I just said literally when I meant figuratively, like a crazy person

The culture wheel has turned since Runaways first appeared in comics form in 2002 wielding its open disdain for its own genre like an obnoxious teenager devoid of self-awareness in a bit of meta-commentary from creator Bryan K Vaughan that was sadly lost on the title's vocal online fanbase who - despite reading a superhero comic set in a superhero universe about people with superhero names and superpowers who fought supervillains - would regularly insist that "Runaways is not a superhero comic" even when the writer expressly wrote Spider-Man and Wolverine into the stories.  Runaways is a superhero comic, but part of its gag was that the characters didn't consider themselves superheroes despite doing all the things superheroes did, like fighting supervillains and vampires, traveling in time, battling shape-changing aliens, etc, and you would have to take an incredibly shallow surface reading of the material to not see any of this...
Anyway, the second season of Marvel's Runaways is not very good, which is my polite way of saying it is bad.
A below-average teen show with the word "Marvel's" bolted onto it, it's roughly 95% people talking or shouting at each other and then the other 5% is something happening in CGI or slow motion.  The straightforward originating premise of kids discovering their parents are supervillains so they Run Away from home has been convoluted with unnecessary backstories for characters who worked best as archetypes, an approach that just serves to reinforce that there are no new ideas in play*, and somehow, despite the sometimes-laughable lengths that the makers have gone to in order to divorce the show from anything vaguely superhero-y, the characters often just look outright ridiculous in a way they wouldn't if they were dressed in modern superhero outfits.
The superhero genre has been  rehabilitated since the Runaways comics first landed, and not only have all the things that made it unique since become standard, but we've had 7 years of a tv show about Green Arrow, which has spun off four years of the Flash, three years of Legends of Tomorrow, and will shortly be joined by a Batwoman series that will be showing alongside the third season of Supergirl, while in cinemas, Marvel have to date made 22 films and roughly 30 billion dollars, and spun off Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, The Punisher, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Agent Carter tv shows.  This would, by any objective evaluation, be the absolute worst time to base a tv show on the idea that superheroes as a concept are stupid and lame - and yet here Runaways comes anyway, peddling its shame at its own genre like Smallville was still a thing.
And what's with the synthwave OST?

It's a genre utilised in evoking the 1980s, but how does that relate to a television show about the post-millennial generation?  I could postulate about how it might be a means to reference the decade that spawned the media which provided the inspiration for the original comics, or suggest that it's a means to channel the post-internet world where all media is available to be consumed at all times and thus genres become meaningless and children pine for the artifacts of cultures that lived and died before they were born but really, I think we all know that's a stretch and it's far more likely it's just a stylistic choice that has no meaning beyond its current and likely fleeting appeal, which is as goo a paradigm for this show as any.  I am implying that Runaways is bad television.
Let's face it, though: if it was good I wouldn't be watching it because I apparently only like dreadful tv.

It does, however, meet the high standards demanded of 13 year old television viewers - by which I mean characters occasionally say the word "hashtag" and the nerd character says something related to Star Wars - but I admire the show's commitment to the rejection of binaries both in its diverse casting, and in its firmly and oft-affirmed belief that the show doesn't have to suck or blow and can, in fact, do both at once.


* Worse still, existing characters from the comics are expanded upon to become what can only be described as racist stereotypes, with the most obvious example being all the black characters having links to gang culture and crime, or the only Asian characters facing off in a martial arts battle, or the only Latino character defeating an opponent by speaking Spanish - and no, I am not making that up.

In all the rush we never got a chance to talk about my balls

Re-watching Rogue One, it's hard to know how much of it is an actual mess and how much I am reading as a mess because I know that a lot of behind-the-scenes shenanigans went on as the producers inexplicably panicked at the last minute that they would not make a cubic fuckton of money from a film with the words "Star Wars" in the title even when it has Darth F Vader in it.
But Rogue One is certainly episodic - in a manner reminiscent of that wave of cheap space operas churned out across the world in the wake of the first Star Wars trilogy that concentrated on the escapades of a group of adventurers in various sci-fi locales before they regrouped for the final battle against the movie's central protagonist, a formulae seen in the likes of Space Raiders, Star Crash and Ice Pirates, and a bit more carefree than the typical 3-act structure usually seen in sci-fi and action movies of the time.  The Force Awakens attempted to channel that same kind of narrative structure, best seen in the hentai monster sequence that doesn't actually serve much storytelling purpose beyond distracting you from the lazy coincidences used to weld Han Solo and Chewbacca into a story in which they don't really have any place, but Rogue One excels at recreating this kind of cheap-ass, anything-goes adventure - it's just really hard to see it because the film is so damned well-made and everything is filtered through the post-millenial grimdark lens of uber-seriousness to the point that not even the clumsy slapstick and catty wisecracks of a comedy robot breaks through - seriously, it is a film that has a wisecracking comedy robot front and center and yet the big takeaway from it is likely how grim and portentous it all is.
After the The Force Awakens' cherry-picking of elements limited to the original trilogy of movies and - given the anti-Prequel /anti-Lucas slant of some marketing and subsequent de-canonising of decades' worth of spin-off media - calculated effort to convince a generation that this film and this alone continued the adventures of their heroes, the Star Wars universe (by design) felt a lot smaller and more empty than it ever had, but Rogue One reverses that.  It adds Easter egg after Easter egg, from cameos of Original Trilogy stalwarts and backing characters to the cast of tv's Rebels without discriminating against the non-movie sections of the canon - this universe feels lived-in again for the first time in a long while, and I am thankful to Rogue One for that, even if I suspect I'll never rewatch it half as many times as I have other Star Warses.
...and so to The Last Jedi trailer, which dropped today.

I am genuinely struggling with how underwhelmed I am, although that could just be my general disappointment with The Force Awakens coupled with an inescapable feeling that much as I thought these new characters were okay in one movie, they've already had their chance to tell their story and now it's done.  I mean, Rey's character arc so focused on "the Call To Adventure" - the first step of the Hero's Journey (AKA "Screenwriting For Dummies: Chapter 1") - to the point that it became the entirety of her arc and when she accepted that call she completed her journey as a character.  I'd prefer to move on from Rey, but obviously Star Wars producers - as we learned with Rogue One - are cautious when it comes to spending 300 million dollars, so I guess we're getting a "white people learn them some mystic arts" movie now, which I guess is as good a mid-80s genre to plunder as the sci-fi romp is.  Even so, I think my hopes are more pinned on the next Star Wars Anthology movie than the latest entry in the increasingly tired Skywalker Dynasty.

You could do with a two day heroin nap

Well, a man's gotta do something with his time, so back we go to the old comics drawing, seeing as it's April and I've only drawn a grand total of 14 pages this year.  I wish I'd known ahead of time that depression impacts on the speed that you can work, as I would have given it a miss and instead made a go of that career I nearly had.  There's probably a joke in there somewhere with a punchline like "I'd be the only comics artist depressed and worried about their career" but that would mean trivialising my PAAAAAAAIIIINN.

Monday 28th September 2009

Bit of a slow day for telly, as I'm still catching up with my backlog of shows and trying to squeeze in the first season of ER, too. Alien Trespass is pretty duff despite starring Robert Patrick, who I normally like in stuff, and Merlin 'something something something' starring Baltar out of the BSG remake in the title role was unsurprisingly utter pish to the point I've forgotten the name of the actual film.
Reasonable amount of drawing done today, though, so that's something.

Thursday 24th September 2009

Minus color and a couple of white-out clean-ups, that's pages 6-7 in the bag. Not a stunning pace considering I started last monday, but I am at least sitting down and getting into the work. Possibly once I cut the booze, late risings and lie-ins till 1 playing Oblivion and mainlining cheap energy drinks I'll get more done in a day, though for the moment I'm enjoying the slower pace of life away from the routine of a regular job.

As regards Oblivion: good game, but I still prefer Fallout. The main quest is far too easy and most of the fun is in the side missions like the Dark brotherhood assassinations or the Thieves Guild tealeafing, though I've been told that level 10 is quite high for someone running through the game and not deliberately leveling-up - I suppose it's entirely possible that the game version of me may be just as awesome as the real thing, but it makes things too easy, and while that's great for getting laid back, sometimes I want my games to be a little exciting and frustrate me now and then. Only a little, mind.

Monday 21st September 2009

Just a quick post to make my daily quota.

Watching: Crash s1, Leverage s1, Drop Dead Diva
Listening: Podcasts! 4th Letter, Small Press Big Mouth and War Rocket Ajax

Tuesday 25th August 2009

Thumbnailing the last of my 'clear-up' jobs as a break from the current (penultimate) one that's basically a 'one camera' story over six pages and a bit samey to draw for too long, or possibly I'm just being arty-precious or something about having to sit my arse down and focus on one thing for any length of time. It probably has more to do with the next job being what amounts to a lifelong ambition - drawing four pages of bear-related massacre for something other than my own amusement.

Sunday 23rd August 2009

I don't know what shames me more - that I willingly watched Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: the Movie, or that I enjoyed it, post-production sound and visual edits to the kung-fu and all. Well, maybe not that last bit, but the nostalgia factor for the movies - tosh or not - that I and my mates sat through for the odd decent bit of kickery punchery is good to experience once in a while. We put up with a LOT of crappy movies during our kung-fu phase (because everyone goes through a kung-fu phase), our tolerance even extending to a brain-amnesty for the films of Albert Pyun, the non-budget Segals, the Eastern Van Dammes, the careers of Cynthia Rothrock, Gary Daniels, Mark 'Iron Chef' Dacascos - all glorious to the growing mind of the pre-interweb kung-fu fan who's willing to overlook their craptitude for want of anything else to watch, but not something to revisit too often in adulthood, or what laughably passes for that in a household where a sizable portion of the living room floor is taken up by Playstation peripherals shaped like guns, guitars and drum kits.
Still doodling away, aimlessly as it's the weekend. Come the weekdays and we're back to the deadlined material. Gettin' closer, that deadline...

Sunday 26th July 2009

Watching: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Smackdown

Sunday 19th July 2009

Watching: Race To Witch Mountain, Virtuality, The Philantropist, 10 Things I Hate About You, Secret Life of the American Teenager
Reading: Dredd "Bad Manners"
Drawing: Medieval villages and Kirby dots

Wednesday 15th July 2009

Medieval villages... hmm. Not sure about my research here.

Sunday 12th July 2009

Happy fun time in Cookstown as the bangers and firecrackers begin their seasonal barrage that'll last for the next few months. Gotta love marching season.
Finished off talky heads page. It suddenly occurred that if I could stay away from looking at pictures of illiterate cats on the internet or going off and playing videogames for all of five minutes, such a page only takes a few hours to run off, rather than half one day, half when next I can be bothered.
Watching: Daria, Royal Pains, Secret Life of the American Teenager, Harper's Island - called the killer after all.

Friday 3rd July 2009

Thursday 2nd July 2009

Day off work today, so I caught up with some potential submission material. Now we're into the early evening and it's time for gym, shower, lots of gaming and then a vague notion of actually finishing up work I've promised to other people.
Kidding - that shit's gettin' done, yo.

Watching: Royal Pains, Weeds
Playing: Sudoku (thus far)

Wednesday 3rd July 2009

Hmm... Trying to break out of my comfort zone and learn to draw new things on demand, I'm beginning to think I've bitten off more than I can chew with a short story for FutureQuake Press about a time-traveller trying to destroy organised religion, as by page three I have to draw Abu ‘Ali Mansur Tāriqu l-Ḥākim, who's an 11th century caliph and imam, and it only occurred to me while thumbnailing the pages and seeking out reference that some things - such as devout muslim leaders who discourage the creation of images of their likeness - might be hard to find visual reference for, as might the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before it was destroyed in the 11th century. Ah well - this must be where that 'imagination' thing I've read about comes into play, but I don't think it'll catch on.

Watching: the season of ATHF I didn't realise had just been shown - hurrah!
Reading: Power Pack Classic, Captain America
Playing: Sudoku, Fallout 3

snapsot of a weekend

Obligatory daily update, and not much to report beyond the usual saturday routine of sleeping in late on a glorious morning only to wake up later so I can go into town and get to the bank and find the weather's turned to bloomin' rain. Then gym to watch me programmes, which are admittedly thin on the ground with the end of the US season, but I still have anime to catch up with, ranging from the under-appreciated Turn A Gundam (an entry in the giant robot genre inspired by the Studio Ghibli visual aesthetic) to the tweener fantasy Magical Witch Squad Alice (a Harry Potter-influenced cross-dimensional adventure that turned up in the west as Tweeny Witches, and features visuals veering from functional to exceptional alongside a great musical score). After the gym, back home for dinner and a lie down to recover from all that effort and beery haze for an hour or two while I catch up with my Star Wars rewatch to coincide with Phantom Menace's 10 year anniversary (Lucas isn't credited much as a director, but he's workmanlike enough across both action scenes and drama that he's actually ahead of other 'event movie' directors like Michael Bay who lose it in busy sequences - the prequels aren't as bad as I thought first time around), then off down the cinema for the latest Terminator, although in the end I didn't bother with that and decided to have a wee scribble instead.


Apart from that, I just wandered about, occasionally sitting down for tv catch-up - if Henry is the killer in Harper's Island and the end of episode 8 isn't a bluff, I totally called that in episode 1.