Ta-da is for when you do a flip or where the magician cuts the pretty lady in half, not when you show someone where you want to shove their dead body

Hate doing repeating panels as I never learn any lessons from where I go wrong. The weekend was the acid test for my sobriety and passed without incident or lapse, though I imagine the real test will be the annual St Paddy's festival of liver and spousal abuse, which should be fun as there is no greater pleasure in life than having an argument with someone who's drunk while you are not.

I wouldn't mind posting my old comics each Monday but I'm on the hop a bit so this week so can only manage some panels from horrific pseudo-manga Fist of the Bear

which I ill-advisedly set upon realising back in the heady days of 2004 when I first bought a computer and thought the internet was made of Manga and pornography (I was only half right as it turned out) and decided to join in. With the manga bit.

This was before I actually knew how to go about such things as scripting, penciling, inking, digitally coloring, and lettering, and when the vast majority of my experience of sequential storytelling came from stories where people shouted at someone while speed-lines exploded behind them.

I would almost describe those old rags as 'manga-like' comics except the art read in the same direction as the lettering, which from what I understand of 'authentic' Japanese comics, is not how they make manga in Japan, as there they have the art going backwards and the dialogue printed in a foreign language. Crazy bastards.

Hopefully, there will be something (marginally) more intelligible than Fist of the Bear featured each Monday here on the blog, preferably from a time when I stopped using pens to ink, as I've been looking through my old stuff and my go-to response seems to be "oh fucking hell, I'm not showing that shit to anyone."

TTFN, taters!

Your dad was wrong about one thing - pain does hurt

Back to work at last, after a non-working weekend that at least saw me stocked up with carbonated caffeine for the inevitable last push on the book. For now I'm back to drawing visual aids to dirty pillow talk for Lee (it's not in the GN or anything, it's just something he wants for himself), so as blog filler and because Al had it up on the internets already so I needn't have been coy, here's Frightening Force, a monstrosity from 2007 that I'd be better off burying or redrawing except I can actually draw backgrounds now so I don't feel as embarrassed as I otherwise might.


Script: Al Ewing
Art: Me
Horrible lettering: also me

imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists

Ah, Frightening Force... one of my worst ever drawing efforts, yet paradoxically one of my favorites to read. Why Al Ewing is not making more coin I will never fathom.

Behind schedule on the GN so it looks like a working weekend for me, meaning stocking up on cheap energy drinks (four for a pound from Poundland means they are literally cheaper than water) and half-watching/half-listening to films accrued on my pc hard drive while manfully trying to pretend it is actually work given I both like doing it and no-one pays me anything - the latter unlikely to change anytime soon and the former a tenuous proposition.

To work I go...