We're no longer poor and in debt - now we're just poor, which as you know is the new middle class

Brexit - as we continue to insist on calling it because it takes up fewer characters in a Tweet than the term "turning into 1930s Germany" - continues apace, and I won't lie, I am kind of in a hurry to get paid for that last job I did so I can get the money out of the bank and have some folding cash laying around Just In Case there's ever anything to those "LOL we livin in Mad Max Times by next year" jokes I was making.

There was a bonkers economics show I was watching online for some reason, and part of the reason it was bonkers was because Alec Baldwin - who is to the world of acting what George Galloway is to the world of politics - was one of the presenters/guests, but hey, Russell brand - who is either a cautionary tale or one of the first Earth Presidents (possibly he is both) by the time you read this, people of the future - made a perfectly good documentary about the Western postwar economics bubble created by a chance convergence of inflated property values and the revival of a failed economics model from the 1800s so why the fuck not Alec Baldwin in an economics panel discussion?  Why the fuck not Alec Baldwin in everything?
Anyway, Alec - or as he's known to his kids, "Daddy, please stop calling at this time of the morning and saying these terrible things about mom" - opined about how the political chancers he encountered on his travels from one free meal to another were laughing about how people would have to grow their own food within the next 15 years, and I thought "bonkers."
But here we are.

Next week, I will be getting back to normal.  The country may be going to buggery, but I'll be sorting myself out, and none of this navel-gazing despair that's gripped the land for the last week.  Well, not unless I find it amusing to keep making Thunderdome jokes, but it'll be a facade, I assure you.

When a man insults the glory of God it's time to let your fists do the talking

The story was a mix of things as I tried to cram different threads and themes into the different characters, but the core concept of "Your Friends and Neighbors" when I was posting it on the blog was that of a kid who lived in a town where the world had come to his door thanks to the kind of wonderful and beautiful multiculturalism that more than half the population of this country just pissed up a wall, and he encounters race and religious differences on the path to character growth and being less of an elitist jerk about his first world problems.
I developed RSI halfway through posting the first chapter and once I started to recover, the strip fell by the wayside in favor of things I had pending - such as the art for a graphic novel - but just for shits and giggles, here's chapter 1 of "The Man By The River" in its entirety, including the pages I never got to put on the blog - and yes before you ask I can draw and letter much better these days.
It's all very crude as I was drawing in Photoshop at that time (I now use Manga Studio), didn't know my way around a page, and the writing risks making me look like the kind of massively sexist and racist snob I thought I was parodying, but there's a special prize* if you can spot the exact page where my crippling RSI kicked in and I could barely hold a pen and draw any more - if you say "page 1" the special prize is a punch in the balls.

* there is no prize.

The sooner things go back to the way they were, the sooner we can make change happen

You know, I was wondering if this blog is stored on a server in Europe somewhere or on the UK mainland, as I would like to think that the people of the future would get to read this horseshit and see that shortly before Britain went utterly mad and had to be sank into the sea to prevent the infection spreading and dooming the rest of the world - 28 Days Later and its "epidemic of hate" was apparently a documentary - Britain had people like you who wasted their time on blogs about comics and bad television - well, not exactly like you, as if you are reading this in the future you won't really know what comics are, or television, probably - or Britain, come to that.
I am not really sure what to say about Britain to future generations.  I make jokes about how catastrophe will undoubtedly follow this whole Brexit thing and we'll be clubbing each other to death in the Thunderdome for Aunty's amusement by this time next year and thanking our lucky stars we got this instead of the fate of the other Pig Killers, but I don't really mean that, it's just a humorous scenario I have postulated in the hope of amusing those reading my words.  Plus Tina Turner is retired now and lives in America, and she'd have to be mental to come here now we're all crazy racists who attack brown people on sight, which I wished was also a humorous scenario I have postulated in the hope of amusing those reading my words but is actually how we all roll now.  We are a racist nation and we make our important political decisions based on the lies of fuckers.  There's your archaeological insight right there, future people.  FUCKERS.
We were a nation of idiots and we got what was coming to us.  It might not be an actual apocalypse, but whatever it is, we worked for it.

I say this with nothing but love but you are dead to me

Conservative voters, you have destroyed this country.
We’re about to birth the first generation of babies that will be regularly woken by the nocturnal screams of their parents, and you did this with your affordable four-wheel drives, your Coldplay albums, your canvas trousers, your NutriBullet, your rape pornography, your James Corden, your Sky Atlantic, your mistress, your numb smile, your Diazepam, your wanking glove, your weight gain, your constant Googling "does this dream make me gay?", your fear of buttons, your Amazon Prime, your unrealistic goals, your friend with terrible spinal injuries, your secret jealousy of all the attention he gets, your constant fear of cancer, your dream of swimming with a dolphin who will at best feel complete indifference towards you, your tutting at the news, your Gucci belt, the books you have pretended to read, your love of cock, your cock of love, your daughter’s wedding, your first bike, your suicide.

Why can't you just be like a normal person and hate?

We've traveled a long road together, Star Trek, but I think it's time we went our separate ways.
It was a good run, and I really enjoyed paying to see your increasingly dumber and shitty films, but when you decide that what can best be described as "some tools on the internet mucking about" is the greatest threat to your intellectual property rather than the scripts for the last two Star Trek movies that you totally signed off on, it's probably time for me to move onto something else, preferably something which I can pretend hasn't been tarnished by a corporate jackboot that doesn't know or care about the difference between a copyright sniper and free advertising for their product.

So basically I'm going to be a Planet of the Apes fan now.  Plenty of movies to get my teeth into with a pedigree going all the way back to the late 1960s, a tv show, a really dreadful cartoon, and comics which I will charitably refer to as "variable in quality".

You only really hit bottom when you stop digging

Oh go on, then, Blogger, have another of my increasingly-infrequent and rambling posts while I hit a quiet spot in The Paying Work.
Not up to much these days, just the odd freelance thing good for occasional beer money injections to my bank account and not much else.  I had knocked the comics thing on the head because it wasn't going anywhere, and the microsecond I made the decision, I ended up getting hired to draw comics not for a publisher but for learning websites.  My work is behind paywalls so basically you have to take my word for it, but I'll be sure to link to anything that's free to view if and when it appears somewhere online.
I did still manage to fall into doing some small press fan work, including my second attempt at Strontium Dog (for Dogbreath), which was basically just me sketching the action figure they brought out that one time, and hey, while I've got you waking from that cider-induced slumber, clearly terrible attempt at Ron Perlman's likeness, what was your opinion of my attempt at a Hellboy strip?

Well I thought I did okay.  Everyone's a critic.

I love you but I'm embarrassed by the things you believe, do and say

I don't know when my tv viewing became trapped in the 1970s and 1980s, but here I am just wrapping up on watching Street Hawk (mostly terrible) and diving into Logan's Run: The Series (completely terrible) and almost immediately getting sidetracked hunting down episodes of Bigfoot and Wildboy, a show I cannot believe I didn't know existed: an orphan is raised by Bigfoot and they fight forest crime together!  Created by Ken Ruby and Joe Spears, who made a ton of awesome cartoons you never really saw if all you owned was an analogue tv in the 1980s, but this one's a live-action effort that's a bit Jungle Book, a bit Incredible Hulk, and a bit Grizzly Adams.  God bless you, Internets - and all who sail upon you!