While you were gone the Globetrotters held a press conference informing everyone that I was a jive sucker.

Manga Studio fiddling continues apace as I pull a move from an actual manga studio like what they have in Japan and start making myself a library of backgrounds and whatnot for basic gag strips or whatever. Still not entirely sold on MS, but then I wasn't sold on Photoshop either and now can't draw a straight line without the bloody thing.
I think my main issue is finding the right balance of line weight and stroke correction so it comes out how I want rather than relying on serendipity, as I can't actually tell what I'm doing around actual pixel size and for the most part just try to make blobs roughly the right shape.
Also, it's Friday night and I miss the booze.


Watching:
four films called Sahara from 1943, 1983, 1995 and 2005 respectively. Why? Because they're there, really, though nobody needs a reason to watch a Humphrey Bogart movie.
Batman: Under the Red Hood, which seems to mistake 'brooding' and 'moping' - quite an unfortunate mix-up for a film about Batman, as you can imagine. He spends long minutes moping and having heartfelt conversations with Alfred about his feelings rather than punching people in the head. This is - as far as I'm aware - Jason Todd's first appearance in a medium other than comic books and as such his death and resurrection seem a contrivance for the purposes of the movie and its heartfelt conversations about the Dark Knight's feelings and stuff rather than a story that might once have held a lot of cache because Jason Todd - alongside Bucky - was one of those rare characters who stayed dead (until someone brought him back). This being his first appearance outside funnybooks, there's no resonance to Todd's death as there was in that medium and I suppose that could be what all the moping is supposed to be about, but it still doesn't change that there's no sense of gravitas or import, it's a story about someone Batman thought was dead that could have been told a dozen times already across several iterations of tv show and straight-to-video movies and wouldn't have been especially interesting there, either. It's not a terrible film, just unexceptional, though John "Bender" DiMaggio is a terrible Joker, which is an opinion I certainly wouldn't have expected to hold given the toss I've paid attention to once I realise Bender is in it. I'm also pretty sure they're going a little too far out of their way to paint Nightwing as a homosexual, which is fine if you're going to go ahead and actually make a character a homosexual man - but if you pussyfoot around it to the point you create an equivalence between effeminate/gay and 'funny'(abnormal), you're not helping the case for diversity much, you're just reinforcing stereotypes.

"If there is to be any salvation... those of us who know our guilt must admit it."

A random panel from the day's work so Lee Robson can use it out of context to suggest some value judgment made on his script. I laugh at your Northern self-loathing, Robson. I laugh at it and your secret desire to be middle class and write plays about middle-aged housewives finding themselves.

Watching: Predators. I don't really know about all this "It's a sequel to the first one and sort of a sequel to the second one or bits of the second one that back up this story but we're ignoring the other two sequels and this is a continuation of the first one" reasoning that's being employed by the makers, but it doesn't sound like a good idea as it didn't stop Superman Returns being a big gay load of shitty ass just because it ignored the more dopey entries in the canon and they should just accept that someone made those and they weren't good and then move on. I have no problem with the existence of Alien 3, Resurrection, AVP and Requiem because no-one's forcing me to watch them more than once, and to be honest, there's no need for the hoop-jumping to distance Predators from poorer relations because it stands alone quite well even from the first, opening as it does with a conundrum not unlike that facing the cast of Cube or one of the many and dreadful Riverworld adaptations, in that a disparate group are stranded somewhere with no knowledge of how they got there or even where 'there' is, and must rally to adapt to unknown dangers. It's played for the first half hour like the audience haven't seen any promo material showing the locale to be an alien world, but a bit like when I watch Planet of the Apes, I do wonder why the characters don't look up and notice the stars and get an inkling - there's a bloomin' huge planet overhead that someone must have noticed even before they got out of the trees, but like Charlton Heston's 'astronaut' not noticing a little clue like THE FUCKING MOON when pondering where he might be, it's not a deal-breaker for me that the cannon fodder of Predators don't notice a couple of Jupiters knocking about between the treeleaves.
It's a fun movie I really enjoyed. The director could maybe have turned the lights on in a few action scenes, but otherwise it holds together well enough as popcorn accompaniment - though personally, I had a big bag of cheesy Wotsits that did the job too.

Sit down, brain off, enjoy - that's my advice.

Damned if I can think of an amusing caption for this one

(although in retrospect perhaps something about the character on the right turning Asian all of a sudden - it's like a DC Comics legacy character that they can't kill off fast enough! Speaking of--)

Reading: Rise of Arsenal - no, really. My thoughts on it are "This is just that heel turn Cassandra Cain Batgirl took a few years back that they backtracked out of like Speedy Gonzales except she had fans and could sell a book or at least she could if she was white or published anywhere but current DC who gives a shit about Speedy?". In other DC news, they're promoting their diversity by making Aquaboy a black person.
I'm sure he'll do well.