It's like our anniversary lunch at Hooters all over again

Don't mind me, I'm just... erm... cleaning up some old 1980s comics I scanned.  Yes.
Watching Marvel's Daredevil, and bearing in mind the forced and unnatural scripting of its nearest competition - The Flash and Arrow - and gosh but they sure make that whole "doing a decent superhero tv show without looking like we're ashamed of doing a superhero tv show" thing look easy.
I never really had a problem with the Affleck movie like many others did - I found it to be a perfectly serviceable and entertaining action flick - but I did think it suffered from an uneven tone and mixed direction, with the NYC depicted coming off in much the same way the city did in the 1990s Ninja Turtles movies.  By comparison, the small-screen version of Daredevil is consistent in its tone, takes itself seriously to the point that there are episodes where people just stand around crying for no discernible reason, action scenes happen with minimum shakycam so you can actually tell what's going on, and rehashing of a lot of The Wire's schtick certainly helps distract from some of Daredevil's more predictable beats, though it generally avoids most of the usual traps of superheroes on tv.
I think I could have done with more character meat, a less brown costume, and a final fight that didn't go on forever, and the Kingpin is a bit rubbish, too, being very similar to the sheriff from noted tv car-crash Under The Dome, but I can see people going "oohhh daddy issues so he has depth" and liking him for that, but I'm kind of sick of that kind of villainy and would have preferred to see the version of the character that Kingpin sees himself as: a righteous man with good intentions who gradually became a monster in pursuing admirable goals - he even quotes some Biblical parables alongside the usual plastic Catholicism that plagues both televisual drama and the Daredevil comics, so there was potential for that to happen.
As it is, Vincint D'Onofrio handles the material well, and Charlie Cox as Matt Murdoch/Daredevil does a blubbery-lipped emo-hero just dandy.  The action scenes - while very good - sometimes betray that they're only there for their gimmick value, with an overlong "homage" to the infamous corridor fight in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (I am crediting the Daredevil production staff with not being so culturally thick-eared that they're homage-ing the dreadful Spike Lee remake) being a particularly glaring offender in that it contributes nothing to the episode's story and feels tacked-on.
Still, there are worse problems for a superhero tv show to have than for the punch-ups to be a distraction from the story.

I just can't stand it when good things happen to people I used to love

As we're very near the 32nd anniversary of the publication of the first issue of Marvel UK's War Cars, I thought I'd dig out my old issues to see if they were as bloody terrible as I remembered - oh sorry, anniversaries are supposed to be celebratory, aren't they?  Well when you're anniversarying a 32 year-old UK comic based on toys that in the end were never released outside Asia, maybe that just isn't possible, The Internet.
Although to be entirely fair, it's not without some positive attributes - the paper stock is not as bad as I thought it would be, and the staples are still intact after all these years.

The toys themselves had no background mythology or context for any supposed conflict or tension that would force the blue team (sports cars that transformed into robots) and the red team (dune buggies that transformed into spiders) to fight each other, so the holes had to be filled in by Marvel editorial staff and writers on the fly, who apparantly took some box art of the teams racing against a background of a nuclear explosion literally and made the story about a series of races across a post-apocalyptic Earth, so it's like Hunger Games, if Hunger Games had Transformers in it and was also Death Race.

It may surprise you to learn that there's not very much on the internet about a comic from three decades ago that no-one bought or gave a poop about, but apparently the franchise was originally called Car Wars to cash in on the cultural cache of the Star Wars name.  It was quickly retitled War Cars, however, to avoid the litigation that nearly befell the theatrically-released pilot of Battlestar Galactica (which all good nerds will know was originally called "Star Worlds" before hastily having "Saga of" added to the title to foil Lucas' vicious legal department), though the change came too late for the UK manufacturers of the toys, who had the name emblazoned on everything from box art to sticker albums, all of which had to be dumped in an English coalmine by Stadium UK, the licence-holder for the toys in the western market who went bankrupt shortly after, leaving Marvel to sell a comic based on toys no-one had heard of and most likely never would.  The villains being referred to as "reds" (in reference to the colour of their vehicles) was not unnoticed by then-popular communist Arthur Scargill (if you're under 30 and reading this, he was sort of the Russell Brand of his day), and - on top of a coalmine being closed down specifically to be used as landfill space for the toys - was taken as evidence of a campaign against trade unions, prompting him to denounce the comic in a newsletter that caused the book to be boycotted by working class families across the UK, leading to the only moment in popular culture when War Cars actually entered the mainstream, after Ben Elton made a joke that more copies of the comic were burned in the street by angry adults than were bought by joyful children.

To put it mildly, War Cars was not a hit, and copies of the comic are so rare that they often go for stupid prices on eBay.  Seriously - 32 pounds for this?  The effing thing's got dog ears and someone's already done the word search and maze puzzles, not to mention some kid's coloured-in the illustrations for the text story.

Scanned from a copy described on eBay as "near mint condition" - MY ASS - this is the first episode of the strip as it appeared in the comic, not just a whopping 4 pages of original content exclusive to the UK market, but in colour, too, so Marvel UK were clearly planning on War Cars being a major title to have made this much effort.  The reprint material typical of the time that pads out the rest of the book is stuff like Killraven and an adaptation of Planet of the Apes by European writer/artist Ernő Zórád - that was probably reprinted dozens of times in the English market by that point - which keeps the post-apocalyptic theme going, alongside overly-aggressive editorial input from the (presumably fictional) "Sargent Wheels", who despised "the reds" and seemed to be some kind of talking scooter, just in case you ever forgot it was the 1980s.
I'll see if I can dig out some more issues to scan in later blog posts, as I am pretty sure I have at the very least got all the episodes of the first story arc to hand.  I imagine it's something we can all look forward to.

I really want to slap you right now but I wouldn't know how to stop

Well, that escalated quickly.
I rather expected tracking down comics printed on thirty year-old toilet paper would take a little longer than it has and that I would get bored after a week or two, but beginning with a couple of non-sequential copies I found tucked between old Warrior issues, an eBay trawl and selling off a small mountain of manga digests has yielded me an unbroken run of The Eagle from 27th March 1982 to 29th April 1989, so I expect I shall now read them while I track down the last hundred or so and then inevitably move onto collecting Tiger and - blimey - Roy of the Rovers because I am totes for real about being all over Johnny Cougar.
The pile I have trails off around the time the book was melded with some sort of Star Trek knock-off called Wildcat that took up a third of the pages, and there also seems to be an effort underway to remove creator credits from the strips - possibly because a talent drain to America was underway at the time and they didn't want to go advertising the names of Vanyo, Jose Ortiz, Eric Bradbury and Mike Dorey when they were more or less keeping the book afloat (NOTE TO SELF: insert contextually-relevant Robert Maxwell joke here).  I suppose it survived the MASK merger a few months beforehand, so it'll survive this one (for a year or two).
I am actually looking forward to reading it all, mainly as I once - to fill a blog post - reviewed a random single issue I found in a shoebox in what I felt to be an appropriate manner, but if anything, that issue was pretty tame.
Flicking through even the earliest po-faced photostrip issues reveals hilariously deadpan stuff like an episode of Doomlord where you don't even notice it's got to the very end of the story and there hasn't been a cliffhanger set up, so Doomlord is chilling out at dinner in his alien form - having hypnotically blocked everyone in the room from seeing him as he truly is - and a new person just walks into the room and sees him and goes "JESUS CHRIST!" and then the Next Week banner reads "Guess who's not coming back to dinner?" and I am sorry, but it is quite clear to me that I am not imagining it and they were clearly taking the piss, a conclusion I am helped towards by Alan Grant on many occasions admitting that he and John Wagner can't remember who wrote what in a period between the late 1970s and mid-80s because they did their writing in the pub and the official credit/paycheque was given to whoever of the two typed up the notes from their trying to trump each other's daft ideas for scenarios and cruelties to inflict on their characters.  Realistically that scenario should be a recipe for disaster, yet they more or less pissed out classics at this stage and I'm looking forward to reading them.

Get outta bed, your son needs to be let out to take an eight foot crap

Another shamelessly recycled strip, and another shameless plug for the Something Wicked omnibus from FutureQuake Press - containing 140 pages of terrible tales of terror to terrify for two pounds - to go with it.

Hashtag the Hell out of him

I didn't want to run this bit of filler for reasons that I would hope would be plainly obvious to those with functioning eyes and a basic knowledge of how things like art and lettering are supposed to work, but I don't have anything else to run in its place so here we are.  Written by Al Ewing before he started slumming it writing Judge Dredd and Avengers comics for money so he could finally do all those things he'd dreamed of like eating each day, if I had half an ounce of sense I'd try and pass off my contribution as the result of this being done back in 1978 or something, but instead I must cop to it being a more recent 2007-ish vintage so you can at least believe I've wised up a bit.
Should you against all reason still want to see artwork by the person who committed the above, it can be found in the Something Wicked omnibus from FutureQuake Press for e-readers and tablets, and which includes much-better illustrated stories written by Al, such as personal favorite The Big If, a neat alternate history tale for anyone with a passing knowledge of the American comic book scares of the 1950s, though it also works just as well if you know Fanny Adams about such things.

Who better than an accupuncturist... TO KILL WITH ACCURATE PUNCTURES?

Another old strip - also scripted by writing machine Lee Robson - just to keep the Halloween thing going.
If you liked this, why not buy some more of its ilk from FutureQuake Press?  We promise we won't hold it against you if you do.

Johnny talks big, but the worst thing I've ever seen him do is strangle a horse

Originally appearing in FutureQuake's 15th issue in 2009 (long since sold out and not available for digital download, sadly) alongside stellar work from up-and-comers like George Coleman, Gibson Quarter, Mark Howard and Adrian Bamforth, Dan Hill's Edge of Creation was around the time I was finally twigging that photoshop's many grey tones, filters, and the burning/lightening tools were not my friends and I needed to learn to draw better in black and white.  Clearly I didn't quite manage a clean break until much later, and I think the lettering is eye-strainingly small - there are other pages on my old pc which seem slightly different and I think I actually did the lettering even smaller - so I did at least learn to use a larger font size in future even if it left much less room for the art, though I got lucky with FQ's larger A4 format pages and these were perfectly legible when they saw print.
I think I just went "eff it" with some of the art, too, particularly background details in the medieval panels, so not my best work, but a helpful learning experience.  Thanks as ever go to FQ's commissioning editors and hetero life partners Dave "Birmingham is a real place" Evans and Richmond "I smell the blood of human beings" Clements for making it happen.

I was just trying to fill a void with all these naked chicks

Another blast from the past here, presented with the kind permission of the original commissioning editor Dave Evans and writer Richmond Clements.
Shako: Snack Attack originally saw print in Zarjaz #9, one of the indie Futurequake imprint's titles devoted to Tharg-approved homages to the 2000ad roster of properties.  Of scriptwriter Richmond, conflicting rumors have it that he was stabbed to death by the adventurer Jack Burton in a subterranean kingdom hidden under San Francisco, thrown to his doom in a volcano on the Genesis Planet, and - most ludicrous of all - that he originally came from Larne.
Apologies must be made for the clumsy lettering - entirely my bad and not indicative of the usually high FQ standard.

If you don't know who Shako is, he originally appeared in 2000ad's fledgling year of publication, accidentally swallowing a top-secret McGuffin and subsequently being hunted by CIA honkies, he cut a swathe of murderous man-on-bear destruction across the Arctic as "the only bear on the CIA's Death List!" and he was all kinds of awesome, but has latterly been viewed as a bit of a joke by grumpy old comics readers who don't want to admit they once loved something so silly and seek to pretend that 2000ad has only ever been a chapbook about unshaven gunmen smooching all the ladies.

Until we meet again, I hope you all have a very nice weekend.

a meal between breakfast and lunch most often enjoyed by childless couples and gay men

This is Just Like Me, a short story by my comics wife Lee Robson about your average common or garden murderer, which originally appeared in Accent UK's Predators graphic novel.  I'd have got Lee over to explain more about it, but he's had a sip of ale today, and is thus insensible until he's had a good night's sleep.

 "Again with the old crap, Bryan?" I hear absolutely no-one say from here in my barely-inhabited corner of the web where only spiders and loneliness dwell - does anyone even use Blogger anymore but me?  It's all Twatting updates and pictures on your Tumblegrams these days, but until I clog up the data allowance of the Blogger account - and your Google update feeds, you poor sods - with every last piece of half-baked tat I've ever drawn, it'll do me just fine.

So Ms Marvel got relaunched yet again.  It's been an eventful flip-flop act for the (original) character as Marvel Comics have to keep bringing out a book every so often under the name Ms Marvel or the trademark lapses, but on top of that they have to bring out a book called Captain Marvel every so often for the same reasons, and these two titles - apart from an entertaining Captain Marvel series in the early 00s by Peter David - have been attributed to the same character on and off depending upon what copyright the company was intent on squatting upon that week, it only being now - four decades later - that someone has cottoned on to the bright idea of just using one or other of the titles on a separate character entirely.  This being the year 2014 and because we know the Nazis were wrong, diversity was floated at some point in the round table discussion and approved because... well, because it's the year 2014/Nazis were wrong and diversity is less good manners and more common sense because there are kind of plenty of honky superheroes already and if your aim is a superhero who's different from what went before, you have to actually try something different sooner or later.

Based on issue 1, it is kind of like Runaways, only I hold out hope Ms Marvel's online fandom will not be as aggressively annoying and evangelical as Runaways fans have been for the last 12 years.  Obviously the presence of Runaways' original artist and co-creator Adrian Alphona is a factor in such an observation, but there's more to tie the two together, like the central teenage female characters, an opening scene in the first issue where the protagonist dabbles in online fanfiction based around the already-established superheroes of the Marvel universe, and the main character's idolising of superheroes that owes a great deal to Runaways cast member Victor Mancha, in what I consider the first chink in the armor as Victor Mancha is one of the most boring comics characters ever created, once spending half the pages of his Son Of Ultron one-shot taking a stroll through what looks like Detroit - he is that boring.  The new Ms Marvel is not as boring so there's victory one, though it's tempered by the character - and the book - suffering from a bit of overexplaining, but it's mostly Disney-cartoon-levels of over-expository dialogue that comes off as a touch of oversharing from someone who's given too much thought to their first world problems (locally referred to as "Gobshite Syndrome"), so it at least ties into the central theme of searching for an individual identity, albeit by leaning heavily upon the usual middle class problems like parent strife and what's expected of "a proper young lady" - again, all very Disney Princess stuff so far.
To be fair on the issue of expository dialogue, it's issue #1 and there's a lot to fit in, but then again, it kind of makes it baffling when right at the end of a book that explains everything in occasionally-cringe-inducing levels of exposition from its very first page, the central conceit of how the character actually gets her powers hinges upon events elsewhere in a Marvel crossover event that goes without explanation here, the most important part of the story so far being reduced to a shrug and a "shit happens", and I'd argue that the last page and a half is redundant storytelling that could have been dropped in favor of a little explanation away from the taken-for-granted conceit among only the dedicated white comics-reading male audience that some quarters purport the book to be an antidote to that it might be explained later, or that the book you're buying on a month-to-month basis will make much more sense if you'd only buy it as a trade collection half a year from now.
G Willow Wilson's writing is solid despite the GS mentioned, and Alphona's linework - while looser and slightly rushed-looking compared to when he's been paired with more seasoned inkers - in my opinion possesses much more character and style than before.  The colour is good, too, but maybe a little more variable and less bold that would be expected of something so heavily inspired by the storytelling and visual tropes of Western animation.

It's a decent enough first issue despite its problems, but I like that Wilson throws so much of the ethnicity and religious upbringing of the character into the first issue in order to draw some drama directly from the fact that the character hasn't had a traditional WASP background despite her immersion in American culture, and though obviously this runs the risk that you might view the characters as politically correct constructions built around a corporate mandate rather than distinct personalities, it does at least avoid the trap Geoff Johns fell into when he introduced the gun-wielding, tattooed, car-thief Muslim character whose name I have hilariously forgotten already in the pages of Green Lantern.  It's a thing that tv and movie writers do all the time where they find like maybe two whole facts about something and then use those alone as the basis for their scene-setting or character-building, and in Johns' case he had to write a story about a Muslim character with tattoos based on the design sketches approved by editorial, and sure enough if you Google "Muslims" and "tattoos" the first few results explain that tattoos are "haram" in Islam, and Johns' script had a character point to the Muslim character's ink and say "I thought tattoos were Haram in Islam?"  Basically, I am positing that writers can often betray just how far they bothered delving into the cultures they're exploring, as there wasn't much else in that story to inform the reader about the religion of the character, but with Wilson - a Muslim convert - there's arguably the beginning of a sense she might have more insight than a white male writer whose first and seemingly last stop on the research trail was a Google search that took him to Yahoo Answers (a well-named site because answers are often given by total yahoos).

When I said I'd blog that, I meant with my car