Being a good Catholic sounds expensive

Well, here we are, a full week into the New Year of 2019, and my New Year's Resolutions are going great.  As ever, I have taken the advice of losers on the social medias not to make resolutions that might be difficult so that if I fail I won't feel sad, as opposed to the totally wrong way that people usually do these things by making resolutions that require effort and so when you succeed you will feel happy.  This year sees the coming of the Brexitpocalypse so nobody gets to feel happy.  Everyone suffers and we will put a brave face on it as the world burns in the finest traditions of the British Empire.  We ran out of foreign soil to salt, so now it's coming home.
Anyway, my resolutions are:
1 - put on weight
2 - exercise less
3 - deteriorate my mental health
4 - fail to secure any work as a comics artist
5 - not carry out my long-threatened and meticulously planned flamethrower attack on a schoolyard
and I fully expect to be able to succeed at all four of these resolutions in the coming year.  Perhaps 2019 will be the year I finally manage to soil myself as a grown adult, as I seem alone among my peers in not having performed this apparently commendable rite of passage.  I picture one day there will be made a film along the lines of The 40 Year Old Virgin, except instead of hesitantly admitting to his friends that he has never blown his love trumpet in a lady's love orchestra, the lead character will disclose that never once as a grown adult has he drank so many tins of Carling Black Label lager that his hungover arse emptied into his jeans at the breakfast table during an ill-advised venture aimed at quietly breaking wind and blaming it on the dog.  Maybe this year is my year.  I know Brexitpocalypse is coming, you guys, but God Damn It, a man can still dream and in the Brexitpocalypse this might be the only dream I still stand a chance of achieving.

Free men pull in all kinds of directions

You haven't any manners at all and you're always seeing things.

Today I watched some tv and broke wind a lot. Saw The Lady Vanishes for the first time and my first thought was "this is like that horrid Jodie Foster film from a few years back" and yeah, I realise this doesn't narrow it down for you but I specifically mean the one where her daughter disappears while they're on a plane together. I prefer the Lady Vanishes over the plane thing, as the latter just kept pushing the hysteria while the former seems to run a gamut of styles over the course of the story including slapstick, psychodrama and black comedy, though I'm on the fence about the turning point in the mystery coming about due to chance rather than insight or invention on the part of protagonists, as I think that's a cheat in mysteries. Good flick. Watching it has also made me realise I have seen Birdemic but not The Birds. I am unsure how something like this happens.

I only have two switches in my life: one turns off my emotions, the other makes a car bounce

Colouring old pages and Jebus but I sucked so bad when I started this book.

No rants about Japanese telly you've never heard of and will never watch today, but I suppose I could try ranting about CSI Miami except, you know, it's like ranting at the wind to complain about American tv shows that are conservative, ill-informed and detrimental to the health of our culture. The latest episode (s10e12) sees a Steve Jobs analogue murdered by a magic bullet while trust fund kids complain about "the man" while talking on iPhones about how they're going to smash capitalism by vandalising Apple Stores - it's basically an episode written by the Frank Miller of three months ago. There's this bit where a character comments "I didn't even know this movement was still going on" and it's clearly supposed to be about how such things are flash-in-the-pan kiddie protests (there are no adults or working class people onscreen at any point during the protest scenes), but what it actually sounds like is the writers admitting that they don't have a clue about their subject matter and they're gonna stick the boot in anyway, which I would like to say is at least honest, except in practice it drips of a reactionary insincerity almost as funny as the episode where a character disapprovingly remarks of Grand Theft Auto that "you get extra points for raping the cashier" during a simulated robbery despite the fact that I don't think I've played a videogame in over ten years that had a scoring system. Angry Birds, I guess, but that's an iPhone app, and doesn't feature much in the way of robbery simulation.

Also, a couple of weeks ago I started saving for a new computer using the method of putting a couple of pounds aside every time my pc fucks me off in some way - and by "my pc" I of course mean "Vista" - and now have two hundred and five pounds in a jar, this being less a tribute to how good I am at putting money aside and more about how I am one hair away from putting my fucking boot into this monitor. It'll still take a while to replace the machine as between Vista and my Xbox failing in massive ways (1) I have resolved to never pay Microsoft another penny, which means getting a Mac, which are kind of expensive - it's seriously like getting a car. I suppose I could do that Linux thing people keep mentioning, but from here it seems like effort, you know?

(1) The Xbox is a fantastic but long story, the short version of which is "it took money from my account without my consent, won't play video or view pictures, and now none of the God damn games on it will work and all of this is how the machine is deliberately designed to function if you have more than one in your house." Way to reward your loyal consumers, MS.

It's not that you've done nothing, it's that you've done nothing worthwhile

Just workin' my way through some colouring and edits while I get through the last of the cold - well, hopefully the last of the cold - so I can start the New Year at last. The headache that's been splitting my brain since last Thursday has broken in that way they do when you can taste and smell things again after whatever ungodly marriage of mucus and blood has been clogging your nostrils finally parts like the Red Sea before a Lemsip Moses and blowing your nose leaves the hanky looking like the Turin Shroud. Blech.
Still, glad to be nearly over it. A bit late to be having a beer to celebrate, so I'll settle for a good kip instead.

Maybe this isn't the time to finish the "Ponies Are Awesome" song

Hit and run post. BAM - I'm like a ninja.

--and sometimes in the middle of the day - for no reason at all - I like to make myself a big pitcher of margheritas and take a nap out on the sundeck

Reading: Static Shock #1, which is okay, I guess, but there seems to be an odd back and forth between the comic it wants to be and the comic that the greater editorial vision for the New 52 wants it to be, on one hand full of the trappings of the 1990s cartoon show and on the other there's all this violent dismemberment, and while this dichotomy will no doubt give rise to gurning online about what DC is doing wrong (though they're shifting books in the short-term and short-term sales are what monthly comics are all about in this "waiting for the trade collection" age), there was something here that didn't ring true that I could not put my finger on until it struck me that Static (or rather his alter-ego Virgil) is not allowed to be poor.

He was poor in the cartoon to the point he couldn't take a bus to school and had a home-made costume rather than a body condom as seen in the newest comic, but in the comic he's not allowed to be so badly off and instead his home is a compact but comfortable brownstone, his costume is shiny and expensive-looking and he has a secret base full of technological wonders that's bankrolled by some sort of black Iron Man-type character with whom he has a student/teacher relationship that I don't see working too well dramatically since Virgil's actual father is still alive and present. The comic equates being less well-off than necessary to live comfortably as being the same thing as poor, as if being poor is basically the same as living in student digs for a year or two while you get your art history masters or become one of those insufferable Media students. Virgil/Static isn't some sort of projects-based superhero living a life of stark contrast to the surburbanites that typify superheroic fiction, but you get the impression that's where the writers wanted to go with it except the trappings and visuals don't back them up.

Static/Virgil seems a typical teen superhero and I'm not sure why I should care to read his book before any of the other teen superhero books on the market, or even the teen superhero books of yesteryear like Darkhawk, which I am still reading my way through now and then. All these teen heroes seem to live in houses with a garage, they all go to college, their big problems are romance and popularity issues caused by some some pesky supervillain - I suppose this might be a conscious thing in these Occupy Wall Street times to give people wallowing in poverty the escapism that superhero comics represent, like when Batman kept having crazy adventures after the war because that was what people wanted to distract them from their misery - although this might also have been because Fred Wertham accused Batman of being a bit of a gaylord and DC - displaying the winning grasp of public opinion that's kept it a powerhouse in North American comic books to this very day - made Batman as camp as humanly possible because, naturally, that is how you dispel gay rumors.

Whatever the case may be, Static Shock made me think about the class system in American superhero comics - or to be more specific, it made me think that North American superhero comics are increasingly distracted with being middle class, and that's a bit of a shame as I seem to remember some great comics from my youth that championed the poor, the underclass, the underdog or whatever patronising label I should be utilising, while nowadays it seems that comics are less about real people escaping into a fantasy world and more having a window into the lives of a defacto ruling elite of posthuman snobs, so I guess it's been worth checking out for that reason if no other, but I don't really get why I should care about this book. The original gave us a decent cartoon show and made a black teen superhero popular, but while that was trends being set, this update seems more like trends being followed, if that makes sense as a criticism - I mean, a comic is under no obligation to blaze a trail or anything even if I think it'd be nice if it would try something new.

I will beat you and there will be nothing madcap or wacky about it

So long, suckers

Catching up with my colouring can mean only one thing: I have absolutely everything else I need to draw finished and my 'to do' list is clear!

Is it fuck.

I'm doodling away at less concentration-demanding arty activities because I'm either hungover or in the process of getting drunk when I've gone near the pc this last couple of weeks, so it's that time of year again when I bid an adieu to daily posts until my rampant drinking probl- I mean my hectic social and networking schedule allows me to return to a more sober daily routine - no point doing a daily work blog if I'm not getting any work done, after all.
Until that happy day when I can stop drinking because that's the day I long for even if must be through the sweet release of death, I wish you all the very best of the season and hope the new year finds you well.

in Soviet Russia...

Another productive Sunday.

Yeah, the title of this post is a bit of a lie.
Pretty lazy day again. I noticed someone wearing a cloak while I was out and about, and while this seems to elicit a certain type of response among the older members of the community, it tends to make me feel like Cookstown isn't that far from civilization because we have kids not afraid to roll like they gotta walking our streets rather than the usual baseball cap/sportswear ensemble bedecking the colourful array of metrosexual ingenues that populate the town. I don't think I'd object so much to the latter wardrobe if it accompanied some sort of physical activity, but that makes me a bit of a hypocrite, as I'm the laziest devil I know.

I know I only got out of bed at two o'clock and spent most of the day playing old PS2 games before wandering into the 'study' around six to catch up with my wrestling and movies while doodling on the computer, but it's nearly ten and I think I'll finish 'working' and get in some serious PS3 time so I'll feel I've actually achieved something with my life today.

sundaze takin' it eazaay...

Nothing much happens on a sunday. Despite my connection with catholicism - monotheism especially - being a long-dead habit, I still enjoy lazy sundays coloured with a hungover beery haze - or stouty haze as is the case today, given last night saw one of my periodic bouts with the black stuff. I took the opportunity to try cycling for the first time in over a year, looked after my sister's kids for a while, then found myself colouring in a Power Pack fanstrip.

I would comment on the Tyrone win over Armagh, but I feel it would be a disservice to a generation of Northern Irishmen who follow a game that's not real football and never will be to pretend I have the first bloody clue what that game is even about. I saw like a dozen handballs in the firt half alone and the ref just lets it slide.
Amateur hour.
It was pretty damn hot today, too. Great to see the weather finally turn, but it means I'll have to make pipe-dream plans to do something significant with my summer again. Well, actually, what I normally do is think about making pipe-dream plans, then decide I'm definitely going to do something, then summer's over, I'm broke, and quite possibly horribly hungover to boot.
But this year? Things are going to be different, etcetera...