Stop being meta. Stop taking everything we do and shoving it up its own ass.

And your chosen catagory is: "hermaphrodite Nazi sympathisers"

"How does she smell?"

Just a quick return to scribbling to test the old arms out for the themed blog. I tend to draw Judge Anderson much, much too young and fit considering where she's at in the comics (a middle-aged burn-out more akin to Helen Mirren circa Prime Suspect), but this being Dreddworld, I imagine 50 to be the new 30 and the lesser prominence of Psi-division in Judge Dredd in recent years gives me the impression she'd be more of a street cop at this stage.
Arms feel all right despite the scribbling, though. Reckon I'll play it safe and put the sketch to bed finished or not, though the return to random screen grabs at least stops me posting random panels from my awful comics.

There will be several major catastrophes - a testament to my genius!

Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.

Check the method from Bedrock, cause I rock ya head to bed just like rockin what? Twin glocks.

So this is why everyone recommends having pages 'in the bank' before embarking on any webcomic publishing schedule - so illness like what I have at the moment doesn't get in the way of a regular update.

Not that it matters, as nothing much has happened so far, has it?
I originally 'coloured' this page with halftone dots, but changed it to old-school UK comic half-colour on top of that because I liked the look of Jimmy Corcoran's Kid Tiger webstrip, and this page being a flashback, an old-school vibe kind of works for it. I'll probably not use the effect for all the flashbacks in the strip, as there's a couple of deliberate art homages in flashbacks planned for down the line that may be humourous should the idea of seeing a man fail to draw like Joe Kubert and Carlos Ezquerra appeal to you. And why would it not?

I'm just glad my clown training prepared me to take a fall like that

wait, I think I hear future Lily sending us a message from her stripper pole: "thanks gay dads, this dance is for you"

"Have a face full of science, you big lummox!"

That unfamiliar tingling and numbness in the arm suggests it may be time to give the drawing, videogaming and computering a complete rest for a week or two, the upshots being I shall likely spend that time watching subtitled films and television shows, not spamming up followers' inboxes with daily updates of a drawing of someone's elbow near a desk or whatever, and missing this week's Themed Art Blog, which I would usually be bummed about except the subject is 2000ad blandstrosity Shakara, which is a strip that has alienated me from day one despite the herculean art from the one of a kind Henry Flint. It's a truism of the comics form that a good story cannot be undone by bad art (though Alan Moore's collaborations with Rob Liefeld tested this part of the theory to destruction) while a bad story cannot be saved by good art, and lord knows there's plenty of examples of this: Camelot 3000, Batman: Hush, Superman: For Tomorrow, so many mangas of the OEL and Asian stripe that I cannot recall them all - and I would put Shakara on that list.
I don't blame writer Robbie Morrison for putting food on his plate, he seems like a nice guy, but Armored gideon did exactly what Shakara did twenty years ago in the pages of 2000ad and even that strip realised before the first story was over that the premise needed to go somewhere else other than "impressive black and white artwork with spot colours like red about a big indestructible monosyllabic robot - who can actually speak full sentences when the mood takes him - moves towards a showdown with his evil twin but in the meantime clatters big demons." Don't get me wrong, I liked Armored Gideon, especially the artwork by Simon Where He Now? Jacob, but that strip went places, the last memory I have of it being the main character hunting down and killing escapees from the pages of 1970s 2000ad strips like Invasion, Shako and Angel by turning the strip he was appearing into the 1970s equivalent with art to match (at least a full decade before this was so commonplace it became the basis of Deadpool stories), while my most recent memory of Shakara is of him shooting space dinosaurs again and then asking some grotesque parody of the female form to hold him close so he can cry about his imminent death, which I couldn't care less about even though it meant an end to the strip.
I don't even think I dislike it, I just find it impossible to relate to or care about and would find equal - probably more - enjoyment if 2000ad employed Henry Flint to illustrate Manowar albums for nine years and then printed that instead, so apologies to my fellow Themed Art Bloggers that I shan't be joining them this week, though I do hope you check the blog out regardless, and also Matt Timson's blog where he has a cheeky stab at it even though he should be working on paying jobs for US comics like the big talented sellout he is.

I shall return when I return, but wish you the best of health in the interim and a jolly Easter should you be so inclined to celebrate it, which I hope you do as Jesus is a nice guy once you get to know him and learn to pay no mind to the assholes he hangs about with these days.

Watching:

You’re my children and I love you but you’re all terrible at what you do and I feel like I should tell you - I would fire you if I could

My Depressing Tuesday song was going to be Johnny Cash's Ain't No Grave (Can Hold My Body Down), but I thought it would be inappropriate if I did so after mentioning the death of Elizabeth Sladen, TV's Sarah Jane Smith: 1 February 1948 – 19 April 2011 - not a bad run, I guess, and she's survived and remembered fondly, but still a shame.
I always preferred Sarah Jane Adventures to Doctor Who, and on my first forays onto the internet I encountered a few like-minded nerds who liked bad 90s action movies and terrible sci-fi films made for twenty pence in a quarry but who were also into Who and had actually met her in person - this being before she resurfaced in the current franchise of Doctor Who and was appearing at old-school Who conventions - and the consensus was that she was a lovely, approachable and outgoing woman, which is probably worth noting given how most stories of meeting minor celebrities tend to be about how unpleasant the experience was for someone or other. I did not hear a bad word said.

that's my favorite type of movie - that and anything set against the backdrop of competitive cheerleading

Dang but I hate this RSI crap, mainly because it's not just confined to my wan- erm, my drawing hand, it's the left hand as well, and general all-over pains that seem to emanate from the bones in my fingers but move about so's there's time when it settles in my elbows. If I had to rate this on a list of my most annoying brushes with ill health, I'd place it above kidney stones, but below that thing I did to myself near my balls that one time that needed surgery. That one really sucked.
So very little in the way of drawing has been done today, and I haven't even bothered attempting to fix today's page of Frank, hence the huge swathes of nothing but default photoshop brushes quickly wafted across the page, and what I would personally describe as "hoof hands" going on.

The dead bloke I think looked exactly like that in the thumbnails - I just drew a square with little hairs on it to denote hands. The mud looks terribly bright, too, but this is actually a rough approximation of an old drinking spot from my hometown that has fallen into disuse of late as anyone who'd likely use it is now old enough (14-15) to drink in a bar instead.

years from now some of these kids will still be talking about the way I Sondheimised them

Note to self: invest less in American wrestling promotions and more in a camera that is not shitty.

For those interested in such things, the chants of the night were probably the wilfully politically -incorrect one aimed at Korean-American Gail Kim: "Go back where you came from - TNA! TNA! TNA!", "South-ern bas-tard!" to the otherwise incredibly well-received and friendly Sheamus (who was the only wrestler to have his nickname - the Celtic Warrior - missing from his entrance), "Ba-Tiste-Ta!" aimed at Mileena and John Morrison (an in-joke not worth explaining but still quite funny), and the usual "WOOOO!"s and "WHAT?"s.
It's maybe me, but I think that these wrestlers might be putting it on. Crazy, I know, but...

It's Friday and I am killed with RSI, so no drawing for a few days until my fingers stop disagreeing with me, and the usual nonsense shall resume on Monday, God willing.
Have a good weekend, all. I hope it treats you well.

The corpses stacked like firewood, the rivers red with their blood - I miss it so much

Have I mentioned I liked Zoids on the blog at all? I'll go out on a limb and venture that it might have come up.
If you do not know what Zoids are I understand completely, but also pity you greatly. Should you fancy a crash course, you could do worse than check out the digital archive of the strip in it's entirety available at BloodfortheBaron.Com, which is the only way you will ever read it between Grant Morrison, Marvel, Tomy, Hasbro and whatever anime company holds the rights to the entirely unrelated cartoon shows latterly based on the property and the attendant royalty payments and licensing mess that make the occasionally grim original strip an unlikely candidate for reprint.

I fear a political career will shine a negative light on my drug dealing

And so another Wednesday rolls around and the creative freight train slows to a crawl again. It'll pick up tomorrow, no doubt, and in the meantime, here's someone doing a typical Cookstown parking maneuver out the front of a shop not 30 yards from my flat:


I HAVE BEEN WATCHING:

She was a kind mother and grandmother who took care of her family, but under that a fat dirty skank

This Depressing Tuesday ditty goes out to my boy Edge. Never the top draw, he was still an enthusiastic addition to the soap-opera circus of professional American wrestling and I did always like his raucous theme tunes - even the one by Rob Zombie who is a director or something now remaking good old films as bad new ones but who had some pretty good ditties back in the day.

I don't think you should open with "yay black kids"

A quick stop off in some visceral urban horror as I remember something promised weeks ago to someone - in my defence, for me three weeks late is practically punctual.
But oh crap the colour balance between my two monitors is waaaaay off - I have no idea what this stuff actually looks like as an end product, I am realising. That is not good.

Speaking of not good, more aimless comics from me:

Will anything ever happen? The evidence so far suggests not.

This is the 80s - I don't know what a good cause is anymore

The weekend begins, it's nice weather out and I'm just off to the gym.
Have a good weekend, all!

You are a big posh sod with plums in your mouth and the plums have mutated and they have got beaks

Tell that bastard I'm not here - I'm gonna go to the sink and take a shower

Hello again, I do hope your Wednesday went well. I personally had a very sedate day today caused by crippling tightness in the fingers of my hand. My GP has diagnosed RSI so I'm looking forward to explaining that one "honest, it's excessive drawing what done it." A bit depressing, all the same, that I don't think I get that much done yet I'm still getting a gammy wrist out of it. I reckon it's got to do with my wonky blood like what Miley Cyrus has - giving up the booze probably did crazy things to my blood sugar.
Not that I'm counting the days until Lent ends so I can eat a small mountain of chocolate and then go on a bender that I have already arranged with mates or anything.
I note in the news that the government is both cutting spending on health while earmarking 75 grand to send text messages to recovering alcoholics to keep them from falling off the wagon, because when you seek the solace of oblivion that comes with alcohol, what will snap you out of it is receiving an anonymous message reminding you how alone you are that only computers that probably live in the future care to think of you enough to remind you that what you are doing is harming yourself and incidentally, doesn't this remind you how much better off dead you are?
Counting the days.

Watching:

You think if I had a haircut like you I could sell more policies?

I normally share my depression with everyone on a Tuesday with a sad, sad song, but this Tuesday I have been looking up comic artists' page-drawing speed and oddly, "a page a day" is a lot less common than I've been led to believe. Some of the rates are a bit sobering, actually. Don't know what to make of this new information, but I'm not as glum as I'd usually be at this time, and a Depressing Tuesday song might be hard to pick out... if I didn't used to be such a Radiohead fan.

Actually, Banana Co isn't even their most depressing song, that would be a toss-up for me between Exit Music or You Never Wash Up After Yourself, though Banana Co does have the virtue of embedding in blog posts. Radiohead for the most part I don't actually find that depressing, creating for my money songs that are less about outright depression and more about anxiety and paranoia, which is fine when you're fifteen and living in a working-class shithole and the weight of how limited your options actually are occasionally crushes the air from your chest, but once you're past 24 you're better off turning into a big music snob and telling everyone else in the factory that Leonard Cohen is where it's at. Me, I didn't even know who Leonard Cohen was until Neal off Young Ones (specifically on the dvd that came out in the late 90s with all the politically-incorrect stuff that originally made it near-the-knuckle was taken out so Ben Elton could chase a knighthood and Kenny Brannagh's friendship) lamented "I'm like a Leonard Cohen record - nobody ever listens to me."
Suzanne is a good track, and he did give the world Hallelujah so Jeff Buckley could do the definitive cover before it became overexposed - but before it did, the song was one of my favorites ever since Mark Radcliffe played it on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks because it was his personal 'go-to' song at the time, presumably to get away from the fuckwits playing REM's Everybody Hurts every five minutes as they struggled to find an anthem for the tragedy to further package and brand it like they did when they started calling it 911. Mind you, not to blame Simon Cowell unduly, I found the song overexposed by the time the actor Alan "Jim From Neighbours" Dale had died of an onscreen heart attack to Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah in two entirely different tv shows (The O.C. and Ugly Betty).

Enough waffle, it's off to bed for me - have a good Wednesday, all!