I was just trying to fill a void with all these naked chicks

Another blast from the past here, presented with the kind permission of the original commissioning editor Dave Evans and writer Richmond Clements.
Shako: Snack Attack originally saw print in Zarjaz #9, one of the indie Futurequake imprint's titles devoted to Tharg-approved homages to the 2000ad roster of properties.  Of scriptwriter Richmond, conflicting rumors have it that he was stabbed to death by the adventurer Jack Burton in a subterranean kingdom hidden under San Francisco, thrown to his doom in a volcano on the Genesis Planet, and - most ludicrous of all - that he originally came from Larne.
Apologies must be made for the clumsy lettering - entirely my bad and not indicative of the usually high FQ standard.

If you don't know who Shako is, he originally appeared in 2000ad's fledgling year of publication, accidentally swallowing a top-secret McGuffin and subsequently being hunted by CIA honkies, he cut a swathe of murderous man-on-bear destruction across the Arctic as "the only bear on the CIA's Death List!" and he was all kinds of awesome, but has latterly been viewed as a bit of a joke by grumpy old comics readers who don't want to admit they once loved something so silly and seek to pretend that 2000ad has only ever been a chapbook about unshaven gunmen smooching all the ladies.

Until we meet again, I hope you all have a very nice weekend.

Compared to the rest of the third world we're doing just fine

Wanted to wait until this went up elsewhere before posting, but in association with Zarjaz and to celebrate the birth of Santa, the release of the Shako trade collection and IDW's US format Dredd monthly, here's Judge Dredd fighting a bear.

If you fancy reading it via a Borg distribution node or tablet, it's also available on PDF and CBR.

Homework was a lot easier back then - history was a lot shorter.

So long, ABC Warriors - you may have turned out in such a way I swear off drawing forever (again - these spells usually last a week or two), but it's good to get outside the comfort zone now and then and take a little spin around my own bloody inability to do even the most basic things on a page. Dammit.

Watching: my Nvidia driver crash repeatedly like the bitch it is, Rescue Me, UFO, Burn Notice

Listening: to late 80s/early 90s songs that are guilty pleasures and trying to decide which ones Glee will ruin for us next like they did Journey's 'Don't Stop Believing' - general consensus is either THIS, or THIS, but hope remains that they'll dash themselves upon the rocks by attempting to cover THIS

"You either die now... or JOIN and die LATER!"

More minor spoilers because I haven't been doing anything else today...



Watching: CRAP, like the indiscriminate pop culture shit-sponge I am

The dead! The dead walk the streets of Kalis!

Dagnabbit - barely got scribbling today at all - I am just so. Damn. Knackered. - so I didn't get to ink some old sketches to fill a post and instead must risk minor spoilering to do a screen grab which might, if you squint really hard - I mean if you squint really really hard - might just be the beginnings of a racist impersonation of an oriental stereotype that you are inexplicably doing to your monitor. If you squint at the screen grab, though, you can probably discern why I don't put screen grabs of thumbnails up much - too far removed from the end product where I'll presumably have addressed Mongrul's wonky legs, how bland Hammerstein looks and his off-center head, how clean Ro-Jaws is, etc - a lot of editing to get done, and I'm still not done thumbing some background details and a couple of the other characters I just can't get looking right at all.

Watching: nothing. I am that tired.

Peekaboo - I kill you!

"You stay, I go. No following."

I hate drawing perspective so fucking much - almost as much as drawing robots. Today has not been good.

Just shut up and fight, mutant scum!

Note to self - learn to draw textures.

"He is thunder and wrath, fire and steel..."

"I will re-calculate - your deaths will be indescribable!"

Okay, so the daily update plan seems to have taken a mild detour due to technical difficulties on some end or other (thank you, Plusnet, and your charming and helpful call center staff). But what the hell - since I gave up the booze I can't get out of bed before 1pm anyway and now I don't have internet (I am transmitting this update via the power of the human mind) the pressure's off and I can get back to some quality PS3 time.

In the words of many a slaughter victim: I'LL BE RIGHT BACK. Internet connection permitting, obviously.

"There's not enough energy in these conductor rods to last a quartex!"

Do you think you could ever be a husband to her? I mean, what can you offer her? Companionship? Love? A man’s love?

Watching: Blake's 7 - only thirty years too late and the first thing I ever knew of this series was when a tv show about old sci-fi mentioned it as SPOILER!! "the show where they all got killed in the final episode", but hey - I get there in the end. It's all right, as it happens. Money was clearly spent on some set dressing and location shooting/costumes, yet quite a great deal more money was clearly saved on special effects. There's also a terrible habit of just throwing exposition at the viewer, like characters sitting on a sofa explaining their evil plans for civilization that hinge on censorship, or Blake sitting Avon down to watch a power point presentation of what happened in the previous episode even though Avon was not only present during events but central to them - but all told, it's okay fluff.
Clash of the Titans - this here remake movie is stupid. Really, it's utterly, utterly stupid and composed of nothing but sequences where things jump towards the camera, which as a visual gets old if you aren't watching in a 3D cinema, which I imagine the vast majority of the audience won't be. I can watch any old shit, mind, so this didn't really offend me and I quite enjoyed it, but it's a ham-fisted, sometimes visually incomprehensible beast. Cool Kraken, all the same.
Steel Dawn - a Patrick Swayze favorite round these parts, it's basically a post-apocalyptic kung-fu version of Shane. Dumb, no-budget, and acted by a bunch of trees, but still likably daft and a good reminder of those heady days when 'low-budget' didn't automatically mean A LOAD OF SHITE and film makers got around their shortcomings by being entertaining and knowing a bit about their craft. The first Terminator, for instance, was a low-budget effort (and far better than the soul-less and bloated sequel whose appeal I've never been able to comprehend), as was Monster Squad, Night of the Comet, Ghoulies, American Ninja 2, Phantasm 2, Warlock, Showdown in Little Tokyo - shit, I could go on for ages just listing complete tosh that's inexplicably entertaining despite itself because someone somewhere along the line decided to apply a little TLC to a concept.
Covert Affairs - I have often wondered what would happen if they reversed the Jennifer Garner road to success and instead of starting out in a good tv show about a female spy before graduating to success in terrible films, an actress started out in successful and good films before moving on to shit television shows about a female spy and clearly Piper Perabo and I are on the same wavelength, because after making The Prestige, she's taken a demotion to this 'so awful it's entertaining' tv show that also stars several other tv no-marks I quite like and him off Jake 2.0. It's basically Alias if you tuned into Alias for the first time and Alias was exactly how you expected it to be (especially the pop songs that play during the end and lots of girly doe-eyes made to some point vaguely off-camera because the main female is feeling inadequate in a man's world) rather than a tv show about a woman who hits a wall and decides the best course of action is to not feel bad but to instead solve that problem immediately by using fancy gadgets for a bit and then shooting Arabs before going home and drinking alcohol until the next episode starts.
Rookie Blue - the more I watch the tall brunette in this attempt to do any acting at all, the more I expect the camera to pull back and reveal the whole thing to be a 'show within a show' where everyone is deliberately spouting the most deliberately cliched lines they can in the most unconvincing way possible to convey that they're playing a terrible actor reading from a banal script, and if that actually comes to pass about ten episodes down the line, then this becomes officially the best mindfuck on soap opera viewers ever committed to television - but I'm going to lay money right now that this will not be the case and this really is all there is to it: bad actors, poor drama, and not a speck of playfulness or genre awareness in sight.
But I keep thinking "any minute now, the camera will pull back..." Quite baffling.

"We all must die someday."

"Did she re-build you to help liberate country... or to be a BLOOD-CRAZED BEAST full of MINDLESS VIOLENCE?"

"Now the dead are rising to challenge the law!"

Attempting McMahon-y robots - FAIL.

"Loved by good - feared by evil!"

Some serious Liefeld spine and perspective fail going on there. I should totally do a comic book about dudes with pouches and guns bigger than their own body baring their teeth and shouting a lot.

Ba weep gra na weep ninny bong

I guess I'm just not used to being chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots.

What if it goes out and melts down a bus load of nuns? How would you like to write the headline on that one?

Just finishing off the Shako story for Zarjaz. The money shot is the titular main character conquering an arctic camp full of scientists, so he has to look a bit like Conan, because Conan The Bear is absolutely a comic I would buy - though obviously I'd be settling for the comic on account of there not being a movie. Because comics are inferior to movies.