It's the world's lamest conspiracy

A low-key final panel - no witty soundbites and it isn't the central character of the book - but barring minor edits, the suspicion I should have redrawn years-old artwork and then doing a cover for it all, this pitch is almost in the bag.  Normal service resumes tomorrow - whatever that may be around here.

That would be really nice if it wasn't coming from someone who'd punched me in the face

Penultimate page on the comic and I'm playing Suits and Dallas catch-up while I work.
Suits has jumped the shark despite an appearance from Wendell Pierce, but Dallas is glossy trash as ever, even if it's hard to see past Larry Hagman's final turn as rattlesnake oil baron JR.  The other plots give it a good punt at getting your dander up and Mitch Pileggi and Faran Tahir always exhude an onscreen presence even if badly utilised - not that they're poorly served here, especially Pileggi's hissable panto villain Harris Ryland who I shit you not straight up gets to steal someone's child and then get JR'd by episode 3 - but Hagman steals it even when he's clearly deflecting the plot and the camera onto his co-stars.  I'm maybe imagining that there's an undercurrent of the character shifting his focus onto the well-being of his family because I'm looking for a bit of salvation and redemption for the old rotter, but either way, it's still moving to see him amble around the sets and just about do so under his own power, working until he literally could not do so any more on the role that made him.

I danced an Amish boy to death

Today I am redrawing feet because I jinxed it by mentioning them yesterday, and rewriting dialogue because me from the past was an even worse writer of things and stuff than the me of now.  Seriously, dialogue that has to exposit and infodump and still be organic is a pain in the old hole - wish I was writing them teen dramas where people look each other in the eye and say things like "your dad is the chief of police" or "you're the head of a Fortune 500 company" right to someone's face and no-one goes "Yeah, I know that - that's my life, man.  Why wouldn't I know what me or my father does for a living?"
Also I am writing blog posts and prevaricating about getting back to the writing, so it looks like a late night until I rewrite these two whole dang panels... no BS, I will probably end up redrawing them because it's easier to draw something else and then write new dialogue for those new panels.
I need to plan my work a lot better.

If voting could change anything, it would be against the law

So Rob Liefeld wants you to write him a story... an offer that has obviously attracted the expected comments about submitting stories featuring grimacing, lots of pouches and no mention of feet - oh what hilarity!  I would probably join in if (a) this wasn't a chuffing great offer to make potential writers that would get their name and work under the noses of the editorial community a lot better than small press work would, especially in the current comics climate where companies are actually making it much harder for new creators to get into the industry rather than easier, and (b) I draw pretty whack feet myself and shan't blame anyone for cutting corners there.  Amusingly, though, draw better feet than I do those pointy sock-things that you see in superhero comics that are supposed to be boots or something - just cannot fucking draw them at all, I can't get my head around what they're supposed to be, or what they look like in three dimensions.  They're mental.

Please do not turn me marrying my daughter into something ugly

Been watching: 
Lord of the Elves, which is an awful title to see onscreen - or even on the bluray box - as it looks fleetingly like Lord of the Flies, which misleads you as to what genre/specific film this might be ripping off (as most Asylum films tend to do).  The story is pure SyFy Channel cheese and it's basically Caravan Of Courage without the Ewoks, though there's a bit where Christopher Judge - still defiantly and unironically making a career playing the black dude with a spear in any old bit of tat going even if it means being the only black guy in a tribe of prehistoric Indonesians and no they do not explain what that is about - turns to face the camera and stands his ground, wielding his spear like it's going to fire lasers from the end and the music swells like David Arnold wrote it... it's an oddly charming touch for an Asylum movie, as they're usually typified by their nastiness and leanings towards shock schlock, while the setting is gorgeous, even if the film shot in a way that they somehow manage to film a panning bird's eye view of the characters running past what are clearly the only tire tracks for miles around.  The tribal chief is also really awful, though I think he's actually supposed to be - it's a strange performance and no mistake, someone would definately have noticed and said something if it wasn't deliberate.
Cheapo cheese that's not exceptional in any way, but passes the time if you don't mind it being slightly nastier than a saturday matinee romp needs to be, which the makers kind of acknowledge with really glaring cuts to some of the gore and the thing still comes in rated 12.
No-one is a lord and there are no elves, though.  Not sure what title's about.

What you call the atrocity of crazed dogs tearing a helpless fox to shreds, others call a pleasant jaunt in the park

Haha.  Oh God, there is just no saving some stuff.  The unreachable past is there for a reason.
Onward!

Noticed Colin Smith had made a post with a title that me think "the inevitable has come to pass", but oddly it is not a dissection of the latest PR fluff from DC or a catalogue of the latest bunch of scabs to work on the property, it's just a sweet cameo that I think even Mr Moore would not object to... if anyone but DC had done it.

But yes, After Watchmen is inevitable.  If anyone wants to make some money, I suggest patenting that name and squatting on it for a while, because that is some easy beans when DC come around in year or two looking to get busy.

Rudy shot two families and a goat in Iraq, and he wasn't even there for the war

Ugly inking is ugly.  What can you do?

I have been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again.  If you don't know it, it is a videogame set in a fictionalised American state that is a portmanteau of California and Nevada and the game is one amazing bit of design even today, mere months away from being two generations of console technology removed from its release and I am still finding new things to see in it.  It was succeeded by Grand Theft Auto 4, a game I have yet to sit down and finish because it is pretty unambitious and banal in comparison, stripping away all the things that the series had logically progressed towards in order to create "realism", which I find hilarious because "realism" is a band aid no game outside pc flight simulators really wants to go picking at.
I suppose I have been thinking about verisimilitude in various ways, but this is the one that grabs me the most if I think of where the pursuit of realism gets in the way of things, and having to sit down and write an all-ages story that is theoretically set in "reality" without getting bogged down in the details, I really hate that I can't just throw exposition at the page and call it dialogue even though it's a necessary evil because it's just the kind of thing that takes me out of a story and I work from the assumption that the reader is at least as smart as I am and if I wouldn't buy it then they probably won't either.

And it is blimming crippling me, here - how do writers at the CW just churn this shit out like they don't give a fuck?  They're amazing people.  They have to be.
Anyway, dialogue is hard, is what I am saying.