I know I'm only twelve, but that was the saddest thing I've ever seen in my entire life

Now I remember why I don't like doing my own colouring.
This is my 966th post, which to me suggests that I have dedicated more time to the blog than I have my own family, which seems unfair as the blog makes me cry a lot more than they do.  It may be time to take stock of where the blog is going as at this point I think I'm only still doing it to spite Tumblr and Instagram users - though don't get me wrong, that is a great reason to do something.

The taco massage was yesterday

GIRL, you are all everything

It's comforting to know that people who buy guns also like angry rants against the government

So to the end of another week, and the beginning the last of the J6 strips.  I probably should have put some punctuation on the final panel of the last one to denote an ending, but here's the next one anyway, in which motorcycling Spider-Man (with a lightsabre) teams up with Barack Obama to fight cyborg sharks led by Cobra Commander in an airship - airships being a fallback for me in these strips, it seems.

It's been a pleasant experience on my end, having something to put up on a regular basis, and I'll continue to post the dailies over the weekend as usual, but I think the experiment has run its course and after this one finishes it's back to infrequent screengrab posts and grumbling about nonsense in my own wee corner of the web as one of the few people who've stuck with Blogger and not just gone to Instagram to post regular pictures of my lunch like I was one of those food-blogger scum - you know the kind of jerks I'm talking about.  Food bloggers are the absolute worst.

Anyway, I hope you'll all have a good weekend.  TTFN.

I can't be the only one in the world who likes plaid, man

 Teenage me waited patiently for a Stallone/Schwarzenegger team-up that never happened, and adult me is thinking teenage me would get along fine with the low-budget head-thumping of Escape Plan even if it is a bit slow while adult me probably just wonders why people keep giving Vinnie Jones acting work (adult me has nothing against Jones, it's just that everything he's in, he plays Vinnie Jones).
It used to be I'd get all het up about action films and could argue why Mark L Lester is a better director than Richard Donner because I think action scenes often represent a microcosm of the director's ability - I even sat down and watched the Jet Li/Jackie Chan fight from Forbidden Kingdom 14 times in a row before I thought it safe to deliver the opinion that Rob Minkoff is an okay director, if a bit passive and low energy.  I take action cinema very seriously, and the trashier and more low-budget the film, the more seriously I take it, as big-budget action movies are mostly just meh suffering from overlong second acts that make them unattractive for potential repeat viewing, and to me Escape Plan is a film that often seems like one long second act.  My first thought when the two leads met was "why are they pretending not to know each other?  They met in Expendables." but the film does nothing to capitalise on that kind of self-awareness and plays things very straight - to its detriment, as I think it could have done with acknowledging that both leads have done decent high-concept prison movies already - Stallone in the first half of Tango And Cash, and Schwarzenegger in the first half of Running Man- and concentrated more on soundbites and throwdowns, as what we get is just kind of there - inoffensive, functional and unexceptional.  Adult me thinks it okay, but teenage me would hopefully want a bit more.  I probably should have watched it with booze.

Ten minutes early is five minutes late

I should probably be ashamed how much I love Dallas, but here we are.  Complete trash that glorifies rich white folk and their rich white folk problems and infidelities, if you can sit through the story recap - never mind those credits - and still expect The Wire on the other end of it, you deserve everything you get.
But IT HAS MITCH PILEGGI WITH A BEARD, DAMMIT, and I'm only human.

What I like to do is drink five or six of the local coffees and then dare my hands not to shake

You're gonna wanna take notes on everything I do because you're about to see life happen at the speed of business

So that 30-year Transformers story finally finished.
To cut a long story short, in 1984 Marvel published a four-issue series based on a new line of toys to gauge reaction from the comic-buying public and it proved successful enough to continue beyond the original four issues, breaking the mold of licenced comics by surviving far beyond the usual couple of years expected of a successful tie-in series and only seeing a final issue in 1991 thanks to Marvel downsizing its licencing commitments to concentrate on making comics about Spider-clones, though this didn't stop them doing a follow-up series years later based on a different line of toys referred to as Transformers G2, but not even Transformers fans mention that series, so I imagine it's a bit like the TF version of that He-Man sequel no-one likes to talk about.  The licence was still lucrative for those that choose to make new TF comics - divergent from the Marvel continuity, naturally - and the comics rights eventually found their way to IDW, who produced their own comics series based on the various toy lines of the property before beginning a new series set immediately after the end of the original Marvel material, despite there being a 21-year gap between issue Marvel's #80 and IDW's #81.  Dubbed Transformers: ReGeneration One, it ended this month with #100, and it's far better than it has any right to be, despite some minor issues with plotting and unclear visuals that had me checking out a Transformers wiki to clarify what I'd missed.
After a series of previously-unseen armadas attack Cybertron one after another (including an armada made out of planets that no-one had seen up until it appeared in orbit), the series ends on a metatextual note, with the Marvel Transformers series excised from the multiverse of existing and possible Transformers continuities so that this really can be the end of the story - no alternate realities or timelines as potential loopholes, this is the actual end and the toys are put away in a box when the story begun in #1 of a 100-issue limited series way back in 1984 is finally over, even if only because negotiating the reprint rights is a bit of a nightmare.  In the story, the urge to make war is purged from the robot species, turning villains into peacemakers and, paradoxically, causing their final extinction not in battle but in a drawn-out process of eons as they get older and come to natural ends, their species no longer capable - or perhaps unwilling - to propagate itself beyond their existing numbers.  There's a nod to the fact that nothing ever ends, of course, with the molten and desolate surface of the Transformers homeworld turned into an incubator for another race of beings, but it's a hollow conceit, as this really is the end as far as we - the readers - are concerned.
What it reminded me most of was one of the better Doctor Who episodes, in that it goes for emotional resonance rather than a script that makes 100 percent sense in science-y terms, and I think that's for the best, as though I was never really a big TF fan in my youth, I did find the (UK) comics were good despite being about toys I was never into, and along with Eagle and 2000ad they were pretty much regular reading even if I often didn't know half of what was going on thanks to never having read the original series or the earliest UK issues - remember when you were allowed to walk into a comic series halfway and pick stuff up and accept that things had happened before you got there and yet still enjoy it?  This here is an ending to what went before, and nothing it does in technical terms could ever be as valid or significant in an objective evaluation as the fact that it is the curtain call on a story which holds nostalgic clout with many thousands of people, myself included, and what it needs to do, it does.
In that spirit, I don't have any considered opinions of the ending worthy of note beyond that I enjoyed it, and my review should probably just be "Wow.  Yeah... 30 years.  Man, that's another bit of my childhood dead and buried."

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go and listen to a Stan Bush song.

Maybe it's the sense of fun you bring to any situation but I miss you already

I take back what I said earlier - you COULD be a bigger pussy

Nothing ruins a relationship like communication

The CW's The 100 has a great high-concept premise: 97 years after a nuclear holocaust, the inhabitants of a space station in Earth orbit send 100 criminals to the surface with a mission to prepare for the remaining colonists, but in-fighting, mutant wildlife and holocaust survivors threaten to wipe out those on the surface, while political backbiting and a failing life support system threaten to wipe out those in orbit.
It's a great premise for a show, combining Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, Battle Royale - in fact every example cited in the first panel of last Saturday's strip as a joke - as well as a dash of pulpy b-movie trash alongside the more literary influences, such as Defcon 4, No Escape and After Earth.
The problem is that it's a show on The CW, and that means if at any point you engage the part of your brain concerned with the process of logical thought instead of the part of your brain that likes to look at attractive young twentysomethings struggling not to rut right there on the spot, it kind of falls apart pretty quickly, like the idea of all crimes on the space station being punishable by death unless you're under 18, which means that all the criminals - even the ones stripping down to their underwear that you're supposed to perv over - are kids, which puts an uncomfortable slant on the exploitative material in the script like aforementioned stripping scene and when characters get brutally killed, and we must also assume that some of the other criminals we haven't seen yet are much younger than the 20-something-playing-17-and-11-months of the main cast.  Likewise the blanket nature of the all-crimes-punishable-by-death mandate goes against the very idea of creating both a sustainable population and a viable genetic pool for future generations, which is a bit of a balancing act in the best of circumstances, never mind if all you have to start with is the limited genetic database of those in orbit when the war broke out, which is at best a couple of dozen people and not nearly enough to restart the human race even if you can surmount the problem of the human reproductive system being entirely dependent upon gravity to function - add to this the arbitrary execution of members of the populace and firing hundreds of your kids at irradiated planets every now and then to see what happens and I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that this is not a group of people that would last very long.  Anyone who's worked with super-smart people can tell you that they're often remarkably shit-brained when it comes to things most people take for granted, so what if they accidentally break a minor law and you end up having to flush the only guy who can work the space-engines out the airlock?
On top of the basic illogic of the premise itself, there's some plotting problems in the pilot, like one character saying he deliberately got himself arrested to be put on the shuttle to Earth, yet mere minutes later we see an angry mob on the station wanting to know what the launch of a shuttle was all about because no-one knows about it, characters getting off the shuttle and deciding they don't need food or water but instead need to have an orgy and take orders from the biggest douchebag in the group rather than the smartest or strongest, the fact that no-one is told they're going to Earth and is just bundled into a ship and fired to the surface in the middle of the night without any training or any guards or any scientists or engineers...
Well, you get the picture, it doesn't make any actual thinking-type sense, but it does have attractive twentysomething actors in Gap clothing wandering around an attractive forest deciding when to have a shag, mutant wildlife, spear-chucking natives, and reasonably decent cgi work.  It's not a classic, and lord knows it certainly isn't original, but if you like trashy b-movie sci-fi it's worth a punt.

One time I took some acid and when the trip was over I could play the bagpipes and drive stick

I will admit that sometimes you can forget that the bigger picture is that we're actually getting better as a species.  The vegans and the vegetarians have the right idea, of course, we just don't want to admit as much right now because that would be to announce our moral inferiority and culpability in something appalling, so we respond to their perfectly sensible dietary choice with open hostility, denial, ridicule, and even outright lies, and this notion returned to me as I was watching The Dallas Buyers Club, finding it weird - suddenly - to see people walking down dowdy hospital corridors talking about the "business" of tending the terminally ill, seeing money symbols instead of human beings and deciding on the life and death of people based on where a decimal point goes.  This is what the millionaire boys' club of the Condems want for the NHS, so the film is a horror story as much for us as it is for the US audience, possibly more so because we at least have to go through the anticipation of waiting for the full scope of the atrocity to make itself known over the coming years, while the yanks have been brainwashed already into thinking private healthcare is normal rather than yet another example of their money being spirited away into the coffers of the rich, the public debate on Obamacare successfully hijacked - with the gleeful aid of the media - by the tea party donkey show of America's crypto-fascist upper-middle classes infuriated yet again at the idea of altruism, because while bombing anonymous brown children is all well and good, giving them a band-aid afterwards is going too far.
Dallas Buyers Club uses the banality and uniform acceptance of this everyday evil to give its story an antagonist in the form of corporate America and the complicity of uncaring and small-minded government bureaucracy, so it's an easy watch in that regard for a big softy like me who likes things to throw back to the telemovie-of-the-week trappings of the mid-80 as the film does quite often.  It also has a protagonist who's essentially a paradigm for the modern politically-incorrect misogynistic racist dickhead central to much of modern entertainment, only here his failings aren't held up as indicative of a rebel spirit who blazes their own trail, these things are held up as failings to be surmounted so that the character can be less of an asshole, which again is quite welcome.

I seem to have waffled uncontrollably again when I could have just said "good film, I liked it."

I'm starting to think this is not therapy - I think we're making you sangria

Posting early today, so I haven't even seen how badly the budget has fucked me over this year while handing money to rich people.  I'm guessing there, of course - I'm sure I can always edit this post in the future if it turns out around one o'clock that the Condems have been just lovely to all us poor folk.

I drank three beers and I got like all giggley and tired and I didn't want a fourth

While it still looks lovely, I don't recall Grant Morrison's and Rian Hughes' Dare being quite as adolescent as it seems to be to these jaded old-man eyes, but in my defence, when I got around to reading it I was 13 and its primary audience.
Nestling in the pages of the Rian Hughes-centric Yesterday's Tomorrows collection of the artist's comics and design work - a beautiful-looking object and no mistake - I recall reading somewhere that it was Morrison's rebuttal to the idea of a gentleman upper-middle-class type adventurer as beloved of a certain generation of schoolboys, but that rings hollow for two reasons:
1 - Morrison didn't have any problems at all with the upper classes adventuring and oppressing the weak when he wrote superhero comics for DC for 30 years in adventures aimed at a specific tier of white, male, middle-class North Americans, and
2 - Dare eschews the class system in favor of the more pantomime-y good/evil dynamic, its nods to the class system being little more than parading out some cartoonishly noble Northerners struggling against The Man.
As well as Dare's 4th form political posturing, there's also Really and Truly, a Morrison joint from the pages of 2000ad that I am going to go ahead and assume got commissioned because of the art.  Hughes really didn't get a good script from Morrison during their 2000ad tenure and I wonder why he didn't plump for the more energetic and fun Robo Hunter outings as a showcase - Morrison's name being worth more in terms of attracting the casual comics reader happening upon the book, I imagine.

drinking, violence, destruction of property - are these the things we think of when we think of the Irish?

Subtle exposition is subtle.

St Patrick's Day here in Ireland, and I didn't notice if the local Baptists showed up to picket the annual parade as usual, as there was a bit of a crowd at it.  I can only presume the Baptists object to the exclusion of gays from the larger parades in New York and Boston and that's why they usually protest a cultural festival in the middle of a mostly-Catholic town attended by thousands of children, so more power to them - we must teach tolerance for difference at a young age.
Been watching the Veronica Mars film, a Kickstarter-ed project based on a television show about a teenage detective, so it's kind of like when Firefly fans got that Serenity film, only this wasn't for massive fucking nerds who need to accept that their shitty space cowboy show wasn't that good.
Set ten years after the end of the teen detective series, it hits its first hurdle in being a movie based on a teen detective show that doesn't actually star a teen detective, so if you're a fan of the genre the movie is not for you before it even starts, though if you're a fan of the original series and only want an epitaph for it, it's likely for you, as there is a pretty narrow focus to proceedings that excludes newcomers despite some concessions to the idea that there might be people other than viewers of the television show watching, so it's hard to say - as a viewer of the original show - if it's any more than the decent movie-of-the-week drama with some mystery elements that it appears to be.  I enjoyed seeing the returning cast, including cameos from successful-ish small screen actors like Schmitt from New Girl and Sue Heck from The Middle as well as blink-and-you'll-miss-it shots of Jamie Lee Curtis and James Franco.  It's an okay sign-off for the series, but I suspect it's nothing special in isolation.

Why is everyone hitting me in the face today?

I ought to move to some place where there's no art like Iran or Utah

I did it first and that's why you're doing it now

Although I've finished with the pages I sent off as samples, I continue posting regardless and today begins another J6 strip.  This one's an "arena" type story where characters get dumped in a place to fight other characters for "all the marbles" on some flimsy pretext, and it was inspired by Marvel's Avengers Arena comic book, which sounded okay at the time but in practice spent its first issue apologizing to the readers for its own premise, which it then didn't follow through on.
Although it cannily cultivated fan outrage at the premise while it was ongoing, it wasn't actually a particularly odd duck of a comic, being no different from other mini/maxi-series published by the Big Two, as DC did a more or less identical miniseries called Salvation Run a few years earlier, and Ultimate Spider-Man had a near-identical story arc in the mid-2000s, but I did like AA for being so openly a product of editorial mandate rather than creative teams making a pitch, and even if this did kind of betray very early on that we wouldn't be seeing the deaths of any characters beloved of editorial (like X23 or Runaways), it does at least help underline that when you're making comics on Marvel's level - especially something under the Avengers brand - it's a product first and foremost.
Martin Gray has some good reviews of the series over on Too Dangerous For a Girl, should you be curious to know more about it.

And so we arrive at the end of another week!  I shall continue to post daily strips over the weekend - hopefully you'll all have a good one.

If I told you the truth you wouldn't have done what I wanted

And that's the end of the pitch material.  Probably should have put some sort of "next episode" blurb at the bottom of that last panel, as I've clearly left room for it.  Ah well.

I think this will make sense if I get more wine

Other characters from nowhere referencing other characters not seen yet?  I suspect it is time to put cards on table in regards to this turkey.

 You've read the blog so you are well-aware by now that I fly by the seat of my pants on most things, so it will probably surprise you not a jot that barring one or two sketches lost in the big PC switchover of 2013, this is more or less the entirety of my planning for the J6 pitch:

True to form, I have lost the actual pitch I made, too, but it was something along the lines of:

Whereas other superheroes find their way around the globe, working-class Brummie superhero team J6 usually have their hands full just finding their way around the UK to the spots of mythic or historical interest to which their adventures call them - places like Loch Ness, the Williamson Tunnels or Mary King's Close - in a series of family-friendly adventures that emphasise the fun and surreal adventure of superhero tales over grim angst.

I referred to the sketch page occasionally for visual reference because I just have the absolute worst memory, but that's more or less it apart from the outline for the main story (these and the pages I've still to run on the blog are proof-of-concept as the submission guidelines called for an example of the finished artwork and lettering as well as a thumbnailed chapter), but I shan't be putting that up here as I might yet get mileage out of it one way or another.
I've worked with less than the above, though - the current project I'm working on was based on something like two notes I found that read "homeless He-Man" and "don't just make the cat a bear again," but I'll muddle through on that one, too.

Last night I had a dream that I was brushing a horse

I have cheated slightly on the "no shadows" rule because it fixed a small art problem, and again, no background in panel 2 - less is more.

Ireland's Hibernia imprint has recently done a collection of the Tower King storyline from the early days of the 1980s Eagle revival, and it's one of the high points thanks to a fast-paced script from Alan Hebden and some cracking Jose Ortiz artwork that - I will be blunt here - was far too good for the strip, or Eagle.  Even today it's pretty gobsmacking in places, especially presented as it is in the original oversized Eagle format rather than the usual US-format for trade collections, so you can really drown in the artwork and I had to stop looking at it in case I started trying to emulate the meticulous hatching and brilliant use of solid blacks to make the characters feel like real people, even if they're grotesque post-apocalyptic mutants living in the ruins of London reduced to a new feudal era - trying to copy it would drive me mad eventually.  If nothing else, it makes for a pretty macabre colouring-in book for younger kids you might be determined to turn into weirdos, as seems to have been the long-term effect of the Eagle on those who grew up with it.
I got my copy from Comicsy, but it's a limited print run of 200 thanks to the deal agreed with the current copyright owners of the material and last I heard Hibernia were down to the low double-figures of the remaining stock, so if you think the entire run of a brilliantly-rendered post-apocalyptic romp sounds like something you'd be interested in checking out, you might want to grab one quick.

I got attacked by a duck at the park yesterday

Back from the weekend lull, there were Saturday and Sunday strips, in case you missed them.

Although it ends up playing around with the visual geography of the scene, I flipped that first panel at the inking stage for lettering reasons, so I do actually give it some thought despite all appearances and evidence to the contrary.  See also: no backgrounds, a decision made to keep the foreground art uncluttered even though I always bitch at those who choose not to draw backgrounds. I'm discovering that sometimes less is more, or at least that most things are a subjective experience, which was a lesson probably begun about 30 minutes into watching The Hangover and finding it about as funny as watching a dying child being kicked out of their wheelchair.

Elsewhere, True Detective wraps up its first season and I shan't spoiler anything here in case you're still catching up, but I liked how it continued to swerve between genres before arriving at its destination.  A great slice of gothic Americana with the odd hint of Lovecraft thrown in.

I can still make evening service if I haul ass

I should have continued slowly poisoning you when we were kids

I'm just gonna go do some research on lawsuits in my room

"One day, madam, I will be better at lettering and colouring my comics, but you will still be ugly." - Winston Churchill, Graphic Narratives Convention for Gentlemen, 1943.

Given the cultural reference, I probably should have done the Hachiko post from earlier in the week with this strip... whoopsy daisy.

So it's the end of the first week of Lent, having given up booze, meat, caffeine, milk, and eggs, and I don't miss any of it at all.  No sir, not one item on that stupid list of things that I don't know what I was thinking when I made it do I miss because I have plenty of toilet paper and headache tablets to hand, so what do I have to complain about?  I'll be honest, I really don't rule out the possibility of snapping and going on a bit of a bender.  We shall see.
I hope the weekend finds you well and I shall see you on the other side of it hopefully fit and well.

You said you were afraid a fly was gonna fly inside your head and learn all your thoughts

Before you ask, yes, it is deliberate that no-one has a shadow - I was experimenting, dammit!  Do you think anyone would willingly colour and letter something this horribly?  Similarly don't be dissing my whack rhymes, yo - I can't help being white.  So, so white...

Eternally out of touch, I did not care very much for 12 Years A Slave as I found it pointless and dull - "slavery is bad," you say?  Well, thank you for clearing that up, Hollywood, but I feel you could have just said "slavery was bad" and spared me two hours of my life I could have spent watching the next few episodes of Star Crossed, which for all its faults does at least explore racial politics - albeit via sci-fi allegory - instead of just wallowing at the bottom of the social ladder seeing how the worst-off of society are treated like a kind of Benefits Street for white liberals.
There's no lesson to be learned in 12 Years A Slave, no themes, no real sense of the passage of all that time, not even any character arcs, it's just a parade of misery, and what it makes me think of most is Passion of the Christ - worthy subject matter, but makes for a repetitive and dull film that treats bodily mutilation like the subject of a pornographic work, although I liked my mate's description of it as "like Shawshank Redemption, but with whippings instead of bummings."

I don't want my kid raised by religious fanatics, I want it raised by homosexuals

I have most recently watched Hachiko Monogatori and the American remake Hachi: A Dog's Story.  The former is one of the saddest things I have ever seen, while the latter is a film that stars Richard Gere.
There's a certain cultural nuance to the tale of the original Hachiko that is not present in the Americanised remake, but I sadly lack the smarts to explain it adequately and so must muddle through as best I can: basically, up until fairly recently, pets were seen as an indulgence of the well-off classes of Japanese society and cats and dogs were largely community-owned utilitarian animals, and there is a common thread in the dominant Japanese spiritual philosophies that posits the importance of an object or person being true to its purpose and nature, so in the case of Hachiko - a dog who waited loyally for its master to arrive by train each day for the rest of its life after the man suddenly passed away - even though the dog waited in vain and was doomed to never meet its master again, the fact that it waited as it was supposed to is seen as admirable, and helped shape cultural attitudes towards pets as being less an indulgence of the affluent and more an addition to the family unit.  In the American version, the dog is basically thick, so it doesn't know any better than to run away when neglected and simply seek out familiar places, and I would argue this loses a lot of the appeal of the original as Hachiko quite clearly understands that its companion is gone but chooses to wait regardless until their reunion in the afterlife, and we know this because there's a watermark scene halfway through where it shifts from being a feelgood movie about a middle-aged man making an unlikely new friend against the social expectations of the day into forty minutes of your feels gland being used as a punching bag after the dog wanders into the room in the house where his master's funeral is being held and starts crying.  It is as mad and heartbreaking as it sounds.
The Gere version not so much.

I once lived with forty birds and they all flew away and I moved on

J6 is a pitch I made to the Phoenix, but nothing came of it so I thought I would avail myself of the chance of some uncomplicated blog filler by breaking the pages down into dailies and running them for a month or so instead of the usual screen grabs.  Because I really am that lazy.

On the plus side, putting work out there did at least get me to sit down and figure out where I needed to improve (anatomy, colouring, stronger opening scenes, better-establishing new characters faster, less hatching, etc), so it was literally back to the drawing board for this pitch, but the basic premise will remain the same as in the proof-of-concept pages I'll be running here: a family of six from a working class estate in Birmingham deal with strange occurrences and the occasional crime.

It's all-ages stuff so despite the odd dip into potty humor there's no swearing, no graphic violence, no screaming "NOOOOOO!" into the rain, and no sexual violence of any sort - which I imagine would be the real deal-breaker for the average superhero fan and those very, very odd people who find their way to the blog via some disturbingly specific search terms in the old Google there, but I assure you the intent was not to subvert any genres or expectations, it was just to do a silly superhero strip in four A4 pages' worth of space, because when I first sat down to do a pitch worthy of a kids' comic, my first thought was "what genre is unashamedly for children?" and "superheroes" was the first thing that popped into my head.
There are only three stories' worth, so if you absolutely hate it (you are apparently not alone) it shan't last very long and the tiresome business of me shouting at the wind because of some sub-par episode of a teenage drama I watched that morning shall resume soon enough.

The internet said to stay off my feet but then I found this wheelchair in a ditch so now I'm ready to work out

Star Crossed stars the 30 year-old ex-model Matt Lanter as the 16 year-old Space Hunkington (this is not really his name) and the 25 year old ex-model Amy Tea Garden (actually her real name) as Some Chick (probably her actual name), and if I said to you "Roswell meets Alien Nation - go write me a series", you would go off and write exactly this, even though you aren't a writer, you're just someone who was passing me in the office at the time when I pulled my nose out of a bowl of cocaine and you only came in to empty the bins, but it's 2014 and all the writing is done electronically and you are fucked - FUCKED - if you're telling me that no-one uses paper so you don't even have a purpose in this office because you need this job, you have debts - not like "I'm in twenty large to Johnny Fingers and he's gonna break my legs if I don't make good" debts, but it's still 2014 and you have debts like everyone else, so you go off and you try to remember what you can of Roswell and Alien Nation from that one time you caught some episodes in the 1990s at something like 2 in the morning and you put it down there on the page and you print it up and bring it into the office even though you know right there - just like you did when you were writing it - that it's complete horseshit and everyone will see through you, everyone will know you're a sham, no-one will accept a bunch of unoriginal, half-baked tropes reheated like this and that office is just going to laugh right in your stupid fucking face and sure enough I take the script out of your hands and I roll it into a ball - roll the pages into an actual ball - and throw it in your face right in front of everyone in exactly the kind of bullying alpha-male prick display you expect from a cokehead twat sailing by on past successes but little actual ability beyond some passable middle-management skills and I say "FUCK PAPER EMAIL ME THAT SHIT IT'S 2014" so you do and sweet mother of God I tell you I'm happy with it and you maybe wonder in passing why I don't say "it's good" or "it's bad" or make any kind of value judgement at all upon what you are pretty sure is a lousy script but you don't really care that much because you've made it, baby - you're a motherfucking writer now and it's music to your ears when your boss tells you "this is not bad enough to throw in the garbage while you watch, but only just" because this is The CW and that, my friends, is where the bar is.
I've seen worse, I guess.