When a man insults the glory of God it's time to let your fists do the talking

The story was a mix of things as I tried to cram different threads and themes into the different characters, but the core concept of "Your Friends and Neighbors" when I was posting it on the blog was that of a kid who lived in a town where the world had come to his door thanks to the kind of wonderful and beautiful multiculturalism that more than half the population of this country just pissed up a wall, and he encounters race and religious differences on the path to character growth and being less of an elitist jerk about his first world problems.
I developed RSI halfway through posting the first chapter and once I started to recover, the strip fell by the wayside in favor of things I had pending - such as the art for a graphic novel - but just for shits and giggles, here's chapter 1 of "The Man By The River" in its entirety, including the pages I never got to put on the blog - and yes before you ask I can draw and letter much better these days.
It's all very crude as I was drawing in Photoshop at that time (I now use Manga Studio), didn't know my way around a page, and the writing risks making me look like the kind of massively sexist and racist snob I thought I was parodying, but there's a special prize* if you can spot the exact page where my crippling RSI kicked in and I could barely hold a pen and draw any more - if you say "page 1" the special prize is a punch in the balls.

* there is no prize.

Reading is for morons what can't understand pictures

You know, I think people don't give Donald Trump the credit he deserves for being genuinely good at what he does - it isn't acting, business, or politics, it's selling the fantasy that he isn't the punchline to capitalism, and that his crazy, unworkable pipe-dreams aren't the mad delusions of a racist idiot.  America is looking like it might get interesting again, or at the very least it looks like it's gearing up to give fascism or socialism a punt in the next few years, which I imagine will be great for its creative industries if the younger types (mid-30s to early 50s) finally have something to rail against.

Just tell me your safeword and let's go

Cyber Tracker is a dystopian drama that examines the dichotomy between law and justice via a near-future setting in which corporate America mechanises a recently-privatised court system.  This dichotomy plays out via exploding fire engines and people being kicked in the head until they fall over and/or explode, with noted thespians Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Richard "Australian" Norton never quite getting a good throwdown between them despite this being what any fan of early-90s head-kicking has turned up to watch.  I made the mistake of not watching this drunk, so not enjoying its knuckle-dragging charms for what they are is entirely on me, though I did like Don Wilson's hilariously terrible Flashback Wife, who huffs out the door towards an offscreen divorce so Don can swig whiskey in the dark while listening to the sexy voice of his home computer, and the closest he gets to hanging out with a real woman until like the last twenty minutes of the film is some jailbait he runs into for some reason.  For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure this was weird behavior in the 1990s, too.

Bone Tomahawk - The Searchers by way of The Hills Have Eyes, with Kurt Russell's grizzled small town sheriff setting out to rescue a deputy and a doctor from Native American cannibals.  Additional good turns from Patrick Wilson and Ed Norton can't stop a functional western horror from looking remarkably cheap for all the talent involved.

If I wasn't so lazy I'd punch you in the stomach

Yep.  Forgot again to update yesterday.  I suppose I shouldn't worry seeing as it was because I was working, but dang it, I just have so much wisdom to share with the world it is a crime when I don't post here about how bad the latest UStv shows are even though I don't seem to actually stop watching them.  Alternatively, it is stupid that I divide my time at home between drawing comics and playing videogames and it wouldn't kill me to branch out a bit and remind myself how to string sentences together now and then.

I have too much money and my wallet's so heavy my back hurts

Joker goes on the list of things I can't draw.

I watched The Last Starfighter again, and it really is in need of a remake or a sequel, though should you wish to live the dreams of your 8 year-old self and play the Starfighter arcade game from the film for yourself, a near-perfect fan-made recreation (with sound sampled from the film) can be downloaded HERE.
As much as I still love it as an unashamed escapist romp, there's something a bit off about what a snob the main character Alex is to his friends, berating them for wanting no more than to enjoy their youth and making the best of their opportunities before he goes gallivanting off to space to be Jesus or whatever, but then a lot of films from this era are like that: overly-vocalising the internal struggles of a character with their status or station in order to better illustrate their later readiness to accept what Joseph Campbell called the "call to action", though is possibly better thought of as a conscious decision to move from the hated status of reactive victim of to active participant in the story cycle, so  before the protagonist can fully embrace a capacity for agency, they are kind of a dick.  I guess it was a thing in the 1980s.

I'd slap you with a glove only just this morning I put away my winter things

I sometimes wonder why so many perfectly sensible comics fans are so hostile towards the superhero genre, home as it is to stories of pure id and social and political commentary dressed up in stretchy leggings, the superhero genre being an especially accommodating one as within it can be told detective stories, stories about alien invaders, stories about witches, stories about talking frogs, and those stories can happen anywhere from the wild west to the planet Mars, while other genres centering on war, mafia criminality, hardboiled detectives, pirates or cowboys don't so easily allow other elements of the fantastic to invade the often narrow and stereotypical confines of their genre without being seen as outings into the territory of the camp and deliberately outrageous mash-up.
I love me some superhero nonsense, is what I'm saying, so it saddens me when when those who make superhero comics for a living insist with increasingly defensive and dismissive volume that I should go and do something else instead of reading superhero comics.
Well, mission accomplished, despite my enjoyment of the odd trade, Ultimate floppy, videogame, cartoon series and movie, I think it best that myself and Spider-Man go our separate ways, which is probably just as well because Ultimate Spider-Man - the latest cartoon Marvel is trumpeting as the second coming - is the kind of cloyingly terrible shit that I thought western animation had got past years ago, and I'm surprised that such experienced hands as Paul Dini's are involved in it, though they likely had to get him on board to defuse criticisms of ripping off Batman: Brave and the Bold's more successful trappings.  As it is, the scattershot cutaways and fourth wall breaking comes off as Family Guy without the racism, and if you've seen Family Guy in the last five years you'll know that basically means Family Guy without the "punchlines", or Seth McFarlane's uncanny ability to tap into the knowledge and experiences of his working-class audience with sketches about dining in Japan and troubles with the housemaid.  After the all-ages Spectacular Spider-Man's rather good take on the material, this step back to exclusively child-oriented storytelling is a disappointment, especially when it comes with lengthy scenes where the main character has a whacky adventure with whatever toy they're now selling in stores (be it a motorcycle - because Spider-Man certainly needs one of those - or a flashing web-shooter ).  It's also committed to immediately building Spider-Man into a larger world of Marvel IPs, and this distracts things further from having any kind of empathy with the character because our investment is supposed to be in Spidey as part of a team, yet the team is a bunch of stereotypical 1-dimensional cyphers, though I do like that Luke Cage's costume is essentially a skintight farmhand's outfit - because it is 2012, that's why.
Maybe Steve Wacker - and through him Marvel - is correct in saying that superhero audiences shouldn't expect anything more than trash aimed at pushing whatever sweatshop-produced tat Disney wants flying off the shelves this month and it's time I moved on or lowered my standards and expectations, but it sort of sucks that this is the stance of creators more than twenty years after Watchmen, Animal Man and Marvelman came out.  Maybe it really is time I moved on to something else... or maybe it's time I just took my money and started rewarding those creators of superhero tales who are willing to try harder.

Please tell me you're wearing that shirt so someone can spot you from space

A superhero fan reviews: Eagle and Tiger 175

Genocidal alien Doomlord has the potential to be an insane comic book, because he's like this alien with a skull for a face and wings for ears, and he has this totally metal ring that can shoot death rays, and he has Superman's powers, only instead of coming to Earth to save us he was sent to evaluate us by these guys who are kind of like the Guardians of Oa only I think they're called the Death Lords or something - I can't decide if that is awesomely insane or insanely awesome - and he sees all the wars and pollution and stuff and he thinks "these guys are lame" and sentences us all to death, only he pussies out and now he protects humanity while living with this single mom and her bratty kid.  It started out pretty awesome with this whole "what if General Zod came to Earth instead of Kal El?" Elseworlds premise, but then totaly wusses out and becomes this story about someone doing good to the best of his ability and understanding, only occasionally he gets really hardcore again and kills people because he's an alien and has a value system that's different to the one he's come to admire in humanity, and that's kind of cool and deep I guess, but he doesn't go around killing people all the time and wrecking stuff, which is really lame.

I bet if Mark Millar wrote this, the alien would be awesome all the time and like throwing trains into London Bridge and then killing the king and letting them elect their own president and he'd say stuff like "class dismissed, your majesty!", but it's that Scotch guy Allen Grant who used to do the really lame Batman stories from like 30 years ago before they kicked him out of America, so that's probably why this sucks.
 
Billy's Boots starts off with this great premise of this juvenile delinquent on the run from foster care who has these, like, haunted sneakers that used to belong to this really famous soccer player, and when he wears them he gets this old guy's mad skills, so I guess this old guy is actually dead and it's his ghost doing it, or he's alive all along and the kid has the power within himself, which would totally be what would happen at the end of the movie version if they made one, which I would only watch if it had a professional wrestler in it.  They could have like Superfly Jimmy Snuka playing the old soccer guy, or a latino of some sort, I guess, because soccer is really big down there - holy cow, wouldn't it be awesome if they made a movie of this and they used CGI to do the old guy so it looked like he was being played by Eddie Guerrero?

That would be off the hook!  Anyway, I don't really get soccer, or sports in general, so this story kind of sucked for me, even before it got to all this lame stuff about people being nice to each other all the time and the people of the town all going to watch the soccer match just because it was happening.  I guess they didn't have Xbox back then so they had to do stupid things like that or be bored all the time.

Star Rider is probably my favorite of all the stories, because it's about this alien who comes to Earth to ride BMX bikes, even though he's like an alien octopus so he has to take human form before he can even use a bike without his tentacles getting caught in the wheels.  I'm not really into sports, but this is like X-Games and stuff, only before there was X-games so it's more like BMX Bandits but with ALF in it, if ALF looked like Cthulu sometimes.

The alien has this spaceship in Loch Ness where the US Navy is looking for the Loch Ness monster with depth charges and then it just suddenly ends as it's getting awsome, which is just bullshit even if it goes straight into this other story called The Computer Warrior, which is about this kid who goes into his computer like Tron and plays the games for real like ReBoot, even though the computer is like this old typewriter kind of thing hooked up to an old tv on this kid's bedroom floor but it still has the power to do this whole virtual reality stuff, which is insane.

The kid goes into the computer and there's this room full of other kids who are playing the game too, so I guess the mian character - Bob, just like ReBoot - has to kill these other kids or something?  A lot actually happens in all these stories even though they're only like 2-4 pages long, and this is very amateurish because too much is happening to keep track of and nobody has time to comment about how what's happening to them is like a movie or cartoon they saw once.

Dan Dare I recognise from superhero writer Garth Ennis' comic book about English people in rockets fighting space-natives, only instead of black guys they were green so that it wasn't offensive, but it's okay for Garth Ennis to do stories about shooting green people because he's Irish.  This version of the character is super-lame, though, as he just sits at a desk doing his job, then orders some people at a computer to send instructions to other people - it's a very unrealistic portrayal of a space hero, I mean he doesn't shoot lasers at aliens at all.

Robo Machines is like Transformers, except even lamer because all they do is run away from the bad guy, who's like this one person chasing these four robots in a giant spaceship filled with lasers and they still run away from him.  These are really lame-ass robots as well as lame-ass heroes.  What do you expect from Gobots, I guess.

Death Wish is actually pretty awsome, because it's about a dude with a Manowar album for a face who does stunts for a living because he wants to crash and burn and end it all, so he only does really, really extreme stunts, and when he goes out in public he wears this creepy mask to stop kids crying and people puking or attacking him.  It's kind of cool, especially when he totally kicks this guy in the face and then breaks out of prison on a Harley and then he promises that from now on he's going to only do even more extreme stunts.  This guy is pretty awsome,actually.

The Thirteenth Floor is about this evil computer who puts people in the Holodeck and then instead of making them go sailing or listen to Data singing, he makes the grim reaper put them through this evil boot camp where climbing nets turn into snakes and stuff, which is all kinds of awsome until the writer ruins it with people helping each other rather than winning the race, which is so dated and not very mature.

The last story is Golden Boy, which is another sports strip, about a kid whose parents die in mysterious circumstances and this super-creepy dude approaches the kid saying he has proof that the kid was responsible for his parents' death and the only way he'll give it to the kid is if the kid takes part in a suicidal death-sport tv reality show and gives this guy his winnings, so it's kind of like Hunger Games only lamer, and tries to hide that it's ripping off Hunger Games by appearing in a comic from 1985.  And what is it with sports in this comic book?  Why all the outdoor activities in something which is only going to be read by asthmatic virgins living in basements?  That's probably the most insane thing about this whole comic book, and even though this story has an evil reality tv show boss who literally has fangs just so you know how evil he really is, it's still pretty lame that it has to be about exercise out in the fresh air and sunlight, which is hard to relate to.  On the plus side, there aren't any women in these stories.  So there's that.

This book kind of sucks, but it does explain why UK writers make such awesome superhero writers - they had plenty of practice making up their own superhero stories so they could avoid reading terrible comics like this.  I'm glad the UK industry is only Thundercats comics now.  They deserve it.

You're a fool who will be beaten down by me!

Hey, Gentaro, why so frustrated when you're a superhero with space rocket powers who's surrounded by scandalously young Japanese glamor models dressed like schoolgirls all day long?



In me news, I have been watching and enjoying: