Aces Weeklystands alongside The Phoenix as a UK weekly you've likely never heard of because it's not clogging up the shelves of your local Smiths, as they've circumvented the supermarkets' protection racket on magazine placement that killed the UK comics industry and have used alternate circulation methods based on subscription and digital distribution, and to cut a long story short, my longtime writing donkey Lee Robson probably has compromising pictures of Aces Weekly publisher and proprietor David
Lloyd and has used them to strongarm him into putting us in the book.
This is quite fortuitous, as Chuck Norris' lawyers are insistent that I do this instead of that graphic novel I was planning, so in a nutshell, Velicity Jones: The Devil's Breath is a 1960s-set pulp caper in the style of Lew Grade's ITC shows, which is not even remotely the smallest niche I've produced comics within - heck, it's not even the smallest niche in UK-based spy comics with a female protagonist I've produced comics within - and will for some reason be appearing in a title that until now has featured comics royalty.
I have literally no idea how this has happened, but here we are.
If you fancy throwing a drowning man a rope, you can buy a subscription to the current volume (28) of Aces Weekly for £6.99 HERE to read on your laptop, smart tv, tablet, phone, pc, etc. Me and Lee will be appearing in Volume 29, should you wish to support us.
Currently putting the finishing touches on The Declassified Chuck Norris, an unauthorised graphic novel biography of the flamboyant self-hating homosexual icon and renowned head-puncher whose contribution to the Cold War can finally be revealed across 80 full-colour pages.
When not working on my next lawsuit, however, I am watching the enjoyably terrible Prison Break. There's a bit in one of his stage interview dvd things where Kevin Smith describes first reading the Superman Lives script and asking if they could get back the money they paid to the writer, and that kept coming back to me while watching Prison Break, as there are a lot of moments in this where I thought that it felt like the writer just threw some stuff together, called it a day and cashed his check. It tries to be tense and clever, but it's mostly just ludicrous and lazy, with arcs sometimes petering out before never being explored again, stories changing tack for no discernible reason, and at least one character who gets on the bus because the writers have literally no idea what to do with him that won't cost them outraged viewers, but put in a nutshell, he is a black man who is screwed by US healthcare to the point his child nearly dies and he's forced into suicide. The writers, brainwashed as they are by the demands of US television's Calvinistic disdain of any criticism of capitalism, are forced to simply make the character go away without any real resolution, despite his being a main character for the past two years of the series. "Didn't he take two women hostage? Don't Rico laws make him complicit in several murders and rapes? Didn't he attempt to steal five million dollars and admit as much in front of the pregnant cop he kidnapped?" are all very good questions you can ask to your heart's content, but this show ain't answering.
Away from the horrible mistake of trying to make sense of what I as a viewer am presented with as supposedly being internal logic, season 3 didn't seem to up the game much - not unless you count the knuckle-biting levels of racist stereotyping in its depiction of South Americans as some sort of positive - while season four is so far a show that does not feature prisons or escapes from prisons, but might feature a break (in) of some sort down the line, after we get past this sort of sub-Mission Impossible caper show it seems to have become now. I have burned through this quite quickly, and apparently there's been another season recently made after a ten year break in production, so I'll probably burn through that, too, but so far I have to say that this show is utter bunkum, though it's nice seeing Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell (both of whom I only know from the DCTVU shows like The Flash and Legends Of Tomorrow) doing something other than pantomime camp.
Hey youse guys I have a totally good excuse for not updating the blog these last few weeks, and it's not the obvious reasons you're thinking of - I'm lazy, have a drinking problem, and finally twigged that no-one is reading it anyway - I have been actual for-reals busy on a thing. For someone
That you might see. Sometime.
Maybe.
No it's not anything that will see print - it makes me happy and sad that you have more faith in me than I do - and nor have I been fortunate to sucker someone into letting me contribute concept art to their movie again, but nearer the time, assuming there isn't some catastrophe that prevents it coming to pass, I will Let You Know that The Thing has officially Happened. In the meantime, it's nearly the anniversary of me putting the first bits of North online here on the blog under the assumption that it would later be useful to have previously-aired material to use as an archive when I finally figured out the technobabble necessary to put my own webcomic site together to run the rest of the strip (long story short: I never got enough money in my Paypal account to pay for the site because no-one on eBay wants to buy PS2 games or titty comics - which are literally all I have in my home that I can't eat, and don't think I haven't tried), but I should probably pull the trigger on more of that or just abandon it like I did Frank. Anyway, come July, I guess we'll see if I follow up on that threat and start spamming your feed on a daily basis again.
This is a very short review, but Sausage Party is a really great film.
I mean, I guess it must be, but I tapped out during the opening musical number where the German sausages show up and say they're going to "kill all the Jews" because there was no possible way the film could top a really funny and well-constructed joke like this, so I owed it to the people who made the film to remember it at its best. Yes, that's probably it.
Plus I pulled a muscle in my side, you guys, and if I laugh too much it really hurts, I just couldn't take that risk.
Someone somewhere is masturbating at the plight of assault victims on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and I mention this not as a scenario that is playing out solely because of statistical inevitability, but because our popular culture has evolved to the point that we put rape front and center as the main attraction in our entertainment, and everything is a fetish to someone so we must assume the grimly inevitable truth that for a (currently) small number of people, SVU is a masturbatory aid.
Shows like Charlie's Angels and Hawaii Five-0 with their impossibly glamorous assault survivors are but the harbingers of what is to come, and speaking of grim inevitability, here's my opinions on a WWE movie: The Condemned, a film about 10 convicts forced to fight each other to the death in front of a live audience.
Trust me, this rambling and potentially triggering opening kind of connects with the broad theme of the review, though I probably lack the skill to integrate everything into a coherent narrative, so hopefully drawing attention to that like I'm doing now will allow me to pass it off as self-awarenes rather than poor writing. By objective standards, The Condemned is a rote straight-to-rental b-movie action flick which has a central bread-and-circuses commentary hinging upon the potential excesses that will result from the inevitable escalation of shock and awe programming, but what makes it interesting is that it is co-financed by WWE Films and stars "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, a wife-beating drug addict whose career was built upon his constantly upping the ante in a violent televised carny act for children. That shareholders of WWE Films could make a movie about the destabilising influence upon society of violent televised entertainment created by greedy corporate sociopaths is a frightening enough symmetry even before you get to the fact that one of that small cadre - Linda McMahon - would later go on to be handed a job in the Presidential cabinet of Donald Trump (née Drumph) for which she was unqualified and in a position to wreak terrible harm upon the country - she even has an avatar within the film whose final words to the audience are devoid of any pretense of a fourth wall or nuance of language as she looks directly into the camera and declares that any society which victimises its most vulnerable members is truly condemned. What's that? You think that's not very subtle? Yes, well, perhaps you have a point that this B-movie whose plot is recycled from multiple B and Z-movie sources and which stars Vinnie Jones as ahahaha - I nearly wrote "stars Vinnie Jones as a primary antagonist" but talk about redundant qualification: IT STARS VINNIE JONES - and geez I don't know what to tell you, guys, this was never going to be subtle - and was always highly unlikely to be objectively good - I'm just more surprised that it's moral. Traditionally with b-movie schlock like this, there's a tacit agreement between film and audience that one won't bother the other too much about the details but The Condemned is really, really earnest about you understanding that even though you are deliberately watching people who "deserve it" get mown down for your entertainment, violence is really bad and even society's wretched dregs have a right to some form of - holy shit - dignity.
The condemned convicts start out as one-note antagonists for the unlikable and violent lead, but over time, tiny flecks of humanity show through, with the only healthy and loving relationship being that of a male and female convict, their counterparts behind the cameras in "normal" society portrayed as the usual array of stereotypical misanthropes who believe rudeness to be synonymous with wit. The primary physical antagonist of the film revealing a history of sexual abuse that he has knowingly perpetuated is a leftfield reveal that is either a twist of the knife if you like the idea of him suffering for his transgressions by any means, or it robs his eventual comeuppance of the cheap emotional release that these kinds of films thrive upon in its suggestion that precisely the kind of entertainment you are currently watching has contributed to the violent downward spiral of lives that it portrays.
Well, that whole review thing didn't come together as well as I hoped it would. We can take some small solace from the fact that I don't get paid for this and I'm dreadfully ill at the moment so this is as painful a chore for me to write as it has been for you to read.
I could have watched The Year Of The Sex Olympics instead of this. That probably tells you a lot about me.
My HOT TAKE on The Handmaid's Tale is less "Well I love dystopian sci-fi so this is a no-brainer" and more "oh fuck not more misery porn". A whole series of this? Really? I don't know why live-action misery porn gets me down so much. I mean, the removal of a protagonist's agency is storytelling 101, and was more or less the foundation of every comic story published in the UK during the 1960s-1980s period that I personally love a great deal, so what sets this television series apart from something appearing in the likes of Misty or Jinty? I mean, obviously there are stylistic differences in the dystopias envisaged by comics creators in the 1970s and those working in the television industry of the late 2010s, but if I had to guess... yeah, it's probably the rape. Once again it's rape o'clock on tv just to let you know how gnarly and For The Realz the story is and I don't know - this is just so tiring. And I say that as someone who has had the good fortune to have been born comfortable in the gender which doesn't get to be pelted with depictions of weaponised sexual assault upon it like every day. Well, whatever. As a card-carrying owner of a functioning penis, perhaps I just don't understand the appeal of watching dramas that explore what would happen if one of my greatest fears was something turned into a non-consensual ritual by Donald Trump's administration, but Lady types on that there internet seem to be lapping this horrible nightmare up, so I'm willing to just let this one go as I don't feel intellectually equipped to tackle this bizarre crossroads of love and hate for the subject matter. Fuckin America - what is up with you lately?
I'm using this old blog page which used to host my impression of 13 Reasons Why (capsule version of my review: I am no longer under 20 years old so I don't get it) as a portfolio showcase, so the contents will change over time, and hopefully I can figure out how to rearrange the layout of the pages so it's not just a long vertical line of single images. Blogger do not make this easy for ham-fisted simpletons like myself.
Anyway, there should be a good mix of stuff I've done, and I'll even throw in some stuff I don't think is even remotely my best, but does at least show that I will try anything. If I've used any work we collaborated on together and you'd rather it wasn't shown in public, just let me know and I'll be happy to remove it - plenty more where that came from.
