Good tea. Nice house.

Hit and run posting again, given the late hour and the avoidance of taking screen grabs of any Babble pages currently in progress as I'm on the last nine pages and want to avoid spoilers. But if you don't mind spoilers, there's some lesbian sex and everyone dies off-panel, or maybe they become a single gestalt intelligence. Possibly I am not reading the ending properly. Or I am confusing it with Evangelion.
In the meantime, I also have to alter an older strip into some kind of presentable form and so will be likely screen-grabbing that project to keep the blog ticking over. Somehow, younger relatives have discovered what Uncle Bryan does as a hobby and have expressed an interest in seeing the book he's been drawing, so now I have to rustle up something suitable to show them and pretend that was what I was doing all along, and not the thing with the gay sex, constant swearing, and that one guy getting his head smashed in by a mob. Still, the older strip will do for blog filler and swapsies at conventions if nothing else, while I also have a few strips owed to some very patient lads indeed and you may be seeing those in passing - and for the lads in question, I imagine it's about bloody time they saw something from their very slow artist...

You may inform the cosmetic surgeon that I'm ready for my vagina now

Oh colouring with a 'u', even though I don't know what the hell I'm doing you never fail to calm me down after a hard day of committed failure.
Watched the season finale for Drop Dead Diva and thoroughly enjoyed it. During this season I did have qualms about the moral tone of the episode where a student claims to have been raped and the denouement is not that her lawyer proves where her college is criminally liable for covering up evidence of this but when the student is awarded a large sum of money for her pain, but that aside it was the kind of stuff I like to watch in the gym, like Outsourced, which I liked and thus was probably doomed to cancellation for that reason alone. I guess that means Diva is probably cancelled, too.

It's a Britney Spears sex riot

What's this? A blog entry not made in the dead of night? Can it be our man is keeping regular hours and attempting to get some scribbling done during daylight?
Well, we'll see how long that lasts. Colouring in today, so not that much work actually done, but another page down is always a good thing, editing process to come later.

Watching: Chase S01E01-02 - a tv show about a blond female marshal chasing America's most dangerous criminals, which as premises go is not a million miles away from the DC Comics series that was also called Chase and featured a blond female protagonist doing much the same thing except in a superhero universe. Whatevers - the show is pretty decent if unspectacular, and any strong female leads in action series that don't end up blubbing because of small child/daddy/mommy/spouse-related trauma by the end of the first episode are to be encouraged.

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

Why Spider-Man is a wanker

Been reading Colsmi's great blog about 2000ad of late and it's made me think there's nothing wrong with a bit of overthinking, so I thought I'd put down my two pennies' worth why - even though his post Brand New Day tales have been entertaining - I don't like Spider-Man and think he's a dickhead.

One of the Marvel universe's most beloved conceits is its ability to have characters be in some way defined by flaws as much as their superpowers, and Peter parker is flawed from his first appearance where he's the shy kid who gets picked on, gets some powers, then basically tells the world to fuck itself hard because he's gonna get him some poontang and benjamins and don't owe nobody nothin'. He has powers, but he isn't going to use them for any noble purpose - he probably swings by burning orphanages without helping just after he became a superhuman, he's that kind of A-hole and total dick until his uncle gets shot, after which Pete suddenly feels he should "contribute to the betterment of society" using the only language a bullied kid understands - he beats people up and mocks them as he does so in order to make them feel insecure to the point they hate him and thus continue a cycle of violence and enmity that would most likely have burned out if the villain had managed to get away with that loot from the bank robbery and retired to Hawaii like they'd planned - there are a lot of Spider-Man villains who really, really hate Spidey and do what they do as much to get to him as to make themselves rich, cure their mutated conditions or Take Over The World, and as for the odd story where he struggles with powerful opponents who initially best him before his coming back in the last act to trounce them, those can be reduced to Spidey basically being upset because he's found someone he can't beat up.

Spider-Man is a story where the bullied kid not only becomes the bully and we're supposed to applaud, but a story where violence begets violence and happiness is fleeting and ultimately unattainable because even when Spidey goes through hell for something or someone he holds dear, when he finally starts to give back by becoming an educator and showing his face to the world instead of hiding behind a mask, he'll just sell it all to the devil in the end so that he can regress back to being a bully again, living the life of a mooching wastrel and contributing nothing.

Don't get me wrong, we're rarely in doubt about certain people needing kicked in the face, but Spidey takes pleasure in doing so, antagonises his victims unnecessarily, and at the end of the day, after he's wound them up something rotten, it's the faceless, nameless inhabitants of the world he occupies who end up paying the price when they fulfill their only purpose in existing in the Marvel universe by becoming a bodycount. Ben Parker and Gwen Stacy die and it's a tragedy that scars his soul, but the thousands of others sent to their maker fail to register beyond the tale's end and the villain will do it all again when he breaks out of prison because in not even having the courage to kill someone like Carnage - whose entire deal is that he murders people because he can - Spidey has basically put his own sense of morality before the actual lives of other people. You're either making the tough decisions and taking the safety of others into your own hands or you aren't, dude.

You're a grade-A wanker, Spider-Man, and I've never liked you.
Well, maybe when Erik Larson was drawing you. You were fun then.

Watching: Enterprise - just finished watching season 4, and while I have to agree with the consensus that it was finally finding its feet, it was entirely apparant that the production process was determined to weed those instances of promise out of the show and keep it as locked into the Trek formula as possible, meaning it was probably best to put the whole franchise out of its misery when they did. There's a great bit in Observer Effect - an otherwise forgettable one-off where 'Enterprise yet again encounters classic Trek aliens before anyone else and there's a perfectly logical reason why no-one knew about the incident' - where the ship's doctor delivers news to the captain that two of the crew have five hours to live, and instead of the blaring omnipresence of the incidental music as per usual, there's several seconds of silence before the cut to the ad break which focus entirely on Scott Bakula's admittedly passive, emotionless face. It's an effective dramatic beat, I thought.
The show's final episode remains as poor as I remember, however, not least because it's an objectively badly-written piece of television whose narrative hook is that it's a replication of events being observed by someone in the future, yet many scenes bafflingly take place outside that observer's purview. The regular cast is reduced to guest-starring roles, too, playing second fiddle to characters and plots from an early and not particularly well-regarded Next generation episode, the final indignity arguably being when one of them bites the dust off-camera, which is just... wow. I have no clue how the show's creators could care so little for their own creations that they became the bitches of a show off the air for over ten years, but that's where Enterprise ended up and I suppose that's why it probably deserved the title of "the Trek show even Trek fans won't watch" that dogged it at the time.
Ponyo - WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE?

Watching: A Christmassy Ted - a revisit of a Christmas standard that in Ireland is akin to the rest of the world's It's A Wonderful Life or The Great Escape, and a daft bit of whimsy tinged with self-awareness it is, too. One of my favorite lines oddly doesn't even get a chuckle from the canned laughter machine: Ted checks the newspaper to see if he's averted disaster and remarks that there's nothing about it in "the Catholic scandal supplement", and Dougal doing a funeral is always fun to see.

Otherwise just aimlessly doodling away, wrapping prezzies and playing GTA4, which I'm finally getting around to finishing well over a year since I actually got the damn thing.

Watching:
Farscape season 1 - the great TV catch-up begins! For me, this was once definitively described at some point in the past as "that thing with the Muppets? Fuck that shit!", though I always simply found it too alienating (in retrospect, possibly intentional) and impenetrable to want to follow. taken from the off, however, it's a decent enough distraction - if a bit top-heavy with Aussies (though that's an observation more than it is a criticism).

Dexter - aw. Shame that character had to go, but a good season.

Venture Bros - not as great as previous seasons, but then it had a lot to live up to. It's moved on from the whole 'death of the Jet Age' themes to growing its main characters beyond their launch concepts, which is an odd move, as for every Ben 10: Alien Force, there's an All Grown Up or Joey. It's working so far, but it's not especially funny or inventive this time around, though I'm willing to accept that I'm maybe just too familiar with the setup and had higher hopes than might reasonably have been fulfilled.