"GRRRRRRR" yeh complete setta bastids yeh

No, I don't know why the werewolf that looks like a big rat from Werewolf in a Woman's Prison is doing a Mel B impression circa 2004 - when you have three minutes to do a sketch and Manga Studio won't give you pressure sensitive response like it oughta, things get desperate.
Oddly, it wasn't New Vegas that kept me from remembering I'm supposed to draw werewolves for the blog, but getting back to a normal drawing routine for the upcoming Omnivistascope so I'm not pushing deadlines again.

Which I'll probably end up doing anyway...

Omnivistascope 6 and the shameless self-whoring that now commences

I don't toot my own horn on the blog as I'm not very good at taking compliments and don't want to draw attention to published stuff, but it occurs that for someone who has vague ambitions about becoming a professional scribbler at some point in the future, this attitude might not be terribly helpful. Luckily, I've just received my contributor's copy of Omnivistascope 6, however, and I'm happy to toot it up right and proper as it's a slick-looking mother of a book with a glossy card cover and dead fancy-looking formatting that would make it look at home on a newsagent's shelf quite easily if it wasn't for me being in it.

Although the strip I drew doesn't actually look that bad in print, so that's one in the win column.
From the 'Quatermass meets John Constantine' trappings of Oliver Redding's Quisling to the Lovecraftian mindscapes of Matt Herbert's I, Shoggoth, almost all strips are written by the more-machine-than-man being known as Paul Scott, with plenty of variety on offer, from the posthuman robot space operatics of Rathbone (described by SFX Magazine in the best possible terms as 'Asimovian' shortly before they described OVS as their pick of the month's book offerings), through the Douglas Adams narrative trappings of space goth Dirk Despair to the masterful detective fiction of sorcerer detective Warlock Holmes and his altercation with the mystery of invisible fog, you get a lot for your six quid, and it looks like quality all the way thanks to good paper stock and shiny, shiny card cover by an artist whose credit is a bit hard to find, but he is bloody good.

You can buy a copy from Paul HERE, or if you detest paypal because of their use of rape squads in the third world, I suspect his regrettable and all-consuming drinking problem may render him open to the barter system should your paths cross at the Bristol International Comic & Small Press Expo 2010 which takes place this weekend, or failing that you can wait around until he passes out and then steal a copy.
It's a fantastic-looking book that's a great read and comes with the SFX seal of something or other - I don't have a clue what it was but they were quite impressed with previous outings of the book and my art there was actually shamefully bad in places. It isn't now, so simple maths prove this one is better than the last and thus science has shown that you have to have Omnivistascope #6 in your life.

Fare thee well, robots!

Finally done with those, so it's off to thumbnail and scribble for a few days in preparation for the rest of the Insomnia GN.

Watching: The Pacific, The Good Wife, Glee

Watching: Tooth Fairy, Miami Medical, Smackdown, Ben Hur 2009, Frank Skinner's Opinionated

Watching: Dr Who, The Bridge, The Dunwich Horror (1970)
Listening: War Rocket Ajax, Pomplemoose, Radiohead

You win this round, poorly-designed robots. You may have won in an underhanded manner by putting a gun to my head and making me drink most of the day away instead of getting some scribbling done, but you win this one...

Watching: The Mummy (1959), Vampire Diaries, Spartacus, CSI, South Park

Watching: Lost, 24, House, the Middle, Modern Family, Ben Hur

Still drawing away at the robots

Away from that, and on account of me not doing fast food or non-downloaded/DVDed television as part of my daily routine, I somehow managed to miss that I now live in a Simpsons parody of the real world...




Watching: Cougartown, Ugly Betty, Wonder Woman, Robocop: the Series, Star Trek: TOS

Watching: CSI Miami, Melrose Place, Trauma, TNA, 90210 - nothing but pure shite today, apparantly.

Watching HBO's Treme, I'm reminded of being so into any given scene - skateboarding, metal, mid-90s dance - that you just slip into the mindset with ease once you're surrounded by the people, a feeling captured in the opening scenes where the first Jazz parade post-katrina makes it's way through the Treme area of New Orleans accruing musicians and locals as it goes, but it continues throughout, be it in Steve Zahn's hand to mouth musician or the performance street-theatre of Mardis Gras Indians as some sort of badge of office, there's just this incredible sense of immersion in a time and place that if you step outside it for a moment and take note of the details of life there it may as well be another planet, and it's that immersion in a culture that crawls out of what's left of the Big Easy that makes Treme work.
You can believe John Goodman's offence at the suggestion that New Orleans isn't one of America's great cities much as you could believe it - warts and all - of the living, breathing entity that was Baltimore in HBO's The Wire, also made with the same staff and methods (local actors, knowledgeable locals as script consultants) as Treme, though the latter substitutes local musicians for the former's police department as the centerpiece of a sprawling ensemble, and while I enjoyed The Wire, I didn't feel quite as invested from the first episode as I do with Treme. It's just fantastic television.

Also Watching: Castle, Damage, ATHF

Halfway through the robotty strip now - not counting my second pass for edits and background details at the end - and damn but my pages look bare without tones. I have no idea why I thought I could cartoony stuff.

Watching: Cold Case, Southland, Human target, Miami Medical - and you know what that show needs? To be more glossy.

Listening: Orbital Blue Album

Watching: Spartacus, ATHF, Dr Who
Listening: Radiohead, David Bowie, REM

Still robotting away. Not paying attention to the line weight as much as I should be, though.

Stil robotting.

Watching: Justified, CSI: NY, Accidentally On Purpose, Outnumbered, Sons of Tucson, Clone Wars
Reading: Thor and the Warriors Four - in which Thor doesn't actually appear. Which is fine, actually, as he's probably going to be overexposed this year with the film and all, and this isn't actually a Thor book as much as it is the latest Power Pack miniseries, which is aimed at kids and thus naturally opens with the first third of the book dedicated to the main characters' grandmother slowly dying while people around her cry.
The story follows the super-rugrats as they seek out Thor and the city of Asgard in order to retrieve a golden apple that cures all sickness with which to return their dying grandmother to health, which if you think about it isn't so much childish naiveté as it is fair enough reasoning for kids who've fought alien tyrants and traveled in time. But this being comic books in the 21st century where Batgirl is stuck in a wheelchair because she doesn't know anyone who can fix a spine and we all nod and say "certainly, that makes perfect sense" rather than calling bullshit on a lack of imagination, there are two ways this story is going to pan out: 1) granny Power dies and an inevitable lesson about the transient nature of life is learned, or 2) granny Power gets a few more years and the bad things in life that we have to endure are kept at bay for a time and we get the happy ending that's increasingly rare in even our children's entertainment. Option 2 doesn't sound likely, does it?
A fun little book, all the same.

Still at the robots.

Watching: Melrose Place, 90210, Southland, WWE RAW, The Good Wife, V, Ugly Betty
Listening: Lady Gaga, Bob Dylan, Pantera, Iron Maiden

Watching: Justified, Life Unexpected, Lost, TNA

Reading: an oddly disappointing crop of Marvel titles from the pull list
X-Men: Second Coming 1 - apart from Wolverine, who I quite wanted to read more of but couldn't get my head around most of his own series as it just seemed to be this ongoing retcon clusterfuck about him finding out stuff about his past that wasn't true two pages later, I didn't care for the X-books much as I didn't care for most of the Marvel stuff that trickled over to the UK in the 1980s/1990s, barring Power Pack, which was reprinted in the back of Return of the Jedi and Thundercats in little four-page chapters chopped from giant-sized debut issues appearing in the states, so it was actually two months into the story before I realised it was a fucking superhero comic and until then I'd been enjoying what seemed like an adaptation of a mid-80s kids' movie about aliens - hey, I was a 2000ad fan and that kind of thing appealed to me. Anyway, for the most part I didn't think much of the Marvel stuff and X-Men's impenetrable, overly-complicated interconnected plotting and dull characters (seriously, has Cyclops had a single defining character moment ever?) seemed a macrocosm of my issues with Marvel's output. It was just this dull, money-chomping franchise that seemed to dominate the superhero market, intermittently throwing out these densely-worded crossovers where nothing much happened except someone shouted, the X-Men talked about teaming up to fight some menace, Cyclops shot his eyebeams at something that was usually off-panel and then at the end some villain I'd never heard of got a splash page to himself so he could tell his minions or the empty room that something bad were about to 'appen, and lordy, but Second Coming is exactly that all over again.
Basically, The X-Men are sitting around talking about how the mutants are in trouble as a race (which they've been doing not only for the last few years since most mutants lost their powers in a magical deus ex status quo changer, but since the mid-80s), then Cyclops shoots his eyebeams, the X-Men team up, they fight some people with guns, then there's a splash page reveal of a guy who's telling his minions something bad is going to 'appen. That is literally everything that happens, and unsurprisingly it's pretty dull, which is not something you should be saying about a story where people fight across the rooftops of moving traffic. I suppose it services those who want nothing more than just this, but as with anything X-Men related that isn't Grant Morrison's run on the title, I'm not sure what's here for non-fans.
Fantastic Four 274 - I literally read this only because the horse aliens from Power Pack had a cameo - I'm not joking - as the title has gone off the boil for me in the last few issues after a decent start to John Hickman's run, but it's perfectly serviceable fantasy adventure if you don't mind stuff that's long on talk and short on action or character development that'll be retconned in a year's time anyway. It's high concept stuff, certainly, but there's only so long you can present high concepts one after another without it coming across as dry (though as with anything, there are exceptions) or unrelatable, and that's the wall Hickman's hitting here. It's a pity, as going by his opening story he has the potential to top John Byrne's defining run on the title, but he's taking his time getting anywhere at all.

Watching: WWE RAW (goodbye, Shawn! ), Bones, The Middle, Modern Family