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.

Curiosity is my sweet tooth. Knowledge is my candy.

My rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager rattled along nicely, though it became apparent that the problems of the show are not something we can retroactively lay at the feet of certain producers just because they went on to make Star Trek: Enterprise, but because there is clearly a struggle between two different Trek universes going on behind the scenes and it was clear that the producer who eventually got kicked off the show they had created (Jeri Taylor) was the one pushing for expanding Trek beyond the rut it had been dug into with later TNG seasons, with episodes like The Thaw and Mortal Coil attempting new approaches to stale material in a way that would later become the norm for sci-fi in shows like the remade Battlestar Galactica, while Coda (written by Taylor) even goes so far outside the Trek wheelhouse as to establish that Captain Janeway's unseen arch-nemesis is the actual effing Grim Reaper, who follows her around eating the souls of those who die in her wake and who is 100 percent for-reals-canon waiting for her like a slavering wolf at the end of her days.
There was hope that maybe I'd misremembered a lot of the show's problems or at least exaggerated them because it wasn't Shakespeare, but nope - what potential there was - and there's a lot of it in the beginning - is not so much eroded over time as it is hammered from very early in proceedings into a more banal shape than it should be, such as the showdown between a 16 wheel truck and a spaceship piloted by a time-traveling archeologist - who's just escaped a compound of gun-toting survivalists under armed siege by the FBI - that involves a laser battle that ends with people jumping away from explosions and this sequence of events is somehow one of the most boring and unexciting things you will ever lay eyes upon.  You can still see the cracks where brilliance tries and fails to shine through the brick wall of middle-of-the-road mediocrity that defined the show - Nemesis, Living Witness - but by and large the struggle to make this a classic-style Trek show about people in extraordinary circumstances rising to present the best in themselves rather than the worst is instead about a bunch of unexceptionally exceptional individuals - all equally flawless and without character - encountering minor inconveniences on their drive home.
And then Seven of Nine's big stupid boobs arrive and it somehow manages to go even more to shit.

(TBC)

Long story short: they found me

Luckily I got naff all done today so it doesn't look so bad when I just repost old doodles to help me fill out the "pages" list on the right as I suppose they technically count as "things I have written."

This kind of drama's the reason I quit the Ohio State football team

Right out of grinding down one pitch to submission standard and straight into another - because I am basically a machine.  And because in three months' time it'll either be a drawing gig, or I won't have to worry about coming with ways to fill blog posts for a while.  Either way, it's all good.

Now excuse me while I go upstairs and make love with my shirt on

Been four weeks since I last blogged, so I'm down to pasting last month's sketchbook again and hoping it looks like I do actually draw things now and then and don't just spend thirty days arguing about balloon placements with editors I am increasingly convinced are more drunk than I am.  The sketchbook is, as usual, brain farts, character sketches, and what looks to me like an ongoing - and losing - battle to portray human anatomy - I'm thinking I should maybe just give up on that one and start making OEL manga.

They baint pretty but they knows the sea

I have no idea why I was watching On The Beach today, I'm not on any kind of quest to watch as many depressing post-apocalyptic movies as I can or anything like that, but this one was a bit more jolly than most, even if the overuse of the tune to Waltzing Matilda made me feel like I was stuck in a lift with the Rod Stewart version of Tom Trubert's Blues for two hours.

Don't bother running - you are already dead

The main thing is that I don't know what I'm doing.

Watching: The Day After - which is scientifically provable to be funnier than the Hangover.

After Africa, being dead was the easiest way to stay alive

No pr0n for blogwatchers today, just random sketches run up while watching the horrendously smug Fairly legal.

Oh Manga Studio - I'm sure you're great, but intuitive? Not so much.
Pretty sure I'm supposed to be learning how to use that anyway... Hm.

Alright, I want you to go outside, take off those helmets and dig your own graves with them

I have no idea why I was Farscape sketching today, but you can't argue with something filling a post-shaped hole, finished or not. Anyway, that up there's supposed to be the goth lass.

Tomorrow: better filler. Possibly.

Superstitious century, didn't time go slow?

Watching: Human Target (alright, but a bit downhill since last season), Clone Wars (I can take it or leave it), The Car (alright horror from the 1970s widely regarded as terrible), 90210 (usually background fodder while I work, for some reason I actually found myself paying attention to this and it wasn't pleasant for me), Modern Family (funny, not afraid to be sappy, and lacking that smug air that makes me want to get on a plane and punch the cast of Cougar Town), and The Flash (a 1990 superhero tv show that - good god - had costumes, silly names, supervillains, death traps, goofy plots and took itself seriously - wouldn't go so far as to say it was good, all the same...).

Reading: A study of the male psyche in the 1990s urban environment when faced with the dichotomy of modern societal models and the ingrained but outdated moral values of the traditional family unit, as highlighted by the contrast between rational and instrumental action here represented by traditionally-held gender norms. That's right, I have mostly been reading Danny Fingeroth and Mike Manly's Darkhawk, and it is a fascinating cultural artifact that I think needs re-evaluation, and damn it, it's not like the blog can't do with some filler rather than me hastily scrawling anything at all in Photoshop most days just so I can make the obligatory daily post.


I can't promise it will be a good evaluation, or even a correct one, but I simply cannot argue with free blog filler when it presents itself.

I had an erotic dream about Henry Rollins last night and I'm straight as an arrow

Today, a request from a younger relative:

Take that, Freddy you dumb knacker. That'll teach you to devote most of your Halloween to things other than attending to your blog so you have to come in late and get scribbling! Like you have for the last week, oddly...

"But it wasn't MY FAULT!"

Still spending too much time on Playstation, so only a quick sketch for the blog this time of the eeeeevil Reverend from Stephen King's Silver Bullet, one of my fave werewolf movies and I reckon an appropriate subject given the season. I thought about doing a themed week of posts about werewolves, so maybe tomorrow I'll attempt to illustrate the divine narrative majesty of Werewolf In A Women's Prison, which is a real film and one I only watched because it had werewolves in it - which nobody believes when I tell them.
But in fairness why would they?

Ah nuuu yood say daht.

Curse you, 15 minute time limit for sketches! I haven't even finished the figure, never mind backgrounds.

Watching: Burn Notice, CSI,

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.

Oh, Manga Studio - why can't we be friends?

Watching Quatermass by the bucketful of late, and while the BBC stuff has dated, the films still have rough-edged B-movie charm, though I don't like Brian Donlevy's portrayal of Quatermass as he comes off as too much of a cock, in particular with the final shot of Quatermass (1957) where he marches off mechanically stating he's going "to start again" sounding like a threat from a Victor Frankenstein or a Herbert West. Likewise, the Martians in the cinematic version of Quatermass and the Pit look a bit poor compared to their televisual counterparts, though I'm probably biased as the Andre Morell Quatermass - for me - remains definitive.

The live broadcast of the adapted and remade Quatermass Experiment was alright, too, but felt a bit ephemeral given the 'shot live' gimmick and the fact that it's the third version of the story, though by default it's my favorite adaptation given the missing episodes from the Reginald Tate version leave an incomplete picture of the original, and Donlevy played the role as too unlikeable for me to totally warm to the film version, particularly the abrupt and seemingly pointless ending where they just kill the beast and move on with their day seeming hateful compared to the Prof Q of other adaptations convincing the last vestige of humanity within the beast to sacrifice itself. There's both heart and science in that resolution that to me embodies the optimism at the core of Quatermass, in that even if we're the product of Martian genetic engineering, what we've made of our world - for better or worse - is our own doing and as individuals we ultimately act for the better of us all.
Michael bay should totally adapt these.

Watching: V, Quatermass (lots of)

A pic of TKT supervillain Tyranny, a war criminal's brain in the body of a T-Rex.

Watching: Glee, Parenthood

Seeing as I'm still drawing robots that I don't want to spoiler by pasting pics on the blog, instead here's a quick snapshot of Nancy Drew getting along famously with the animal kingdom as usual.

The story behind this sketch is a scene from the first Nancy Drew story, which is inexplicably described as a "mystery" novel despite being about the search for a copy of a will and having the title 'The Secret of the Old Clock'. SPOILER ALERT - it's in the old clock.
It was a choice between the exciting boat scene where she runs out of gas and floats there in the lake for a few hours, the blood-pumping car scene where she drives around and gets lost, or the frantic shopping scene where she haggles over a dress, but I choose this scene in the end because it lends itself to a vaguely amusing image of Nancy about to be horrifically scarred in an animal attack, as around forty pages in a good mauling would have helped up the pace of a rather sedentary novel about a nosy cow who wanders about until mysteries solve themselves. I guess this was what passed for empowering girlyism in 1930, though I'm not entirely sure how it caught on as a series of books, nor how it eventually led to women in the army and stuff.

Watching: Barbarian Queen 2 - though I have no clue at all why this is the case. Am I watching this out of ghoulish 'played by the woman Phil Spector murdered' curiosity, or because the legendarily terrible Death Racers hasn't finished downloading just yet? Whatever the slim rationale for subjecting myself to it, this is pretty bad stuff whose reputation as a camp classic is a little baffling as it's just the aimless kind of bad, rather than the aggressively terrible to the point of funniness bad, or the self-aware and knowing kind of bad.
There's a bratty princess played by someone a bit old to be playing princesses at this stage of her life and career who ends up running away to be a barbarian (while also simultaneously being a queen - do you see?) and a really drippy and traitorous prince who for some reason is rewarded for being pretty ineffectual (and in league with the dudes who murdered the old king) with the love of the bratty and not entirely convincing Barbarian (and Queen) of the title, and there's also an evil little girl who seems to have somehow wandered off the set of her parentally-approved starring turn as a pre-teen bitch in a mid-80s summer matinée about orphans into the set of a no-budget softcore porno but plays the same part regardless and makes the best of a bad situation by joining in with the torture of topless women and insisting grown men show her physical affection if they want to be her husband a few years down the line. Then she wishes to be older so men will want to have sex with her and this is what actually comes to pass and wow but it could only get less creepy from there.
(Seriously, young girls in grown women's bodies is my all-time favorite super-creepy trope, probably epitomised best by the scene in 13 Going On 30 where a young girl wakes up as Jennifer Garner and then runs around her apartment being chased by Garner's naked boyfriend - because there's nothing funnier in tween wish-fulfillemnt comedies than scenes in which 13 year old girls are scared shitless they're going to be raped)
Barbarian Queen is pretty darn awful, but to be fair I wasn't under any illusions going in that this was probably the only reason I was watching it. I can't think of any standout awful scenes to hold up for ridicule, either, and that's probably the most damning criticism I can think of. It was on, I watched it, then it was over, and once I stop writing this blog entry about it, I'll pretty much just move on with my life and never think of it again.

Bah! Hate time-limit sketching, but it does loosen up the creative juices. I'm probably imagining that the sketch of a giggly girl looks ruder than I'd intended, though - dirty mind, me.

Watching: Community, CSI:NY, Bones, Secret Life of the American Teenager, The Deep End