When I was his age I was sloshing through the jungle dodging enemy fire with nothing but a necklace of ears to talk to

The blog has lain fallow for a while now, so I thought I'd bung up my "sketchbook" for August - or at least the latter half of August - as I have of late tried to get away from filling physical notebooks with doodles as I believe it makes me lazy not having to refine or follow through on anything I jot down and then throw in a pile and forget about, and I rarely use Manga Studio even though I recalled it being great for sketching (and not freezing up with files over 7mb like Photoshop does), so I've killed a couple of birds with the one stone here and created what I think can best be described as less a sketchbook and more of a digital napkin covered in doodles.
Don't mind the big red blobs on some pages, that's just me redacting things I shall be using in some form elsewhere, and for the most part this was me keeping my hands busy while I watched tv, so I hope you shall forgive me my lack of ability with MS' colouring, lettering, or inking tools, I'm more a Photoshop man (at least for now).

Like any other form of government, it's got something to do with young men killing each other

Crap on you, dodgy likeness!
I think I did well lasting the 10 minutes of Atlas Shrugged that I did, as this was some pretty high-falutin' brainiac stuff that went over my head to the point I couldn't understand it at all and had to call it a day, like the notion people should be paid what they're worth and yet (1) for some reason this is a very bad thing when applied to working class people and (2) no-one seems to question that this is one of the central rabble-rousing tenets of national socialism, only redressed by... well, it doesn't seem to be redressed at all, it just seems to be saying rich white people are worth every penny and if they decide to stop banking and politicking the whole world will come to an end because it revolves around them.
Anyway, I lasted 10 minutes because of the stodgy dialogue that makes no-one sound like a human being, and the "near future" setting where there are newsboys selling papers on streetcorners because papers are a primary news source is arguably doing the film no favors either unless this is meant to be a timeless stodgy allegory in which case it would help if philosophically it wasn't espousing the rationale of the schoolyard bully chancing their arm by holding their breath until they get what they want.  I like Mercy's Taylor Schilling and I like Defiance's Grant Bowler, but this does neither any favors.

2 and 2 doesn't make 4 anymore - at the moment it adds up to exactly nothing

Don't mind the rather raw pre-toned artwork, I'm just touching base, chums.

Being a social drinker, I have long known the entertainment value in poking the bear for amusement, but there is always a line in the sand that starts from the idea of basic decency and ends in the notion that no-one wants a smack in the face, and if you are a regular reader you will hardly need telling that I say arsehole things on the web all the time, but I'm not going anywhere and I use my real name - albeit on the blog and Twitter I do so with that crazy taig spelling that makes me look like a mental fenian even more than my occasional statements to the effect that "that there Catholicism, I do that and it's not so bad" does - so I like to tell myself I'm a bit better than certain types of human slime that have popped up on the news recently making cocks of themselves on this here interconnected network, because I am a firm believer that being an arsehole on the internet is a privilege, but it is not compulsory.

It turns blue.

The action hero in the exclusive company of men - proving himself only to his peers and eschewing the acts of weakness necessary to appeal to soft, emotional women - was held up in various forms as the epitomy of manliness in the environment of the 1980s action film to the extent that there are no women in Rambo 3 to soften his brutality and force him to display emotion, but that's okay because it is ultimately a film about the consequences of violence as the language of men.

Removed from the company of women, man creates his own alien landscape hewn from and sustained by acts of terror and savagery: the Soviet army use violence to hold Afghanistan and the consequence is a rebel movement, the rebels use violence and the consequence is retaliation against their families by the Soviets and so it goes in bloody red circles until the violence is escalated towards an end through the outside agency of John Rambo, who from the very start is shown as using violence merely as a means, stick fighting for money but showing mercy to a downed opponent even when that opponent doesn't extend the same courtesy.  Across the course of the film (and its two prequels) Rambo understands the cyclical nature of hostility, and because he and by extension the film understands this, violence is shown to render all participants - even its perpetrators - as victims, from the desensitised and dehumanised Soviets far removed from their own society to do what that society has deemed necessary - but unpalatable - to the brutalised Afghans who accept the rape and murder of their families as their lot, violence is portrayed as a self-perpetuating way of life of the male warrior class until forced towards an ultimate end.
Rambo tips the conflict in this direction by making the matter a personal war between himself and the cruel Soviet commander, but despite his being our POV character, there is little distinction between Rambo and the Soviets, and if anything his campaign is more brutal and terrifying than theirs, as in running headlong towards the enemy, he eschews the idea of an ongoing campaign of war between two factions in his pursuit of a quantifiable endgame he moves towards via the most direct route.  Along the way, the consequences of violence are graphically shown - especially in the infamous "cauterizing" scene - to the extent that for most people the one scene in the film that breaks it is the confrontation between helicopter and tank that signals the end of the third act, as one of the participants is seen to walk away from it "victorious" rather than be consumed and destroyed by it as would seem to be the inevitable result based on all that has gone before, with even that character's only friend in the world looking disappointed that he didn't die in the two warriors' inescapable and literal head-on collision - until this point, Rambo 3 is an unflinching indictment of violence, but even in betraying its central conceit it serves to better illustrate it, as by getting to walk away from the conflict, Rambo the character perpetuates the cycle in perpetuating the alpha male franchise.  The film unambiguously relays that Rambo will find no rest among civilised men, that at best he can hope only to live on the edges of society among those who recognise his capacity for violence and on occasion allow him to indulge it as a momentary emotional and physical release and expression of who and what he is before he returns to being haunted by who and what he isn't.  Rambo, like any extreme example of the action hero, is an eternal mid life crisis, taught the value of "victory" but ultimately only wanting something he cannot simply go out and take.
Thus I posit that Rambo 3 is morally superior to Man of Steel and is a better film for younger viewers to watch because in Man of Steel, violence has no consequence, and I don't just mean that Superman and the evil Kryptonions punch each other over and over and over again without any repercussions for minutes longer than necessary or interesting, I also mean that the end of the film glosses over the deaths of millions and the economic impact of the destruction of a major American city while Rambo 3 shows that getting punched will possibly kill you - Man of Steel couldn't even get across that two people of similar strength punching each other will at the very least result in one of them getting a bruise.  Rambo 3 has people getting shot and they explode in red fountains - or sometimes in literal explosions and a rain of body parts and organs - while Man of Steel has a rubber mannequin bounce around a bit when someone is hit by the fist-sized equivalent of a bullet train.  Rambo 3 has the F-word and gore, but these are shown as being bad and not admirable accoutrements of the rollercoaster 3D CGI setpieces and in the world of Rambo 3 - single-minded in its pursuit of the action spectacle as it is - death is final, terrible, and devoid of dignity.
There is, however, thematic overlap with Rambo 3 and Man of Steel in that they both portray the conflicting desires of a son and those of his surrogate father, but Man of Steel fails to suggest why one point of view or the other may win out in the end, as it is not about a man who discards the nihilistic and xenophobic "me me me" lessons of his Republican middle-American upbringing and becomes his own formed and rational person, it is instead about a man who is told to do one thing and does it until he is told to do another thing, and at all times is uncomfortable doing either.  There's no choice to the role he fulfills, no commentary on his place in a larger mechanism of society or even the idea of predestination, it's just one man doing what he's told and never showing any spine.  Rambo 3, by contrast, is about a man who understands what he is and lives in a constant state of frustration because of it, but when he acts, it is with confidence and because he feels a palpable human connection to another person that even the audience is aware of, not because he has been instructed to do so by a surrogate father - at one point he outright refuses to act in this father's name or interests because Rambo is his own man, but he will act out of love for another.  Even coming from a frightening, mentally unstable figure like John Rambo, this is a moral compunction I can understand, and further it is held by someone whose actions do not leave him unaffected.  In accepting his role in things from the off and the consequences of his actions, Rambo, unlike Man of Steel's Superman, is operating within the same moral universe as the rest of us, and thus no matter how many people he reduces to a red smear with a machine gun, he is still one of us, capable of the love and sense of community necessary of a cinematic hero.

God help me, I think you people are horrible

MASSIVE SPOILERS for Man Of Steel.

Jor-El is a spaceman who lives on an advanced alien planet of interstellar explorers, and this is why he does not have a car, he has a dragon.  Does it poop when it flies?  I mean, does it drop this half ton dookie on people as Jor-El is going off to a space-science meeting?  It just seems very impractical to me to have a space dragon instead of maybe a flying motorcycle or a jetpack - there's not even a safety railing on a flying dragon, doesn't that worry people?
Anyway, Jor-El and Zod have a falling-out over the fact that Zod is a murderer and eugenics-obsessed space Nazi, so Jor-El - who you will recall is a space scientist - proceeds to beat up Zod - a trained warrior from birth - in a fair fight, so Zod stabs him with Robocop's brain-stabbing USB jack (from that time in Robocop 1 when Boddicker went AAH because he'd just been stabbed in the brain with a spike) and Superman's rocketship takes off because obviously Krypton is not out of resources or anything so Jor-El can lay his hands on enough solid fuel to allow a vessel to escape Krypton's massive gravity which is in no way being increased further by the planet's core imploding.  I mean, haha, it's not like the movie has gone out of its way to establish stuff like there's no fuel and gravity on Krypton is really strong, is it?
With Superman-El on his way to Earth to - as far as I can tell - star in a string of soft-focus tv advertisements, Zod swears revenge and that he will recover the Space McGuffin shortly before he is punished for trying to overthrow the Romulan Council by being locked up inside a steel dildo which is then thrust into a "black hole" via a spaceship that has corridors made of vaginas.
I have not made any of that up.
Flashforward 33 years and Superman is a humble fisherman - there will be more such references to him being Jesus so let's acknowledge it and move on* - and in flashback we see his adoptive father giving him advice like "never use your powers to help people even if it means you have to let them die", "don't be yourself", "be afraid of the government", "people are not inherently good", "trust no-one", and "hide who and what you are" and many other valuable lessons that we associate with Superman.  At some point they're out driving and instead of driving to where they meant to go they drive to a tornado instead, and Superman's dad dies to prove that he's right about something, the movie suggesting this is an important lesson about Superman trusting his dad because his dad is always right, but the impact is lessened by the slightly problematic fact that his dad is a small-minded tool with conservative values rooted in xenophobia and parochialism that are ultimately destructive to the point that they drive Superman into a 16-year walkabout to grow a beard and express himself only through anonymous acts of terrifying vandalism disproportionate to perceived slights.
During one of his many odd jobs under false names, he's working on an impenetrable top-secret excavation site with top-notch security just as they discover a 20 000 year old Kryptonian spaceship buried under the Canadian ice that attracts the attention of Lois Lane.  To answer your question, no, the movie does not explain why he is there at this exact time.  He just is.
Meeting the holographic version of his dead dad after shooting a laser into Lois (not a euphimism), Clark is told that Jor-El had a dream that Kryptonian children would no longer have to do jobs that are assigned to them before they're even born, and that Superman is going to put on a costume and help him realise this dream as it's the reason Jor-El concieved his son in the first place.  YES I KNOW.
Meanwhile, Lois' boss reasons that people would not want to know about the presence of an invincible alien demigod hiding among humans (really, he actually says this onscreen) so Lois should stop writing stories with news in them and go back into the office and... well, the movie doesn't clarify what else she should be doing that is more important than revealing that an invincible alien demigod walks the Earth among us, but there's probably office stuff that needed sorting out, like someone had a birthday coming up and things needed organising for that, like strippers and drugs.
However, instead of going back to organising the office orgy, Lois takes roughly 90 seconds to discover that Superman is really Clark Kent from Smallville.  She tricks Clark's mum into revealing this by asking if her son is a flying alien demigod and Clark's mum says that he is.  Lois waits at Superman's human dad's grave until Superman shows up and tells her that he doesn't feel like explaining himself and his dad said to hide from the world and try not to murder anyone, so Lois gives up on her story, possibly because she realises that IT IS MEANDERING ALL OVER THE PLACE.
Zod shows up demanding Superman surrender to him, so after a scene where Superman tells Lois that on his planet - which would be Earth - "s" stands for "hope" they both get taken up to Zod's spaceship where Krypton's atmosphere takes away Superman's powers so he can be tortured while Lois escapes and then gets rescued when Superman floats out into space with his arms out like he's Jesus and saves her from an escape pod which lands just down the road from the house of Clark's parents, which seems to be the one spot on Earth where all single-seat spaceships crash for some reason, and Zod and Lady Zod show up at the house and fighting happens.
In between the pauses for Lady Zod to deliver a Bad Guy Lecture to Superman, it's basically that fight from the Thor movie, only with lots of rubbery CGI humans, and then Lois has a car load of cops give her a lift to Clark's house where he's standing around in his Superman costume talking to his mum on the front lawn and the cops are looking right at all this and that's how you know Clark doesn't have a secret identity or anything.  They call the army who come to the farm and pick up the rocket that carried Superman to Earth from its hiding place in the barn (for some reason, Superman doesn't just carry it to them) and they make a plan to turn the rocket into a bomb that will create a black hole in the center of Metropolis.  Superman can't carry the bomb to the target himself because that would mean sacrificing himself for humanity and it's not like the movie wants to draw parallels between Superman and Jesus or anything so he doesn't do that, he goes off to the other side of the planet to be fondled by tentacles for twenty minutes (again, I am not making this up) before hitting on the novel idea of stopping a giant robot spider by punching it.
Zod's master plan, meanwhile, is to turn Earth into a planet that will rob him and all his invincible super-soldiers of their powers, because he's trying to save the Kryptonian race from extinction and the way to best ensure this is to make sure that under no circumstances are the remaining members of this race completely invulnerable to harm.  Superman's rocket is bashed into Zod's spaceship and a black hole happens, so Superman catches Lois from falling again and flies out of the black hole going GRRR and then they make out in the rubble that used to be Metropolis but is now the dusty grave of 8 million people.  Zod climbs out of somewhere and they have the fight from the end of Matrix 3, and at the end of it Zod tries to kill these people with his heat vision, only Zod's heat ray eyes obviously hit whatever he's looking at, right?  But the beams take forever to cross this one foot or so of wall while Superman is going "no, don't burn that family of four to death" so I guess in the fight he broke his eyeball muscles so he couldn't just look at the people he wants to kill by swiveling his eyes around in their sockets, he has to turn his actual head towards whatever he wants to look at, only Superman won't let him because he would rather people not be killed, so he snaps Zod's neck.
Flash forward to "later" and Superman wrecks a drone and throws it in front of a general and tells him that the military - who came to his home and got his rocketship, remember - shouldn't try to find out where his home - that they had already come to - might be.  Then he goes to the Daily Planet in a pair of glasses but with the exact same hair style and - possibly more of a clue here - being about seven feet tall and built like a brick shithouse compared to everyone else in the room, and everyone acts like they don't know who it is because - and I'll admit I'm guessing - it's a seven foot tall invincible alien demigod who snaps people's necks and wrecks entire cities and kills millions of people and there's not a damn thing man nor god can do to stop him and if he tells you he's a mild-mannered reporter and not an alien murderer with laserbeam eyes, you nod and say "yes, Clark" and Lois simpers and says the line "welcome to THE PLANET" and Amy Adams to her credit does stop herself winking at the camera as she delivers the line, so you may fare better than I did and not actually vomit.


I did not think much of this film.
It was very derivative of other films, inevitably the Marvel stuff like Thor (Krypton/Asguard is a no-brainer visual lift), but it also borrows heavily from videogames, particularly the Final Fantasy series to the point that I felt like a lot of the action scenes were just the elaborate summons animations from FF7 and FF8, with a fight between Zod and Superman at the end that's a direct lift of the Cloud/Sephiroth showdown from the finale of CGI movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children - it's one thing after another that I've seen elsewhere, even down to the shakycam pan/zoom/zoom again CGI spaceship shots that are lifted from Firefly/Serenity and Battlestar Galactica.  The direction is technically inept, too, with shakycam in contextually inappropriate scenes - by which I mean all of them -underlining that it isn't an actual narrative or visual technique, it's just being copied from other places because everyone else is doing it, even videogame cutscene directors, and it is used here without any purpose or meaning beyond itself.  Superman also is odd.  His costume has a belt buckle despite being a one-piece unitard with no belt, feeding my suspicion that the film was made by people who thought that as long as Superman wasn't wearing underpants on the outside, people would take him seriously, because it's underpants on the outside that make him silly and/or unbelievable.  He looks exactly like Tom Welling from the tv show Smallville, and the story itself is a mish-mash of ideas and images from various Superman things over the years like the lengthy Krypton-based prologue about Superman's dad coming directly from the 1990s Superman cartoon pilot episode, the World Engine lifted from Mark Waid's superfluous-but-good Birthright, the robot spider fight from the many, many treatments for the never-made Superman Lives from which we also get a shot of a polar bear and Superman's gay robot butler in the Fortress of Solitude, and obviously the fearful conservative version of the Johnathan Kent character from the tv series Smallville who pops his clogs to give Clark's story more pathos or something, though myself, I would have prefered to see the kind-hearted and worldly-minded yokel of the Lois and Clark tv series instead - some parental figure who would steer the character towards a sense of responsibility to his fellow man and the notion that we're all in this together rather than the idea that some people were meant for better things that seems to be the main thrust of Man Of Steel, with the little people dying in their millions just to give background colour to the posturing of an elitist snob who adopts an "us and them" worldview after a three minute conversation with his holodad.  This guy has no roots, I have literally no idea what investment he has in people to the point he could care one way or the other if we all died, he has no reason to be good to us - quite the opposite, in fact, as all that's actually proved in his journey to become Superman is that Earthly law doesn't apply to him, so he needn't even fear the reprisals his father warned him might come if he ever revealed himself.  Oh dang, now I wished I'd referred to his dads as Gladiator and The Postman for some reason, but I can't be bothered editing all that crap up there so let's just say this is a really stupid, inconsistent and cowardly movie and leave it there.




*  Before anyone says my boy Big J was a carpenter, I refer you to the learned Mr Cohen.

You know the concept of time confuses me

I have to admit, while Nightwing generally doesn't seem to be the kind of comic I'd normally like to read, it has a good inverse-sexism policy going on with the artwork that I approve of heartily.  By which I mean the artist really likes to draw man ass.

 Nice one, DC!  About time a major publisher took this step, though I don't suppose it means anything to anyone outside Northern Ireland that the himbo lead of Nightwing is a dead ringer for Spunky from Mal Coney's gay superhero comic Major Power And Spunky., but I throw it out there anyway.  I don't think this means Dick Grayson in the comics is gay because he's been with ladies - all of them, as far as I can tell - so he's probably just bisexual now - which I imagine is what happens when you run out of ladies but want to keep going.
As for the rest of the comic - the texty bits with story and words, I mean - I think Nightwing is supposed to be Spider-Man now or something like that.  He doesn't seem to get on well with the only woman in the book - hmmm... - and then a man in latex slaps him around and locks him up in a dungeon and forces him to strip on camera... you know, this is going to sound super-weird, but I am pretty sure the aforementioned Major Power and Spunky covered ground like this.

I have never seen a woman eat ribs like that in my life except in caveman drawings

Playing The Last of Us, it's kind of like Enslaved but with the main character from Uncharted.  If that analogy isn't vague enough for you, then it's what I Am Alive would be if it wasn't a terminally broken playing experience.  Otherwise I am trying with limited success to draw old-school 2000ad dinosaurs with limited reference and my memory is not the best for this kind of thing.  I haven't had a drink in 5 days and I'm having a sensible night tonight... if I make it to the end of the weekend and stay dry, I suspect this may be me getting my arse on track at last.