Science is my pie

Chapter 17 may be read HERE, though Dredd's hand is still wonky in the lettered version.
You will note that I struggle so much at drawing in the space available that things often pop out of panels, and that I continue to try drawing things in triangle-y ways.

Chapter 18 may be read HERE.  I really wished I'd left some of those SFX to Dave.

I just can't stand it when good things happen to people I used to love

As we're very near the 32nd anniversary of the publication of the first issue of Marvel UK's War Cars, I thought I'd dig out my old issues to see if they were as bloody terrible as I remembered - oh sorry, anniversaries are supposed to be celebratory, aren't they?  Well when you're anniversarying a 32 year-old UK comic based on toys that in the end were never released outside Asia, maybe that just isn't possible, The Internet.
Although to be entirely fair, it's not without some positive attributes - the paper stock is not as bad as I thought it would be, and the staples are still intact after all these years.

The toys themselves had no background mythology or context for any supposed conflict or tension that would force the blue team (sports cars that transformed into robots) and the red team (dune buggies that transformed into spiders) to fight each other, so the holes had to be filled in by Marvel editorial staff and writers on the fly, who apparantly took some box art of the teams racing against a background of a nuclear explosion literally and made the story about a series of races across a post-apocalyptic Earth, so it's like Hunger Games, if Hunger Games had Transformers in it and was also Death Race.

It may surprise you to learn that there's not very much on the internet about a comic from three decades ago that no-one bought or gave a poop about, but apparently the franchise was originally called Car Wars to cash in on the cultural cache of the Star Wars name.  It was quickly retitled War Cars, however, to avoid the litigation that nearly befell the theatrically-released pilot of Battlestar Galactica (which all good nerds will know was originally called "Star Worlds" before hastily having "Saga of" added to the title to foil Lucas' vicious legal department), though the change came too late for the UK manufacturers of the toys, who had the name emblazoned on everything from box art to sticker albums, all of which had to be dumped in an English coalmine by Stadium UK, the licence-holder for the toys in the western market who went bankrupt shortly after, leaving Marvel to sell a comic based on toys no-one had heard of and most likely never would.  The villains being referred to as "reds" (in reference to the colour of their vehicles) was not unnoticed by then-popular communist Arthur Scargill (if you're under 30 and reading this, he was sort of the Russell Brand of his day), and - on top of a coalmine being closed down specifically to be used as landfill space for the toys - was taken as evidence of a campaign against trade unions, prompting him to denounce the comic in a newsletter that caused the book to be boycotted by working class families across the UK, leading to the only moment in popular culture when War Cars actually entered the mainstream, after Ben Elton made a joke that more copies of the comic were burned in the street by angry adults than were bought by joyful children.

To put it mildly, War Cars was not a hit, and copies of the comic are so rare that they often go for stupid prices on eBay.  Seriously - 32 pounds for this?  The effing thing's got dog ears and someone's already done the word search and maze puzzles, not to mention some kid's coloured-in the illustrations for the text story.

Scanned from a copy described on eBay as "near mint condition" - MY ASS - this is the first episode of the strip as it appeared in the comic, not just a whopping 4 pages of original content exclusive to the UK market, but in colour, too, so Marvel UK were clearly planning on War Cars being a major title to have made this much effort.  The reprint material typical of the time that pads out the rest of the book is stuff like Killraven and an adaptation of Planet of the Apes by European writer/artist Ernő Zórád - that was probably reprinted dozens of times in the English market by that point - which keeps the post-apocalyptic theme going, alongside overly-aggressive editorial input from the (presumably fictional) "Sargent Wheels", who despised "the reds" and seemed to be some kind of talking scooter, just in case you ever forgot it was the 1980s.
I'll see if I can dig out some more issues to scan in later blog posts, as I am pretty sure I have at the very least got all the episodes of the first story arc to hand.  I imagine it's something we can all look forward to.

I'm a strong 8 in LA and a solid 10 everywhere else

Chapter 16 can be read HERE.  I am pretty sure that, as with chapter 12, I have misjudged the overall tone and ventured into slapstick territory here.  Tried to do a sort of triangular layout in the first panel to lead the eye across the action, but ran afoul of the limited amount of horizontal space available to me, so tried the same thing to a lesser extent in the third panel - originally that sound effect was much bigger and connected the two figures, but I reduced the size because it made it look like it was a thunderclap or something.

Big Bob's in the back and I think it's Hug O'Clock

Chapter 8 with its laissez faire approach to continuity and sequential storytelling may be read HERE.

Chapter 9 - including wonky crab-like hands for which the window of opportunity to make a Jeremy Beadle reference that remains topical is fading with every passing day thanks to the relentless march of time - can be read HERE.  Say what you like about Beadle,  but he didn't trade in mean-spirited humor, did a lot for charity, and he wasn't a nonce.

Chapter 10 can be read HERE, though fair warning the characters in the lettered version are still stick figures.  Still struggling with drawing what I want at this size and resolution...

Chapter 11 and attendant ill-advised attempts at both high and low angles can be read HERE.

Chapter 12 in which I misjudge the tone as slapstick comedy can be read HERE.

Chapter 13 where I try and fail to create a tangible visual reference to the film by getting the characters pointing the wrong way and then forget to draw pavements can be read HERE.  In my defence, I did at least manage to replicate the visual effect in the film of Karl Urban's face being eaten by the helmet.

Chapter 14 where I go super-original with a picture of Dredd pointing a gun at the reader that has clearly been the result of poor visual research can be found HERE.

Chapter 15 was described thusly: "I have no idea what is going on" by the guy that wrote it and can be read HERE.

Oh good, you found the vodka

Chapter 5 can be read HERE.  Note the absence of any kind of traffic in panel 2, as around this point I was becoming aware that between the resolution and the need for dialogue balloons, it might not be a great idea to add too much visual clutter that wouldn't be discerned in the final strips.  As it is, I kept things simple but still think the background in this panel just looks like a bunch of lines anyway.  I considered doing the traffic behind a full-body pose of Dredd standing up and looking tough in the final panel, but thought better of it in the end because that would just shift the potential problems of panel two into panel three, so in the end there's not much of a sense of where Dredd is at this point - remember he is supposed to be in the middle of speeding traffic - and I find myself committing an art crime I always notice in other people's comics where you get one establishing panel near the very start and then the art cruises for the rest of the scene with few - if any - background shots.  I did like panel one, I guess, but it looks half-finished around the edges.

Chapter six can be read HERE, and suffers from similar problems, although this time the lack of any sense of where the story is taking place is mandated by the script, as at this point it's just a hidden base somewhere or other.  I do get draw the actual physical location of the base in a later strip, but - SPOILER - I fuck that up as well.

I had a brainwave at this point in chapter 7 - which can be read HERE - that if I wanted to avoid Dredd and Hershey just being talking heads or stick figures in this strip, I should combine a couple of panels for a panning shot across Hershey's office as this would render both panels in the script, but also get me a larger single panel to use as an establishing shot rather than one single cluttered or unclear panel with Hershey, Dredd, and Hershey's office crammed in on one side of the strip.  This did constrain me a little in terms of where the characters would be in the shot, obviously, as apart from all the empty space at the top of panels that would be necessary to avoid plastering lettering over characters (which I don't like to see), Hershey speaks first in the script, so the eventual placement of speech balloons would dictate that Hershey needs to go on the left in the first panel, and Dredd has all the dialogue in panel 2, so he'd have to be the focus there, which is why the window is at a silly angle it doesn't need to be in order to draw the eye towards him - or towards the city he's looking at, as I'm a little unsure of what the effect is, to be honest.  I try the same combining-panels trick in the next strip, but that doesn't turn out so well, either.

Watches are a confidence trick invented by the Swiss

The original can be read HERE.  Note how I use solid blacks to avoid doing any work - erm, I mean major detail on the Dredd jimp in panel one, though I think the solid blacks help it as the pacing on this as an action scene is off for me, as it feels like there's just so little energy across the panels, prompting me to not draw any city detail in the background of the last panel so that it's just these basic triangular shapes drawing your eye in the relevant directions.  It doesn't really salvage it, in my opinion, and I probably should have kept the speed lines in panel 1, ironically the one thing I didn't refuse to change.
I like to think there's a charm in seeing Dredd chased by a guy on a lawnmower, though.

How many assholes do we have on this ship, anyway?

So the latest bout of comics-related e-drama between a pair of asshole nobodies on the web can be summed up thus: someone became a ringleader for online abuse aimed at a budding writer who had some sophomore work for Marvel and it is implied that there was intent behind the abuse to get them fired by Marvel because of their persona away from writing.  As far as I can tell, there's (American) irony in play, in that this is a bad thing if the victim is female, but a good thing if the victim is male, because Reasons.
I used to read D'Orazio's blog religiously because she is an interesting commentator who brings a great deal of firsthand experience to the debate on gender that modern comics seems afraid to have, but one of the things that eventually drove me away from her stomping ground was her constantly laying things on a bit thick, as well as stretching logic further than it could go to support sometimes-flimsy presuppositions usually to the detriment of the output of DC Comics with which she clearly had an axe to grind and was incapable of being objective about (or as some commentators who know D'Orazio personally choose to put it: "always talking about her own victimization") and seeing her lead her refusal of Sims' apology with accusations of misogyny is annoying because it's an attempt to move the goalposts to D'Orazio's normal field of play at the expense of the existing and acknowledged debate about bullying, which is a gender-neutral issue.
I don't know why D'Orazio would choose to do this - perhaps it's subconscious and she does genuinely see all criticism and/or harrassment as being gender-motivated - but the end result won't be to help dialog, it will be to tarnish future discussion because now the other side will utilise D'Orazio's comments as proof that progressive arguments are manipulative and disingenuous, and less helpfully, they'll use Sims as some sort of role model, which even Sims doesn't think should be the case.

The asshole contingent on the web is a large, vocal and unrepentant body, and can only be fought long-term by consistently playing fair and not practicing a double standard and then trying to excuse it because the victim is an obnoxious internet jackass like Sims, but that boat has sailed on the D'Orazio/Sims debacle, and now it's just assholes - myself included - shouting at each other on the web again.  Here's hoping the next e-spat will move things forward a little.