His wife went into premature labor and blah, blah, blah

Just in case any among the 14 regular weekend visitors who seem to be reading War Cars when I can be bothered to post it are interested, here's some old War Cars line art I found in my travels because yes I am still doing this.
Eagle-eyed readers will spot where the art that appeared in the actual comic was changed from the original linework you see here, presumably because the editors at the time didn't think anyone would really believe an artist from 1983 would have been quite so technically incompetent and it might be an idea to have another pass at it so it appeared more convincing...ly the work of someone from that era.
No, I don't know why I still bother, either, but here we are.

I blame the internet and that yoghurt in a tube

Here's one fresh out of my digital binbags - an old comics idea knocking about in my noggin, which I got the idea for donkeys ago when I used to live in South Wembley, as near the sprawling estate where I lived was a huge but rarely-used jumble of criss-crossing train tracks that led underground via several huge brick tunnel arches, and the subject of lost tunnels and abandoned stations on the underground eventually came up in conversation with someone or other and the two clicked together years later while I was playing Metro 2033 on the PS3.

Media seems choked with "secret civilization under London" stories, though, and I don't think I'd have offered much to the genre with Underground beyond what I thought was an amusing inversion of the trope: instead of London having a hidden secret world of terror and wonder beneath its streets, the world of terror and wonder was London itself and the boringly normal world was the one that existed deep beneath the Thames Valley in the subterranean towns and villages built by descendants of the population of a government bunker who had survived the nuclear war that took place in the 1980s (clearly I was subconsciously influenced by War Cars) and eventually expanded from their fallout shelter to settle in caves and caverns far beneath the ruins of the city.  Best not think too hard about The Science on this one, I am thinking.

The characters would travel a mundane-looking underworld of brick walls, collapsed tunnels and flooded sewers in a quest for knowledge, so when I say I wasn't offering anything new I really mean it, with even the mutants - when they eventually appeared - just being humans in bandages and hazmat suits, and the main antagonists being The Vicars - yep, just dudes dressed in black.

Unhelpfully, I have lost all but these few sketches and the original proof of concept pages below, so don't judge the abilities of contemporary me by the on-the-nose dialogue, rough art, and pages occasionally crammed with text.  I shelved it when I had to do something for someone else, then never came back to it as I had other projects on the go by then, but I'm pretty sure the only reason I drew the art pages originally was to try and use Manga Studio's crosshatching brushes, but it wasn't a terribly successful attempt, as I just couldn't figure out a way to get them to do what I wanted.

Ohgod..! Didyoueatallthisacid?

Ah, Saturdays - usually they're a mad dash looking after nephews or nieces, but today was a bit better. I put Dead Rising 2 on in the back room and lay on the bed playing that for God knows how long and let the weans watch. Not worried about the graphic content of the game too much - oil will run out in their lifetime and Iran will probably nuke me and all the other heathens before too long (although if you're that desperate to be surrounded by hundreds of virgins, lads, NYCC is on next week, where hopefully the GN I'm working on will be officially announced by the publishers), so all the carnage is probably helpful in hardening them for the world they'll inherit from us. I'm thoughtful like that.

No proper drawing today as it was chilli time, but as usual I wander back to Turbo Katie in the vague intention of finishing it off before my slow and horrible death from nuclear radiation, or - more likely - from being beaten with the thighbone of an infant by a spide determined to get the world's last tin of Red Bull out of my feeble hands.

Watching:

One of those ideas so simple it's genius, Turtles Forever is the movie-length epilogue to the most recent Ninja Turtles tv show, a series that was actually pretty good, but typically hard to follow on terrestrial television.
The 'movie' sees the stars of the original 1980s Fred Wolf-produced cartoon series thrown across time and space to team up with the current versions to fight the original Shredder, who has revived the current Shredder from his intergalactic tomb so he can seek out and destroy the original Ninja Turtles from the 1980s comic book before they can become popular enough to spawn the Turtles franchise that will in turn spread out across a multiverse of infinite possibilities to create realities where the Turtles are real and thwart the Shredder at every turn. We see glimpses of these realities, and pretty much every version is in there, from the videogames, the CGI movie, the UK comic strip based on the cartoon show, the live-action movies, the live-action tv show - it's a nice little metatextual nod, but not unprecedented given that the show this movie bookends had an episode where one of the Turtles teamed up with Jack Kirby.

It's good fun, with the initial impression that the 80s cartoon Turtles are jobbing to their 2000s counterparts defused with the scene where the comic book versions refer to them as sell-outs (and the 1980s versions as "the fat ones"), and plenty of humour that suggest the makers know exactly what level they're pitching at, but still manage to put in humour you don't see coming, like the appearance of the 1980s Splinter, which made me laugh even though I'm well aware this is a show about jellyfish in robot suits fighting ninja turtles across time - he just looks fucking ridiculous even in that context - and I somehow didn't see "but first we have to save April!" coming, either.

Damn you, anatomy. You win this round.

Watching:
Life Unexpected - the first four episodes of this Oregon-based family drama veers wildly between what it wants to be and what it actually is - or at least what's within the abilities of the creative team to produce. It wants to be a lot grittier than it is, but it fails no matter how many allusions to foster home abuses, underage sex and drug usage it slips into the dialogue. It's a schmaltzy drama and a decent time-killer if you're watching it via iTunes while getting on with work, but I can't see it setting the world on fire with those who choose to do their televisual watching on an actual television. For me the main sticking-point is that the thirtysomething mother is played by one of the teens off of Roswell High, which was knocked off the programming schedules because Smallville came along and was much, much worse and naturally everyone watched it instead in much the same way that viewers chose One Tree Hill over the slightly less terrible The OC - kind of like choosing to be raped in the mouth rather than the arse. Anyway - the actress may actually be the age she's playing - if not older - but I'm buggered if I'm taking the notion seriously.
The Deep End - shallow, nihilistic shit. I see it being a success if scheduled properly. I do find myself going "oh, that's her off of Veronica Mars", "Oh, that's the best Lex Luthor" and "oh, that's not actually Billy Zane but I don't care what character he's playing the actor exhudes a deeply untrustworthy air of hostility so I'm gonna go ahead and assume he's the bad dude in any given situation" and I'm right about that. It's okay as these things go, but not essential viewing.

Watching: Smallville - the JSA episode. My review is thus: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Hawkman walking across the room is just hysterical to watch, as is Michael Shanks' Batman voice when he's trying to hold a conversation, Stargirl is clearly a short 30something woman from her first appearance onscreen and her costume is lamentable for a list of reasons that begin with "that top is fifteen years too young for her" and end with "teenage cosplayers have done a better job in their bedrooms", Lois' dialogue is spectacularly terrible - in fact 90 percent of the dialogue is terrible, mostly because it comprises of characters talking exposition and unnecessary/outdated pop-culture references to each other, and Doctor Fate is surely a legend in the making for choosing to remake someone on the genetic level using his occult powers rather than just step to one side to avoid being stabbed to death by a purple icicle-phallus. It's beyond terrible in places, trying to have all this daft imagery but scuppered by the fact that since day one Smallville has thought itself too serious for such things - there's simply too much disparity between concept and execution for any objective evaluation to avoid, and the best way to enjoy it - as I have for several years now - is to hunker down with someone like yourself who watches the whole thing as car-crash television and shout what you hope are amusing jokes at the screen, though in this episode, that comprised mostly of shouting "Thundercats - HOOOOOOOOOO!" when the camera pans across Hawkman's golden girdle, or quoting any of Anult Sweatyknickers' awful cold-related puns from his turn as Mr Freeze in Batman and Robin every time the villain 'The Icicle' shows up onscreen, because he has exactly the same skin make-up as the Governator did, and the fact that this is all done with a straight face is either the saddest thing on television ever, or the most awesome. Standout moment is probably Dr Fate's 'Henshin!' sequence, which, like the Wonder Twins' "Powers - ACTIVATE!" scene, is pitch-perfect silliness for this kind of material, only let down by everyone else in the room trying to act grown-up instead of joining in the fun.

Watching: Batman: the Brave and the Bold, Vampire Diaries
Playing: Fallout 3 AGAIN
Being: hungover and weekend-lazy

Watching: Eastwick, White Collar, Batman: Brave and the Bold
Reading: Dear Billy, Death Day

Watching:

Book of Eli - one of the failings of Fallout 3 was a lack of video sequences to tie together the main plot and stop the eventual resolution feeling like a bit of an anticlimax, but there's probably enough similarities between that and this to imagine what it might have been like if one of my favorite time sinks had a better bookend than a Ron Perlman voiceover. The visual trappings of Eli are quite dour and the theological subtext might trouble some of your more argumentative liberals, though the idea of thousands of years of Christianity reduced to just another bunch of words on a shelf might offset that on an intellectual level. The rest of the film, while competent, falls short in terms of entertainment and - oddly - artistic merit compared to other post-apocalyptic offerings of more humble means, though the one film that kept coming to mind was Patrick Swayze's Steel Dawn, possibly because of the western influence on the story, setting and main character - but it's an unfavorable comparison given that the Swayze-starrer had brevity and a lightness of touch to proceedings born of the low budget and embarrassing 1980s vision of post-apocalyptia, while Eli is sombre, overlong, and has an ending that's a bit like the end of an episode of Smallville in that it just won't finish. It's a journeyman adventure, and all things considered I've had more enjoyment from watching horrible no-budget DVD travesties like She-Wolves of the Wasteland or America 3000 by dint of not having high expectations to meet. For definitive wasteland fiction, A Boy and His Dog or Damnation Alley probably remain a better bet.

Reading:

Wolverine: Origins #43 - More of the usual murderous fun from Marvel's biggest draw with small children as he has a slow day and only disembowels one person for a whole book. I'm sure he'll be back at his all-ages best next month, but in the meantime, it's great to see 1980s staples Cloak and Dagger doing something other than filling space on team books written by someone with more of an eye on the comics internet and what it's talking about than a plan what to actually do with old-school favorites once they're jammed into a glorified cameo, which is pretty much all C&D have been doing since their stint on Marvel Knights ended about ten years ago, particularly in Runaways, where they did little more than jobbing to get newer characters over with that title's fast-shrinking monthly readership. Here, Dagger is admittedly little more than a joke, reduced to a damsel in distress/"chicks don't understand a man's pain" role, but it's at least a meaty role with some sort of emotional substance and palpable sense of danger to it, and the 20-something Cloak and Dagger don't spend all their time banging on about 'the good old days' of comics from the writer's youth, which is a comic book trope of which I am thoroughly sick to the back teeth.
The Boys #38 - I get two impressions from this comic. 1 - that Garth Ennis is writing about non-whites again and you either have an opinion about that by now or you don't, and 2 - that he's seen Aliens more than once. Ennis is always readable, of course, but The Female didn't really need an origin and that's what this issue is.

Drawing:

Nothing at all - it's saturday, bugger off!

Saturday 17th October 2009

No boozing tonight, sadly.
Just fiddling about with greytones to see what works in between bouts of Uncharted 2 and catching up with my manga reading. The draughtsmanship in Nausicaa is quite impressive, as is the scale of the story. A lot of fun.
Yotsuba&! has been praised elsewhere so I shan't bother adding to that - instead I'll offer that this is the kind of manga that could benefit with more investment in the reprint quality and cultural appropriation of the western text, as it's certainly an accessible work if you're already deeply into manga, but if you're coming to it cold, the flipped pages throw you out of the story in the disparity between the flow of text and art. Which is a pity, as this just the kind of book that could encourage a new or younger audience of the joys of reading and storytelling, but here that's lost in favor of chasing a cheap buck and pandering to a notably elitist and obsessive body of fans several years beyond the age group that would most benefit from a good translation.

Saturday 03rd October 2009

Saturday evening and guess who's not boozing? I'm not boozing! Yet, anyway - I'm still Irish and there's certain standards that have to be maintained. That and my family have a disposition towards alcoholism.

Not even joking.

Watching: Pelham 123, Stargate Universe, The Middle, the weans to make sure they don't kill each other