Love don't mix with this pimpin' man!

Because a man cannot live on hate alone - God knows I have tried - I have put some work up on Comicsy that you can pay for if you fancy.  No, I don't fully understand this concept of giving someone money in exchange for their creative work either and I'm not sure it'll catch on, but I've done it anyway so never let it be said that I won't try new things.

The creative work in question is a restoration of the first 21 pages (five chapters) of mid-80s toy tie-in comic War Cars, which you might remember I mentioned here on the blog on the first of Apr-- erm, back at the start of April this year.  I have made no secret of my affection for old UK comics and this project has been prompted by that, specifically Ian Rimmer and Simon Fuman's utterly bonkers Zoids run, as well as elements of Furman's Transformers comics from around the same time.  If you like the thought of a post-apocalyptic Whacky Races-type scenario, have £1.99 to spare and don't fancy waiting around until it turns up on scanning sites so you can read it for free, perhaps you might give it a try?

War Cars Collected 001 is available as a .PDF, .CBZ or .CBR for download to e-readers, tablets, and Borg Distribution Nodes HERE. 

I like my booze two ways only: straight up, and by myself

Whoring time again!
As well as a strip in Something Wicked #10 which can be found here, I have a strip in Zarjaz #22, which can also be found here, containing work by PJ Holden and Al Ewing, who are "comics famous" - which basically means that people who are into comics like what they do or hate and resent their success, but normal folk will likely pass them in the street and toss loose change in their direction - and yet their contributions are not the most surprising thing of this issue, nor that I've got to draw Shako for the second time in print without anyone chasing me off with a pointed stick (or the third time if you count the free Christmas comic hosted by Zarjaz back in 2012 that can be seen here on the Quaequam Blog in a post that also advertises my first graphic novel Babble, which BOOM! Studios' lawyers assure me is legally distinct from James Tynion's Memetic), no, what is surprising is that Dave "Bolt 01" Evans - health service worker, father to what I am assured is a number of children to rival Screaming Jay Hawkins and editor/publisher of FutureQuake, Something Wicked, Zarjaz, and Dogbreath - somehow found the time to draw a comic strip.
Anyway, my contribution - which one reviewer has called "almost convincing" - naturally contains a bear.  It's an encounter between Bionic Man homage MACH 1 and ursine killing machine Shako set before either of their strips began proper, and has been described as "the strip you didn't know you wanted" by one podcast whose name sadly escapes me, rubbish as I am.  By all means check out this fine publication before the new Tory-approved tax rules for digital exchanges utterly destroys the British small press in the same way they've fucked everything else the fat greedy sack of cunts have got their reptilian fingers on.  Funny how they almost seem in a rush to get this stuff done like they don't expect to be around this time next year, isn't it?  They are very much robbed of even the honesty of a mugger or a ram raider, as those are just coping with the failure they already experience rather than planning for the failure they know is coming.  Say what you like about the American government, at least it actually kills its own citizens without shame, not like the Tories, starving people of money and dignity until they take their own lives - at least Darren Wilson got his own hands dirty when he went out and killed a poor person, IDS just smirks behind a tower of paper forms as his string of failures force others to do it by their own hands, the weasel.  You'd think someone who lives in his wife's house would understand about dependence on others, but that would require a capacity to give a single fuck.
Anyway, buy my comics while you can.  That would be lovely.

Just as an exercise, let's take stabbing off the table

Note to self: delete texture brushes from Manga Studio.
No witty banter to impart today - regular readers of the blog will call days such as these "weekdays" - so I'll give a shout out for this tri-month's issue of Something Wicked, in which I illustrate a story by my writing donkey Lee Robson.  Something Wicked can be purchased here in physical form, with a more Borg-friendly digital edition to follow sometime later.

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.

If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again

 

I haven't actually posted this before, so this is likely the first of many appearances it will make: presenting another spooOOooOOooky tale for Halloween, The Thing in the Window was written up by my writing mule Lee Robson when I was between drawing gigs, and is so frightening it made me never want to use Adobe Photoshop for art ever again.  Okay, admittedly that might have had just as much to do with the fact that Manga Studio has some purdy line correction options built into the pen tool for use with vector layers that practically draws things for you and makes mistakes look like part of your artwork - you can see the attraction of that from my point of view.  This is the story that killed bitmaps, I guess, but if you liked it and would like to see more from Lee and myself , check out the Something Wicked omnibus collection for e-readers like iPad and Android - though I guess it'll work on Kindle, too, as long as you don't mind contributing to the destruction of digital comics distribution, the bullying of authors, tax dodging, and the erosion of workers' rights.

We both know I'm borderline creepy

My recycling old strips as blog filler is something regular readers are well-used to by now (yes, I do have regular readers - I'm likely more surprised at this than you are), but on this occasion it's all in a good promotional cause, as FutureQuake Press have released a Something Wicked omnibus for digital readers, featuring artwork such as that above - that I would rather never have seen the light of day ever again but hey at least it's not the werewolf story - and also some much more assured contributions from others too numerous to copy and paste here, many of whom went on to stuff like 2000ad and some monthly with the word "Avengers" in the title put out by indy auteurs Marvel leaving their lazier small press comrades like me scratching our bollocks and wondering where we went wrong in our lives.
140 superhero-free pages of original content for 2 pounds could only be better value if they were giving it away, but we aren't communists yet so dig deep and help support independent comics this Halloween!  Alternatively, anti-democratic tax-dodging slave-driving multinational Amazon probably have some Batman graphic novels you could buy for around the same price, which I am sure is exactly the same thing.

Just because I'm not fat doesn't mean I'm not American

 It has been pointed out that my picks for Forbidden Planet's Desert Island Comics feature are all British-made comics - pure coincidence, but I'll roll with it.
HA HA YOU SUCK, AMERICAN COMICS.
In the interests of fairness, I do actually recall lots of great US comics from my youth, but they probably don't count because they were chosen for reprint as they were tonally more in line with British comics' readers' tastes, and also because they were reformatted from the US standard of 22-page monthlies to 5-6 page weekly installments - stuff like Transformers and Power Pack, but there were other entertaining strips like Ghost Rider and Deathlok showing up in short-lived anthologies aimed at the UK market like Havok, Meltdown, and even the rather lovely Strip (the Marvel UK anthology, not to be confused with the contemporary independent UK anthology - if only because the Marvel version managed to actually come out).  I found all but one issues of Strip recently during an attic clearout and there's some great stuff in there, from the original Marshall Law miniseries, Jean Van Hamme's Thorgal, Don Lawrence's Storm, Wagner, Grant and Gibson's Gengis Grimtoad, and Furman and Senior's The Body In Question, which finally gave a (slightly retconned) origin for mechanoid bounty hunter Death's Head.  Great stuff, very European in flavor and much missed from a marketplace currently dominated by 2000ad and seemingly endless US superhero reprint titles.  This trip down memory lane sure does make me hope that The Phoenix lasts more than its scheduled two years.

Tonight is about one man's functioning penis

Some more whoring for the GN, as Babble gets what I classify as a "good review" at Comics Anonymous seeing as it entails the reader not having been sickened and angered to his core by our presumption, and also an interview with me and Lee over on Broken Frontier where, in a break with tradition, I come off like a complete twat.

Yeah you're nothing but a hoo-er! Yer a hoo-er! Get out of my house!

Got me an ABC Warriors strip appearing the current issue of Zarjaz and sorry to break with the traditions of classic self-whoring where everything is brilliant and shiny but I shall be frank and admit that I've let the side down by painting it with mud so you can't actually make anything out on the last three pages, but if you squint you can pretend I was trying to channel 2000ad's nineties phase where everything was painted with fag ends and brown acrylics. The strip is Broken Dreams and is from a script by Lee Robson, but don't let our presence put you off as there are actually good strips in this issue, particularly Richmond Clements and George Coleman's prog-ready Rogue Trooper and Emperor/Bruno Stahl's Dirty Frank: Holy Wrong, which is a comic strip about Alan Moore going back in time to kill Frank Miller. Rounded off with a Bad Company tale and a couple of good Dredds, it's well worth a read.


Buy it or I will murder you with fire.

Even as I write this song I'm drinking wine from a human skull

Bit of minor whoring for something what I done - Hibernia Comics (who do the ace quality reprint collections of forgotten UK comics classics like The 13th Floor and Doomlord) have an all-Irish themed fanzine called Tales of the Emerald isle out now, and I draw a Judge Joyce story in it.

So if you want to read a quality indy comic which has some neat stories from fans of 2000ad's paddy contingent only occasionally ruined by me drawing them, you can check here how to order a copy, though as with other officially unofficially official fanzines of the 2000ad bent like Dogbreath and Zarjaz, it's a small print run so grab a copy quick. Do not walk, RUN to the internet to secure yourself a piece of fan history!

Watching: Young Justice 1.1-1.2 - an odd one, this. The Young Justice comic was a light hearted DC offering while the Teen Titans comics are dour affairs that fetishise the murder and abuse of young people, so it's odd that the Teen Titans cartoon was a light-hearted affair and the Young Justice cartoon is a po-faced offering where its teen protagonists are tortured (to death is the intention) halfway through and at the end Superman meets a clone of himself he didn't know he had and acts in much the same manner you'd expect someone to act as they deliver the words "I guess I'm your dad" or "she told me she took care of it..." It's alright as explodey/punchy 'toons go, and certainly better than the recent crop of DC animated movies, but nothing special.
No Ordinary Family 1.9 - I have no idea why I keep watching this indecisive and derivative show, and I'm not sure what the producers hate more: their audience, superheroes, or television.

You're the youngest woman detective in the Miami Police Department and I really admire you, like, a lot

Small Press Big Mouth give me and comedy Geordie (as if there's any other kind) Lee Robson's upcoming Com.X graphic novel a mention over on their podcast, along with other ex-Insomnia bods who found new homes for their work after the collapse of the company. It's a pretty decent podcast because it centers more on the small press and indie books from the UK scene and is quite good for picking up on the kind of books you might not even know exist, though I do wonder why Lee and Stacy put on silly accents for it, though obviously I can't go throwing stones about silly accents.
Strange but true: you know Brad Pitt's accent in The Devil's Own? That's a Cookstown accent (he even name-drops the town, though erroneously places it on the shores of Lough Neagh despite that being a half hour drive), and it's often ridiculed by English comedians for being ridiculous and unrealistic - well pardon us for not meeting your high standards of faux-gaelic brogue you middle class university-educated cunts. We can't all sound like your The Edge, or standard-bearer for pretend Irish the world over Shane McGowan.