Watching: Justified, Life Unexpected, Lost, TNA

Back in business drawing freaky Asimov-style space robots (according to SFX magazine). I tried to read some Asimov on and off, but shorts and the first Foundation are about as far as I got. I thought it could be a little dry in places, but Asimov is a master of the high concept and he can pretty much cruise on that once he gets going.

Watching: The Pacific, Cold Case, Human Target, Clone Wars, Home and Away
Listening: War Rocket Ajax

Bryan excels himself by fixing a problem that stumps even Wacom scienticians! But still can't fix their damned on-again-off-again drivers that don't seem able to register in Vista for any protracted period of time - computer on, computer off seems the only way to do that job, but hey, it's not like I was doing anything else on my Easter weekend anyway so I could totally afford to waste two days making something work like it's fucking supposed to.

Watching:
Vampire Diaries - waaaaaaaaaaaaank.
Kamen Rider W - aural and visual gibberish from the Japs that I lap up indiscriminately like a dog licks puke from a bus shelter floor on a sunday morning. It's no Kabuto, but Double/W has its own charm here and there, even if it does serve as a helpful insight to the Nipponese subconscious with its youth-obsessed cast, scary women, and very, very close bonding between male leads that can only lead to one of two things: they get angry with each other or they make out, and this being a kids show they pretty much much just end up shouting untranslatable concepts at each other before bumping fists, putting on a slightly camp hat and accompanying wrist gesture and then beating someone up under a bridge like trannies fighting over a bag of chips.
Stargate: Universe - speaking as someone who sat through every episode of Babylon 5, I can safely say I've never seen a tv show quite as far up its own arse as this one (though to be fair, I did give up on Caprica at the end of the first episode for being creepy, pretentious shit). The basic gist is that SGU is a grittily realistic take on the concept of a multicultural crew transported to the other side of the universe by a magic door created by jellyfish aliens when they used to look human and which was instrumental in defining the political face of the galaxy after a lengthy war between snakes in people's brains posing as gods who were fighting Lego spiders and the actual gods of Norse myth (who were secretly the Roswell aliens) on two fronts before they were beaten by McGuyver and a guy who was trying to act like James Spader and failing to even be that bad an actor. Thinking about it, there's no real reason a tv show can't be straight-faced and deliberately lacking in self-awareness to disguise that all its plots are lifted from other sources - oh wait, yes there is: it can't if it's a spin-off of a spin-off of a movie and all of the parent properties were dripping in self-awareness to the point it was sometimes painful because at that stage all you're doing is stripping the franchise of its affability in the hope of disguising that you're out of ideas, and SGU is charmless, and most definately out of ideas given the deus ex "Begbie comes back" device used in this episode. I'm beginning to think I only watch this show to annoy myself.

Silver Banshee made an appearance on Smallville:

and was quite good except it was appearing in an episode of Smallville and by that measure became probably the funniest thing I've seen on TV this week - until I saw this:


No sketches today - my £900 Cintiq has turned from a monitor upon which you can draw into a 'no picture' tablet like you can buy out of Tesco for 25 quid, and this is apparantly less a quirky problem than it is an inevitability, which Wacom don't seem to be going out of their way to tell potential buyers. Which is nice of them. Actually, it's not as good as the tablets for 25 quid from Tesco, as the shape of the tablet's response area is different from most of the monitor settings, and the buttons on the side have no functionality, so by my reckoning, I've only wasted £910 I didn't have then and don't have now.

Well, that was a great way to spend an entire day - removing a virus from my pc that's left the damn thing running noticeably slower. I'm a bit stumped by how these viruses are supposed to work: they download these icons onto your desktop called 'Yourporn' or 'HotDonkeyCocks.net', and I'm a bit confused why people would think the response to this would be "This guy's gone to a lot of trouble to hack my pc, disable access to the Task Manager, Registry and System Restore, and fucked my internet connection and file association protocols, and even now I've finally got rid of the fucking thing the sound on my machine is gone, so I think I'll reward his tenacity by visiting these porn links and giving him my money."

So now I'm sketching for little reason other than it's the end of the day and I'll get pretty much nothing practical done now but I want to fiddle with the pc for a bit to see how it handles stuff. I could draw Godzilla forever, I think that's apparant from his periodic appearances on my Deviantart page, but I can never really remember what the big fucker looks like apart from the fact that he's grey instead of green in all but the very latest (post-millennial) movies, but I've coloured him green anyway, because the cartoon was awesome.

Reading: an oddly disappointing crop of Marvel titles from the pull list
X-Men: Second Coming 1 - apart from Wolverine, who I quite wanted to read more of but couldn't get my head around most of his own series as it just seemed to be this ongoing retcon clusterfuck about him finding out stuff about his past that wasn't true two pages later, I didn't care for the X-books much as I didn't care for most of the Marvel stuff that trickled over to the UK in the 1980s/1990s, barring Power Pack, which was reprinted in the back of Return of the Jedi and Thundercats in little four-page chapters chopped from giant-sized debut issues appearing in the states, so it was actually two months into the story before I realised it was a fucking superhero comic and until then I'd been enjoying what seemed like an adaptation of a mid-80s kids' movie about aliens - hey, I was a 2000ad fan and that kind of thing appealed to me. Anyway, for the most part I didn't think much of the Marvel stuff and X-Men's impenetrable, overly-complicated interconnected plotting and dull characters (seriously, has Cyclops had a single defining character moment ever?) seemed a macrocosm of my issues with Marvel's output. It was just this dull, money-chomping franchise that seemed to dominate the superhero market, intermittently throwing out these densely-worded crossovers where nothing much happened except someone shouted, the X-Men talked about teaming up to fight some menace, Cyclops shot his eyebeams at something that was usually off-panel and then at the end some villain I'd never heard of got a splash page to himself so he could tell his minions or the empty room that something bad were about to 'appen, and lordy, but Second Coming is exactly that all over again.
Basically, The X-Men are sitting around talking about how the mutants are in trouble as a race (which they've been doing not only for the last few years since most mutants lost their powers in a magical deus ex status quo changer, but since the mid-80s), then Cyclops shoots his eyebeams, the X-Men team up, they fight some people with guns, then there's a splash page reveal of a guy who's telling his minions something bad is going to 'appen. That is literally everything that happens, and unsurprisingly it's pretty dull, which is not something you should be saying about a story where people fight across the rooftops of moving traffic. I suppose it services those who want nothing more than just this, but as with anything X-Men related that isn't Grant Morrison's run on the title, I'm not sure what's here for non-fans.
Fantastic Four 274 - I literally read this only because the horse aliens from Power Pack had a cameo - I'm not joking - as the title has gone off the boil for me in the last few issues after a decent start to John Hickman's run, but it's perfectly serviceable fantasy adventure if you don't mind stuff that's long on talk and short on action or character development that'll be retconned in a year's time anyway. It's high concept stuff, certainly, but there's only so long you can present high concepts one after another without it coming across as dry (though as with anything, there are exceptions) or unrelatable, and that's the wall Hickman's hitting here. It's a pity, as going by his opening story he has the potential to top John Byrne's defining run on the title, but he's taking his time getting anywhere at all.

Watching: WWE RAW (goodbye, Shawn! ), Bones, The Middle, Modern Family

Drawing:

Space robots in the distant future for Omnivistascope in a slightly cartoony style. It's actually the fourth part, of an ongoing story, but only the second part that I've drawn. I had to follow on from another artist (the talented, distinctive and slightly daunting Dunk Nimmo) and sadly didn't learn my lesson from a previous attempt to emulate another artist that resulted in the abominable Love Is Hell for FutureQuake. Whereas Dunk has a clean and bold style, I'm a bloody scribbler, an inclination that's caused me headaches with Babble as I try to stick to a single line weight and no hatching for an entire graphic novel for reasons that I can no longer actually remember, which is why the blog may be short on any kind of running commentary on how my work may or may not be evolving and long on random rants about crappy cable channels on the other side of the Atlantic watched by no-one that has ever known the touch of a woman.
Anyway, I think the point of this post was that I'm drawing in a slightly different manner than usual, which is probably good for me.

Watching: Parenthood, Trauma, 90210 (lesbian kiss - guess this show isn't coming back next season), TNA, Melrose Place, Ugly Betty (gayboy kisses - I hope this show is coming back next season)