Inclined to ramble

Apple

2011-10-21T09:58:00.000+01:00

I'm not a great fan of Apple, they're certainly leaders in their field and Jobs' was right when he said without Apple Microsoft would still be green pixel writing on a black screen. However their products create an elitest hierarchy in electronics ownership made worse by the fact that they are at the top end of affordable so too many people buy them at the expense of more basic needs.

Steve Jobs, however, was a very wise man with a great understanding of design and creativity. I like what he has to say here.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have”

Obvious but sometimes it seems it takes a clever person to see the obvious.

Me preaching

2011-09-06T09:56:00.001+01:00

Anyone who's known me for any length of of time knows my tendency to get on a soapbox and preach. Since becoming a Christian I've been given a new soapbox and this one they video and share with the world. Here's me, talking about Anger, at New Community Church West End.

Anger Management - Peter Bangs from New Community // West End on Vimeo.

Birthday

2011-09-05T13:10:00.001+01:00

It's five days until my 47th Birthday. Over the last two years I've been playing with a free website provider and I've come to one conclusion, blogger is vastly superior to very free provider I've looked at. So, it's bye bye website and hello more blogger. I do get slightly anal about stuff at times so the keep everything neat I will be running 5 blogs. Bangs Twitches will be bird and nature drawings and eventually a shop, sketching urbanely will be where I post urban sketches done while wearing a smoking jacket and calling everyone dahling, Inclined to Ramble will be thoughts and ramblings on life and the Universe, September Roads will be any drawings and comics I feel inclined to post and finally, Blues in the Dark will be reviews and thoughts on the fictional worlds, inspired by the excellent "To busy thinking about my comics". I'll include links back and forth as and when they're of any use.

The end.

2008-10-28T11:08:00.003Z

This is the 151st entry on Inclined to Ramble. I'm not famous for my sticking power at anything creative and this is something of a record for me. However life changes and somethings have had their season.

16 October saw the birth of my son, Harry James Samuel Bangs. It was a very different affair to my daughter Molly's birth. She came one week early by emergency ceasarean which was probably the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. When it reaches the point where an emergency operation is necessary, as the father you drop to the bottom of the list of priorities. I was left standing in a waiting room outside an operating theatre for 20 minutes but it seemed like hours. Two minutes to get into a gown and cap and 18 minutes to let my imagination rn wild on all the awful things that could be happening. Until that point I'd viewed my imagination as my best friend, writing and drawing were almost as essential to me as breathing and eating. After that point creative acts became increasingly difficult, I started little and finished even less.

Harry's birth was a very different thing, I was there from the start, helping and supporting through the entire labour in it's glorious technicolour. Thanks to a wonderful midwife I was able to help my son into this world rather than stand by helplessly and it feels like something has changed because of that. My imagination again feels like a friend, ideas are running sure and fast and for the first time in a long time I feel the need to "do" rather than just think about "doing".

Seven years with my daughter Molly has been a wonderful experience and I look forward with anticipation to all the years ahead. Looking back from this point I can see I focused my creativity into building an entertaining and imaginative world for her to live in. I think I was scared to aim it anywhere else.

Harry is nearly two weeks old now and he is a thoroughly entertaining young man. He's poo'd on me, pee'd on me and deprived me of many hours of sleep and I love him for it. He pulls an endless variety of silly faces and makes many daft noises that keep me laughing all the time. He's also made me realise it's time for a change and change is good.

Part of the reason for this blog was to look at my creativity and understand what was happening to it. In the course of the last 150 posts I've looked at things that inspire me, looked at family as a source for inspiration and an excuse for inactivity and posted some of the things I've managed to do.

Now it's time to move forward. I have committed to Karen to complete a kids book by her next birthday. Karen is scarier than any editor ever and so I have to do it. I wants somewhere to document this. I've had a lot of fun sketching outdoors and want somewhere to show these off. I've enjoyed writing reviews of comics and books I've enjoyed so I want to continue that somewhere. So with all that in mind it's goodbye blogger and hello my own website. The sensible thing would be to set up the website first and then link to it from here. I'm not strong on sensible though so here's a picture of Harry instead

and look out for one last post in the next week.

Paster for the day

2008-06-07T21:52:00.002+01:00

My wife Karen is somewhat excited at the moment. Tomorrow she is paster for the day at her church. Her Pasters, Julia and Paul Franklin, flew to Florida last week to attend a revival going on there at the moment and in their absence asked Karen to lead the meeting and give what I guess most of us would know as the sermon. Karen is a woman of amazing faith and, to my mind, was the best person they could ask. She's been working on what to say all week and is, hopefully, putting the finishing touches to it now. Tomorrow I shall be there with Molly, our daughter, to support her along side a lovng and supportive congregation.

Olivia Alice Sawyer

2008-06-07T21:42:00.002+01:00

Yesterday morning at 7.15am my sister Wendy gave birth to a daughter, Olivia Alice. She was 7lb 4 and 1/2oz and arrived safely after putting her mother through 31 hours of agony. Yesterday was also my dear old mother's 65th birthday which we planned to celebrate today, 7th June.

As it happened my mothers birthday celebrations were nicely combined with, but not overwhelmed by, Olivia's introduction to the world and family at large. I got a nice long cuddle, winded her and got her off to sleep so that was good practice for November when littlenose arrives.

Had a few beers so slightly blurry as I type this.

Indiana Jones

2008-06-03T19:49:00.002+01:00

There are no two ways about it Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a damn fine movie. It's not Raiders but in some respects it comes closer than the other two movies. Raiders felt like a combination of period pulp and real world concerns. Temple of Doom was pure pulp and despite its secondary story of parental relationships The Last Crusade rarely rose above its pulp beginnings. Kingdom was again born out of the pulp fiction of the day, this time the science fiction of the 50's rather than the slightly occult adventure fiction so popular in the 30's. In addition though it touched on the generational problems that came up in Last Crusade, the problems that come with aging, McCarthyite red baiting, the difficulties in managing a relationship. It may not have gone into them in great depth but they grounded it in the real world and it was a better film for it. As an old time Indy fan who's no longer the callow youth he was at the time of Raiders I appreciated the recognition of the fact Indy had aged some in the last 20 years and everything was still possible but much harder.

It was a well written movie, sensibly keeping George Lucas away from the scripting, with some excellent stunt work, a very funny snake scene and some funny and touching scenes with Marion Ravenwood, who still looked pretty hot. The scenes with Mutt worked well apart from the Marlon Brando impersonation that made up his first appearance. If you recognised Brando's Wild One persona it set up your expectations of what Mutt would be like and Shia LaBeouf isn't actor enough to pull it off. Fortunately LaBeouf's Wild One act is soon shown to be just that and the character becomes more likable for it. There is a worry that Indy is going to hand over the mantle to Mutt which the movie really plays up to at the end before putting your mind at rest.

There were occasional complaints in reviews that Harrison Ford was to old to play Indy at 65 but my only reply to that is "What a load of bollocks". At 70 my old man was capable of doing most of the things we saw Indy do so no way he was too old.

parenthood

2008-05-17T16:42:00.002+01:00

I've been fairly quiet on the impending arrival of Child Bangs # 2, because, frankly, there's been too much going on that's kept me away from Rambling. Littlenose, as the baby is being called until we find out the sex, is approximately 16 weeks old now and doing fine. We had a scan a couple of weeks ago and discovered only that the baby has my nose (large) and is perfectly in proportion for it's age. Karen, however, has had a lousy time with sickness throughout the 1st trimester and has carried this over into the second, not helped by a virus that did the rounds of the whole family and a very unpleasant cold she's still hanging on too. At least the sickness is now improving. This has meant that I've had to pick up the slack on everything from school runs to washing, housework and looking after Karen. Not a complaint by the way as she's picked up my slack on many an occasion. Then this weekend just past I've had some stupid virus that completely wiped me out. There's more to say on our impending parenthood but there's not been either the time or energy to say it. More will follow though.

What's going on

2008-05-17T15:52:00.002+01:00

For the second time in the history of my marriage I'm watching football. Previously watched a world cup match with Molly as she wanted to watch a game. This time I'm watching The FA Cup final on my own. Portsmouth are a local team, supported by a number of my workmates, and one part of the Saints/Pompey local "rivalry". As you can imagine from 2 matches in 9 years, I'm not a big football fan but the optimism and excitment of the people I work with must be contagious, as here I am at half time.

To my untutored eye there seems to be more skill and less primadonna over acting im this then I saw in the World Cup match and I'm hoping Portsmouth win although partof me would like to see underdogs Cardiff win.

Don't expect to see a big review of the game, I wouldn't know what I was talking about.

Spirit, more disappointment

2008-04-21T22:01:00.002+01:00

So the trailer's out. It's Miller's Daredevil right down to the voice over. It will look good if the trailer's anything to go by and has the potential to be a good movie, but it ain't the Spirit, it's Daredevil with the names changed.

Why kids don't read the Beano

2008-04-20T12:26:00.005+01:00

A Random Beano cover

Apparently there was a survey published a few weeks back that said kids no longer read the Beano. Initially I was surprised. I don't know what the sales figures are on the Beano but Steve Holland offers up a figure of 74,000 a week based on figures released by the publishers. for 2007. Apparently that's down some 15,000 on the same period in 2006. Still, 74,000 is a figure most US comics would kill for and this is weekly. I think it's probably fair to say The Beano's readership is slowly shrinking but it's a long way from being written off yet.

I decided then to have a look at a recent issue,3427, to see what sort of state it's in and I wasn't impressed. Thematically The Beano appears to have stood still since it's inception some 70 years ago. Artistically it's still a fine comic, true there's no one to replace the likes of Dudley Watkins or Leo Baxendale but there's a 4 pages strip by Hunt Emerson,Mini the Minx by Ken Patterson and Nigel Parkinson's slightly amateurish but kinetic artwork on Bea. The best art is superb, unfortunately there's work like Tom Paterson's on The Numbskulls which looks like a second rate version of the dull art that fills a lot of "how to" books and is a terrible disappointment.

There's a mixture of New and old characters. Dennis the Menace (the real one) is still there as is Mini the Minx and Billy Whizz and The Bash Street Kids which mostly fair well. Newer characters fare less well artistically. Ball Boy (around since 1975) suffers from stiff drawing and uninspired and outdated character designs. The teacher looks like he stepped out of an early 1970's Play for Today, the lead and his best mate are identical with different hair and the supporting cast look like rip offs of the Bash Street Kids and "Pirates of the Caribeano" has a strange, Hanna Barbera style art. Laura Howell's Johnny Bean from Happy Green is the finest addition is the best new strip as far as art goes, and looking at her website she is obviously holding back and drawing in a Beano style. The artists all remain close to a house style but show a degree of individual style.

The writing however is largely by the numbers and so the writing is the problem for the Beano, plots have not moved on much since 1938, there's the occasional bit of vomiting and farting but really it's still 1938. In theory that shouldn't be a problem, with good writers and a regular turn over of readers stories of naughty kids should be still as fresh as ever and for a long time it was. Unfortunately the writing is the problem. Mini the Minx and the last Dennis the Menace story are fresh takes on traditional stories and the fathers in each story get past the ineffectual authoritarian slipper wielder and gain a further dimension. Fred's Bed is genuinely funny, working for both kids and adults and Emerson's Beanowatch is a charming and gently funny riff on Bill Oddie's Springwatch. Ball Boy has an excellent punchline with Stonehenge being used as a goal. Roger the Dodger, Ivy the Terrible and The Numbskulls are , sadly, terrible. They're hackneyed reworkings of stories that were stale 40 years ago.

74,000 sales a week is not to be sniffed at but loosen up on the house style in art and writing, recognise that the world has moved on and look for some inventive writers and Beano could be doing 100,000 plus a week again.

2008-04-13T16:37:00.004+01:00

This saddens me. If this is anything to go by, Frank Miller's Spirit will be an extension of his Sin City crap. What I've seen so far suggests he's missed the humour, the humanity and the basic love of life that the spirit embodies

Things I learnt from my father.

2008-04-08T19:54:00.003+01:00

I took the time today to stop and take stock of the things my father gave me. It surprised me just how much there was. Taking things in near chronological order we start with comics. I don't really know my dad's history with comics, I know he read the Gem, the Magnet and the Hotspur as a kid in the 30's and the Eagle when I was a kid. I remember searching for his eagle each week in my pre school days and getting comics like Pippin and Tog each week. The love of comics as a form of story telling has stayed with me all my life so far. Sequential story telling is my football or my train spotting. It's stayed with me and, happily, the material available has grown
with me.

Next and closely connected there's reading. My father taught me to read before I started school. By the time I was eight I'd read every set book and when "reading time" came around I was sent off to the school library to work my way through the books there. This meant, for me, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Roald Dahl and Joan Aiken among others. A couple of years after that I was reading my grandparent's western novels, classic pulp novels and then a world's worth of mythology. These days I've rarely got less than two books on the go at once and I'm busy handing that appreciation of books and reading on to Molly, my daughter.

Then there's drawing. Up to the age of seven my drawing consisted of stick men with stick guns shooting each other all over every sheet of paper. My dad could draw, he was never going to achieve greatness but he was competent and to me, at the time, he was Michelangelo and De Vinci rolled into one. I would get him to draw me pictures of soldiers, not realising he was probably drawing from memory, until one day he was to busy and told me to do something myself. I still remember sitting down with a Marvel comic and drawing a cowboy from an advert for Lone Ranger toys on the back cover. I was so impressed with my work I've been drawing ever since.

Then there was the love of the countryside and old places. My dad instilled a powerful love of all things uniquely British. There's something about British architecture and British countryside that is unique to this country, a 17th century English Farmhouse, bares little resemblance to a French or German or Italian one, despite often using the same materials, and so it goes with churches and townhouses and castles and on and on.

So I guess what I'm saying is "Thanks Dad".

Pogle hunters

2008-03-30T19:34:00.003+01:00

When I was a wee boy one of the first TV programmes to make any lasting impression on me was "The Pogles". This everyday tale of woodland folk can best be described as the Brothers Grimm through a Terry Gilliam lense. To call it wierd is to understate things.

This episode was apparently judged too scarey for children and not shown originally.

One of my most abiding memories of my childhood is walking through woodlands with my parents and my baby sister with my father calling out "Here Pogle, Pogle" as we walked. At four or five this seemed the most normal thing in the world to me, and probably was partly responsible for the strength of my imagination.

strange days

2008-03-23T22:01:00.001Z

My wife and I are pregnant. 7 weeks. Due around 9th November.

Still dazed.

Danny Boy

2008-03-08T22:13:00.002Z

Apparently, with St Patrick's Day less than a couple of weeks away, the owner of an Irish bar in New York has banned the song Danny Boy from being sung in his pub. He has good grounds, it is a depressing and maudlin song and worse, was written by an Englishman who'd never even visited Ireland. Personally I'd like to see the ban extended world wide and only lifted for the end of Irish funerals when everyone is drunk enough to do it justice.

My own family have a history with the song, despite not being even a little bit Irish. My parents have always enjoyed throwing a party, I have memories of them going back into the seventies, and the parties would inevitably involve copious amounts of beer and wine and continue until 3am and later. The closing ceremony usually involved my father and a few of his eldest and closest friends sat around a blazing brazier singing the old songs and the capper to this would usually be Danny Boy. By this point my dad almost always had his harmonica out and be playing along as a half dozen or so very drunk men enjoyed themselves murdering this awful song. These days I find it strangely nostalgic to hear the song but back in the day I can honestly say it was the stuff of nightmares. My parents and their friends were probably the last generation to enjoy the group sing-song as a form of social entertainment, they were also probably the last generation to a common legacy of song to draw on. Popular music today is so diverse and so fractured that it's not an experience we're likely to regain.

So, for my father, I proudly present the finest rendition of Danny Boy known to man. I give you, The Leprechaun Brothers.

Yet more rambling

2008-03-03T20:34:00.004Z

This weekend past I discovered the BBC Iplayer giving me instant access to much of the best and worst of the BBC's output. So far it's enabled me to do three things, catch up on Torchwood, watch the first part of "World of Fantasy" and finally see "Armstrong and Miller".

Torchwood first. I enjoyed the first series of Torchwood, except the finale, in the sameway I enjoy watching, The Persuaders or UFO or Tom Baker's Dr Who. The first series of Torchwood was hokum, pure hokum. The characters were underdeveloped, fences were sat on in certain issues, the story often revolved around monster of the week cliches which weren't original back in the seventies when I first encountered most of them. But the stories were told with a lot of energy and they weren't set in London so I enjoyed them as escapist fantasy.

This second series has been infinitely grimmer but the stories have grown more out of the characters and so have far more depth. The focus has been on Owen's death and resurrection, his reactions and the reactions of Tosh and Captain Jack. The story has been incidental except in so far as it realises the growth of the characters. Owen is no longer a one dimensional shag monster, being dead is moving him rapidly towards being three dimensional and he's actually becomng likable. His chats with the suicidal woman and the bed ridden Richard Briers showed more nuances to the character than the whole of the previous series. When they killed Owen I was glad at the idea of seeing the back of him, but now he's dead I hope he sticks around. Jack too has changed, primarily because the writers and producers seem to feel viewers are okay with him being gay so they seem to be veering more towards that and away from making him bisexual. As they've done that John Barrowman seems to have become more comfortable with the character. The scene between him and Owen in the Police cell, when he gets quite slushy and then slaps Owen's head to re-assert his manhood is the most touching thing I've seen in the programme since it started. They've also cut back on him standing on roof posing heroically which has got to be a bonus. Finally Tosh, who was the most under developed character in the last series, even more neglected than Gwen's boyfriend, is finally a character rather than a cypher. Her awkward relationship with Owen is so realistic and so easy to relate to, we've all been there at some point, that she's become human over night.

The world of Fantasy was the first part of a three part series looking at, well, the worlds of fantasy. It's started with the child hero, growing out of the current Harry Potter phenomenon but paying, thankfully, little time to it. It followed the evolution of the child hero, from Charles Kingsley's Waterbabies through to Potter with a brief look back at fairy tales through readings from everything from Alice In Wonderland to Alan Garner's books and on to Phillip Pullman. The accompanying imagery was also well thought out. Alongside a few clips from films and BBC TV series there was much original film that wasn't so much an adaptation of the work in question as a distillation of the essence of each book and maintained an almost dreamlike quality that served to unify the source material. The series did do something that is becoming a tradition for this sort of programme which is trot out a succession of opinions from comedians, actors and writers. Happily this time they were from folk who had some bearing and something worthwhile to say. Even Phill Jupiter, who seems to appear on every media and culture related series like this was restrained and intelligent. Worth checking out the remaining two episodes.

Finally, Armstrong and Webb. All I can say about this is it made me laugh. The characters in the sketches didn't rely on freak potential unlike things like Little Britain or the Catherine Tate Show. The show had wit, memorable characters and lines you know are going to appear in conversations soon.

Men and manias

2008-03-03T16:01:00.004Z

Working in the Bus industry you learn a lot about the obsessive nature of men. I once had an hour long conversation with my first manager, who like me had come in from outside the industry, about that very subject. She had a great deal of, understandable, disdain for what she referred to as "Bus Nuts" and I tried to explain to her that most men had obsessions. With most it's sport, usually football, or music and because of the prevalence these are considered acceptable, if often boring or annoying if to extreme. Then there are the others, those who hold a relatively obscure obsession. For some it's Hornby model trains, or the Napoleonic War, or comics, or skateboarding or James Bond or Star Wars or one of a million other things that are harmless and come with some sort of less than flattering stereotype. Happily most, on closer inspection, include a broader scope of people and put a lie to the stereotype, but not, so far as I can see, the bus nut.

One of my colleagues, who works in the engineering department and has to deal with a lot of enquiries about the fleet from "enthusiasts", has described their mania as bordering on autism.

For pictorial interest only, This is a bus

From Wikipedia (admittedly not the best source but the easiest to access and understand) comes this definition "Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior". Add to that an obsession with numbers, lists and order and you have a fair description of the average bus enthusiast. It's almost scary how some enthusiasts can give you an entire history for a particular vehicle based solely on it's fleet number. They'll tell you where it's been in service, what make of vehicle it is and it's age, what livery it's painted in and a whole host of other facts that sail far over my head. But even then there's a split between those who have personal hygiene problems and live with their mothers still and those who can pass as normal. Last week two of my colleagues, who seem like normal people most of the time, had a twenty minute conversation, with impersonations, about the noise various types of bus made when you first turned the engines over. It's one thing to hear fat, sweaty men with coke bottle glasses, body odour and an inability to dress themselves have a conversation like that and quite another when it's two people you like and respect.

My comics obsession has never really plumbed that sort of depth but easily could. Though I no longer follow superhero comics and rarely read them now except in the occasional collection borrowed from the library, it's all still there, bubbling under the surface. It wouldn't take much to get me going on "who's the best Green Lantern" or "who's strongest, The Hulk or The Thing". I guess when you're as closed to being branded with a stereotype as I am it makes you a little more aware about writing someone off as a "nut".

What's happening today

2008-03-03T15:00:00.002Z

Hopefully today, my sister comes home after spinal surgery. She went in a week ago and is expected to be sent home today after a successful operation. It has kind of thrown a lot of other things into a lesser light, particularly because my sister, Lindsey, lives in Australia so our understanding of what's gone on is second, third or even fourth hand by the time we get information. The time difference makes communication difficult but I have managed to speak to Lindsey a couple of times and to her husband Paul as well and word seems to be generally positive.

I've got this week off work and hope to split it fairly evenly between drawing and house related jobs. I'd have liked to spend the entire week drawing to be honest but with Karen at home for a couple of those days I've graciously accepted that's not going to happen and I'm going to have to show a little familial responsibility. Still, today's been pretty good on that front and I've been pretty productive. I recently got Illustrator and have done the linework of two pictures on there today. They were my first go with Illustrator and I'm finding vectors to be a strange beast indeed compared to drawing in Photoshop or Painter. They'll have colour added before I even consider showing them in public. On top of that I've inked a page and a half of my Western cartoon strip and hope to have at least the first three pages finished by the end of the week. Finally, after dropping Molly at school, I ventured into Riverside Park and froze my fingers to the bone doing a couple of quick sketches. If I can maintain this level of productivity for the rest of the week it should be a good week.

Also I watched my first ever episodes of Armstrong and Webb on the BBC Iplayer and was mightily amused. The show is more "Fast Show" than "Little Britain" which is good by me as "The Fast Show" was the last sketch to make me laugh out loud.

Coraline trailer

2008-02-27T20:57:00.002Z

It's possibly something to do with my age but as much as I love all story based media, I find it impossible to keep up with allthe things that could be of interest to me. Which is why I was unaware that the wonderful Mr Henry Selick was making a stop motion movie of Neil Gaiman's "Coraline". This Youtube teaser trailer looks absolutely wonderful and, if nothing else, guarantees I'll buy the film on DVD when it's available. Selick worked on two of my three favourite stop motion movies of the last 25 years, the wonderful but underrated "James and the Giant Peach" and the equally wonderful but slightly over rated "Nightmare before Christmas". ( my third favourite is the recent and absolutely stunning version of "Peter and The Wolf"). Before computers took over, stop motion was the best way to create special effects monsters and the like and masters of stop motion like Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien are still rightfully considered genius's in the Realm of special effects. In the world of feature films Selick is probably the only heir to these two men.

If you only check out one of Selick's films I'd recommend James and the Giant Peach, because his
rendition of Roald Dahl's world is very true, darker, more sinister and yet more positive than Tim Burton's very American Halloween/Christmas tale.

Fanfic

2008-02-26T20:58:00.002Z

Fanfic is about wish fulfillment for folks who become very submerged in a fictional world, Buffy and Star Trek being, apparently, the foremost example. A lot of fanfic appears to have grown out of sexual fantasies about characters, fans wanted to imagine sexual or romantic scenes between, for instance, Kirk and Spock. There is nothing inherently wrong in the concept of fan fiction except that there is often a dichotomy between the fantasies of fans and professional writing where characters remain true to themselves. With fan fiction the characters often behave out of character.

By now you're probably wondering what this is about. Well I was thinking about the amount of "professional" fanfic writers now working in my favourite medium, comics. Up until the end of the 60's comics were written by writers. Good or bad, they were writers first and many in fact despised the medium. At the end of the 60's, with the arrival of people like Roy Thomas, you had the arrival of fans turning professional and a mammoth change in the nature of Marvel and DC comics. As a fan you often wonder, who's stronger Hulk or the Thing?, what would happen if Robin left Batman and so on. The first generation of fans turned pro were still firstly writers but with succesive generations these ideas have become primary over writing professionally until you're faced with Mark Millar, the confused Superman reboot (more of the stuff that was written out is written back in again) and Spider-man; one last day. Each of these, as placed within the Marvel and DC universes, is about fan wish fulfillment. Millar will happily twist a character's nature to serve a plot point, Superman was last coherently dealt with in the John Byrne reboot, which like it or not, stayed true to the character even as it played fast and loose with the story dressing and One Last Day is the ultimate wish fulfillment of one particular fan and sadly there is one major cause. The age of the toys everyone is playing with. Millar, the writers who've worked on Superman and Joe Quesada have all created interesting, well written and well told stories that are true to their characters, away from the Marvel and DC sandbox. Yet Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the Avengers and more have been central to the childhood or youth of many of these writers and they feel they have a right to warp and twist them to their hearts content. There is nothing wrong with rewriting the cluttered history of a character, over 40 to 60 years a character collects an awful lot of dross, but the best work remains true to the character and accepts that, after a period of time, the character takes on a life of it's own. I read "One Last Day" and it was a travesty, an abortion, but I also read "Brand New Day" and despite incorporating things I hated, it was a fine Spiderman comic, true to the core of the character.

I love this medium but I find it harder and harder to read the characters of my childhood because the writers writing them are trying to answer all the questions the fascinated me as a fan but I knew should never be answered. I still dip a toe occassionally but in truth I haven't bought an extended run of a Marvel or DC comic for over 10 years apart from the odd event comic. The money I would have spent on these companies is still spent on comics but on much younger characters or independent comics, graphic novels and collections from Image and Dark Horse and Fantagraphics, Top Shelf and others. I'm lucky in that something that was such an integral part of my childhood has grown with me.

My blog is like a cyberman

2008-02-24T23:00:00.001Z

Upgraded that is. I love Firefox and the scribefire add on that makes blogging so easy. No need to log in to Dashboard,i just click on an icon on the bottom of my browser. Now in the right hand column I've added a soundtrack courtesy of Finetune. Pick 45 tracks and embed them in your blog with a simple piece of code. The music is all jazz so if you don't like jazz, don't click on it. The other nice thing about the player is the autoplay code is optional. I hate visiting a site and being met with music I dislike and having to disable the player before I can continue to browse. I like choice. A playlist on a site can enhance your understanding of the site or it's contributors but if the music isn't as much to your taste as their written postings you may not want to listen. It's about choice.

Playing with fire

2008-02-20T21:53:00.001Z

just installed firefox as default browser on my laptop and it comes with a lot of very neat plug ins and add-ons including one called scribefire. Scribefire gives you an easy link to publish to your blog or edit recent posts. Some working out to do but looks promising.

Indy's Back

2008-02-18T08:40:00.004Z

and millions of men in their 30's and 40's are wondering, "Is George Lucas about to piss over their childhoods again"?

Hopefully the answer is no. Lucas wrote the story but not the screenplay so the dialogue shouldn't make me cringe. David Koepp, who did write the screenplay has a good deal of experience having written Zathura, Carlito's Way, Spider-Man, the under appreciated War of the Worlds, which was very true to the source material, and my personal favourite, the first Mission Impossible movie so there's a lot of promise there. Ford looks wonderful and it's great to see a real grown up heading an action movie. I know Shea LeBeouf is in it but from the trailer at least it promises to be an Indy movie with added brat value rather than yet another heroic teen movie.

I've got my fingers crossed and my place booked in the queue to see it as soon as it's released.

Goodbye Steve

2008-02-12T20:40:00.000Z

Steve Gerber is dead.

First time I've cried over a person I only knew through their work.

Steve Gerber was a mere 60 years old. Waiting for a lung transplant. He was writing more comics and now he's gone. Sometimes life stinks.

God rest Steve.

Gus Ariola

2008-02-04T19:20:00.000Z

Yet another great cartoonist, that far too few people know, is dead. I Discovered Gus Arriola through an article by R C Harvey in the Comics Journal and immediately fell in love with his clean artwork and funny jokes. Funny jokes are still a rarity among newspaper cartoon strips and the handful of Arriola's cartoons I saw always raised a chuckle at the very least. Gus Arriola was a man with a mission, he wanted his primarily white audience to learn about his home country of Mexico and, building on 40's racial stereotypes of the fat and lazy Mexican, Ariola exceeded all expectations and, once established, proceeded to tell tales that involved all aspects of Mexican culture and history.

Arriola was a classic cartoonist in the style, I suppose, of a Disney storyboard man, he could have compared favourably with any of Disneys nine old men. He wasn't afraid to experiment though and when he did so he was in a rare class indeed, approaching the work of Cliff Sterret and Frank King in design.

Take the time to seek out examples of Arriola's work, it's going to be worth your while.

Swimming

2008-02-03T15:52:00.000Z

I can't swim but each week, along with a number of other mostly non-swimming parents, I take my for her swimming lesson. Molly's an interesting mix of fearless and timid when it comes to anything physical. One moment she's braver than any of her boy mates and the next she's choking back tears rather than do something seemingly simple. Swimming though has been a real eye opener. She takes lessons in a small, 5 meter, private pool with no more than 3 other kids. Julia, the teacher, is an absolute bloody marvel and really makes all the difference. Like all great teachers she has an inate knack for knowing how far she can push a child, when to encourage, when to be tough and when to back off. This week Molly was the only child there for the session and Julia decided she was going to tech her to swim underwater and pick things up off the bottom of the pool.

Molly looked a little nervous, mostly because one of her friends was due to come and check the lesson out, but followed Julia's instructions and, on her first dive, picked a large plastic starfish up off the bottom of the pool. Great form on her first go but the next couple were a bit wobbly. Then Aedan turns up, whole family in tow, and Molly moves into overdrive. She keeps giving me the starfish and getting me to throw it for her then diving and bringing it back. On the fourth or fifth go I dropit too close to the edge of the pool. My daughter walks away through the pool to the laddder and climbs out. I figure I've put her off by making it too difficult and am busy kicking myself inwardly. She stops in front of me facing the pool, points her hands downwards and dives head first into the water, surfacing moments later with the starfish and a very triumphant smile. Julia's jaw drops and hits the water, mine hits the poolside then we both start cheering and high fiving. Molly calmly flips the starfish over her shoulder, duckdives and does an unexpected forward roll in the water. Again she comes up smiling and this time Julia's on it. "Wow, you did a forward roll under the water. That's amazing. Do you think you could do two?"

Molly looks at her nervously and shakes her head, holding on to Julia's arm, and then lets go and proceeds to do a double forward roll under the water. By this time both Julia and I are calling her a show-off jokingly. Molly thinks it's great and spends the rest of the day telling everyone she's a show off.

There's something incredible about seeing your child do something for the first time, but when it's something you can't do yourself the feeling of pride is so strong you feel you could bust.

Marvel Zombies

2008-01-30T22:04:00.000Z

Comics fans are a funny bunch, they scream and howl and threaten boycotts but never stop buying their Marvel fix. The latest "outrage" to upset Marvel fans has been the resetting of Marvel continuity to remove the "Spider-Man marriage". The man in charge at Marvel, one Joe Quesada, has whipped the fans into a frenzy of polarised hate it love it ecstasy. As with everything that's happened in Marvel comics since Stan Lee hired fans as writers everything is tied to this obsession with continuity. Spider-Man never got married and some 20 years worth of story are no longer canon and as such no one knows for sure what continuity is anymore.

I've always been more of a story fan than a continuity fan. I like a good story where the character behaves true to himself. Having Spider-Man start using a gun would not be true to the character, having Spider-Man make a deal with the Devil would not be true to the character. As I understand it Spider-Man didn't make the deal, Mary Jane did out of her love for Peter Parker and his Aunt. It may have been a crappy story but it was true to character in both cases. Mary Jane's story has mostly been about what she's willing to sacrifice for Peter Parker/Spider-Man.

More importantly perhaps, the stories still exist. If you choose to reread a certain set of stories then Pete and Mary Jane are still married and in that sense always will be.

Most importantly, "Brand New Day" was a good Spider-Man story. Dan Slott wrote a good story with many classic Spider-Man moments. I haven't really read Spider-Man for some twenty years or more but I read "Brand New Day" and I enjoyed it.

The wife's first boyfriend

2008-01-24T19:52:00.000Z

Karen's been going through her and Molly's keepsakes. Karen's included love letters from her first boyfriend. Curiousity gets the better of me in these situations so we just had to Google him. Currently the slushly what not is playing professional Basketball for the Teesside Mohawks. Steven Butler, the boy in question, has been playing professional basketball for more than ten years and as a teenager wrote the soppiest letters ever written. His teasm mates would love them.

OU

2008-01-24T18:50:00.000Z

I've just sent off my essay and reflection for my OU course so I've the opportunity to breath for a moment. Word counts are a killer, trying to "compare and contrast the portrayal of women in mid-Victorian times using two texts" in 1000 words was absolute murder. I had texts by John Ruskin, well known Pre-Raphaelite fanboy, and Henry Mayhew, less well known writer and journalist. Mayhew wrote extensively about the Victorian London poor in a vaguely responsible version of tabloid journalism.

My initial draft of the essay ran to 1500 words and contained a great deal of what I thought was interesting supplimentary material that gave greater background to the essay. Cutting much of this in the editing phase was quite disheartening but the final essay reads well. Ruskins divorce put his writing in such perfect context and Mayhew's friendships with other writers and his visits to the Court of Bankruptcy made his writing about prostitution among needlewomen all the more sympathetic.

I can't say I'm looking forward to the next module.

in defence of Don Heck

2008-01-17T13:01:00.000Z

I was reading the rather excellent website comics comics about the nature of craft and how it's tied to the influences peculiar to the time and place that an artist grew up in. The idea posited was that no modern artist can be , for example, Alex Toth, no matter how hard they try to emulate his style, because they didn't grow up subject to the same environmental influences. They can build on the techniques he used influenced by their own environmental influences. It's an interesting idea, and one with a great deal of validity but not what really got my attention. No what got my attention was this "Don Heck, long reviled as one of the worst hacks in the Marvel Bullpen, was a solid storyteller." The writer, Frank Santoro never commented on the "worst hack" label but offered up Heck as an example of a solid story teller who knew how to structure a page. Most comics fans my age(43) and younger mostly know Heck from his work on books like Wonder Woman back in the mid seventies. To be perfectly frank these books are not his best work and are not helped by the stories he was illustrating. It would probably be fair to say that by the seventies Heck was being sidelined as fill in artist and a man past his prime. A fate that befell many of his colleagues from the fifties and sixties much more quickly and was unfair to Heck as he was only in his 40's at the time. Heck was a strong, fluid artist who had not only a great grasp of storytelling but could produce a powerful cover image as well.
Avengers 36 cover

I had the good fortune to see much of Don Heck's Marvel work in reprint during the seventies thanks to Marvel UK reprint books and his Avengers was probably my first favourite book. His renditions of the Avengers gave a constant sense of the power of them. His Captain America was large and dominating, his Quicksilver all sleek lines and his Scarlet Witch could have bewitched my 9 year old self quite happily.

Heck's misfortune was to be a solid craftsman and storyteller in an age when fans were entering the business as professionals and readers were demanding whistles and bells over quality. It's suprising looking back at the seventies how many of the artists who entered comics then, Brunner, Wrightson, Kaluta, Windsor Smith and Ploog, to name but a few were better known for their illustration work or illustrational style. And if you look at what has reprinted from that time, it's interesting to note how much of it is the solid storytelling work of men like Heck, Kirby, Colan, Swan, Kubert and men of their generation. 30 Years from now will the big companies, if they still exist in the same form they do now, be reprinting people like MacFarlane in the same way?

comics reviews

2008-01-12T21:43:00.000Z

I've got a second site, called "Blues in the Dark", where I'm now reviewing items from my weekly comics purchases. There are three reviews there already so do check it out.

New Year

2008-01-06T20:26:00.001Z

Well like many people I started the year by taking stock and reviewing various parts of my life and considering resolutions. Last year was not a bad year all in all. It had it's low points, some of which were very low, but artistically particularly it was a pretty good year.

Sensibly this year I kept my resolutions simple. Last year I drew more than I have in probably the last five, this year I intend to draw more. I'm not setting myself goals such as drawing daily as they seem to suck the pleasure out of drawing. My other resolution is a little more difficult. It's to follow a creative idea through to the end, not give up. Somewhere along the line I forgot that for most of us who have the creative desire it's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and while it's fun it's also requires work to create something.

I have aims for the year though, ideas I want to follow through,

There's a western, "2000 miles", which is currently a story outline waiting to happen. Probably in comic form and 16 pages."A horde of winter gods" is a supernatural love story, there's an idea for a kids book that I've been batting around in my head for several years now and finally there are a couple of pictures (paintings) living in my head at the moment that need to come out. There may be a story to go with them, I'm not entirely sure.

Of course I hit a first bump within days of the new year starting. Climbing into the loft to put the Christmas Decorations away I managed to slice open the little finger on my drawing hand almost down to the first joint. So everytime I try to do something I'm more worried about banging my finger and the accompanying pain and when I forget to worry I inevitably hit it and end up with my eyes watering from the pain. It's still hard to believe something so stupid could hurt so much.

My nephew the hero

2007-11-28T20:23:00.000Z

My nephew Mitchell Griffin has just won the Tasmanian karting championship for his age group. He's an superb racer, who despite his small stature for his age, has an incredible mental attitude towards racing that makes him a winner all the way to my mind, whether he comes first or last. Happily he comes first more often than last. Lewis Hamilton came up from the same route apparently, so who knows how far he could go with this.

And don't you just love his victory salute.

I have made a foolish commitment

2007-11-27T20:55:00.000Z

In a moment of madness I allowed my darling wife, who knows what buttons to push, to talk me in to beginning an open degree with the Open University. I have begun with something fairly stimulating but straight forward as my first module, "Start writing essays".

My fir, st task is to analyse this question in no more than 350 wordsCompare and contrast the representation of women in two mid-Victorian texts.

I came up with this

The essay question above has three key words, compare, contrast and representation. The most important of these has to be representation. Use of the word representation highlights the understanding that no text is factually definitive, it merely “represents” the author's “view” of the role of women in Victorian times. Each text can only focus on the segment of the female population relevant to it's subject matter and provide a contextual overview of the life of someone within that level of the social strata. Further it must be appreciated that the texts include fiction and poetry, both of which have literary demands, beyond the reportage of fact. These story based requirements can result in details being exaggerated for dramatic effect. It should also be considered that writers of journalistic works and socially aware and philanthropically motivated essayists would likely be writing to emphasise a particular side of a moral debate, reflecting, perhaps the growing Victorian interest in scientific explanations of the the world around us and the workings of society in particular.

This does mean that any effort to compare and contrast is fraught with danger. It was possible then, perhaps even more so than now, to find two very disparate Englands. The birth of the Industrial Age gave some men great wealth and the ability to indulge their philanthropic interests, at the same time as leaving many to live in abject poverty in slums. There is a dichotomy between hard scientific or religious belief on one hand, as demonstrated in the “change or die” nature of social Darwinism, and the almost Socialist philanthropic beliefs of people like William Hesketh Lever, founder of Port Sunlight and “Christian duty” urge to philanthropy among Anglicans, Methodists and non-conformists. Due to this care must be taken not to place to great a reliance on any one text as no writer has any greater veracity than another. Any comparisons drawn,or contrasts made, must be done with due consideration given not only to the work but also to the writer and his social, philanthropic and scientific views, as best they may be known.

Which basically means "each writer has an agenda, either social or literary which has to be taken into account when looking at what they each have to say about the role of women in Mid-Victorian society."

Or to put it another way, after years of training myself to write with direction, purpose and clarity, I now have to learn to waffle.

Superstition

2007-11-22T21:02:00.000Z

I wanted to avoid the usual suspects for a Illustration Friday entry on superstition so I googled around and found a superstition I liked. Apparently for every falling leaf you catch you get one month's good luck. Hence the picture.

Reading level

2007-11-21T19:26:00.000Z

Just been reading my favourite blog, Eddie Campbell's Fate of the Artist, and came across this (alleged) test of the reading level needed to understand the content of a blog. Campbells blog only came in at High School level, which I must admit suprised me.

Cash Advance Loans

What suprised me more was that mine came in as College Undergrad. I'm really not sure what that says about my writing.

Now must get back to my Illustration Friday entry.

Harold Gray

2007-11-11T20:27:00.000Z

Harold Gray is one of those artists I've only come to appreciate as I've got older and been able to recognise the craft behind his superficially awkward figure work and scarey blank eyed characters. I'm not sure how to describe Gray's politics because everything I've read on him seems to have a different view on where he stood politically, but idealogically he was very conservative, seemed to see things very much in black and white and comes across as a staunch traditionalist and indivdualist. I imagine he had little time for the hippies who were so prominent in the USA when he died in 1968 which is what made the picture below such a curiousity.

Published by Lund Humphries, A Century of Posters puts this image as circa 1970. To my eye it could have been drawn by Harold Gray, although I am sure there are scholars out there who could say for sure, but the image of a fingerclicking Daddy Warbucks in pinstriped and flared Levis, doing a can can on his armchair, must be one that would have Gray turning in his grave.

Photoshop

2007-11-10T15:04:00.000Z

This past 2 weeks have all been about experimentation with Photoshop. I've never had training or a real opportunity to do more than very basic photo editing on it. The past 2 weeks though I've been reading on line tutorials and trying out new things, repeating them over and over until I understand how to do them. It's all fairly simple stuff to anyone who uses it frequently but this is virgin territory to me so I'm quite pleased with the results, like this,

Turning a selected element in a colour picture into black and white,

and this

Turning an image into the kind of thing you often see on pc wallpapers and 60@s posters, subject matter withstanding.

or removing a background like this

As I say, simple stuff but all new to me.

Illustration Friday - Scale

2007-11-10T14:48:00.000Z

The idea came easy. The picture itself came relatively easy. And then I decided to colour it in Photoshop. First real time doing that. Desk surrounded by clumps of hair pulled out. Applied only one filter, ignoring the urge to use more. And all the while Jimi Hendrix plays "all Along The Watchtower.

The final image was loosely influenced by Picasso's poster work which was in a book I'm currently reading. I'm no Picasso but I loved the very loose, almost wobbly line of the poster images.

Insert foot

2007-10-28T22:30:00.000Z

sometimes, in support of the people I care about, I have a habit of opening my mouth without thinking things through. This is not new failing on my part, when I was 12 or so years old my dad gave me a card that said "engage brain before opening mouth" so that's at least 30 years.

My wife, Karen, has many good points, her unfaltering faith in the innate goodness of people and her willingness to help anyone being two of the most prominent. She is a Christian by faith and a pretty good example of one by and large in her dealings with the people around her. This unfortunately makes me all the more protective when someone takes advantage of her good nature, screws her over or otherwise upsets her.

My personal experience with the members of Karen's Church has been that they are good people who are fortunate enough to have something to believe in above and beyond the corporeal. Unfortunately there are always a few who wear their belief like a badge of superiority and, to be frank, have their head so far up their own arse that they do for Christianity what Osama Bin Laden has done for the Muslim Faith.

One such person, waving his godliness like a big stick with which to chastise others, has recently caused a great deal of upset within her church before leaving in high dudgeon. He caused Karen a great deal of sadness and took advantage of her good nature, although she doesn't see it that way. He got Karen teaching his son to play drums, which she was happy to do, and borrowed a library book from her which had drumming exercises in it. He then promptly misplaced the library book and ignored several requests for it's return, leaving Karen to deal with the embarrassment of telling the library she no longer had the book and was unable to return it and to deal with the financial implications of paying any fine to replace the book. I would have been happy to write this off as sheer thoughtlessness and stupidity on his part but for the fact the man has a website and a blog where he rants on and on about God's ideals and living in God and how blessed he is by God and the complete perfidy of this sanctimonious buffoon is impossible to stomach.

So this afternoon I left a comment on his blog pointing out that I was pleased he had such a good relationship with his God and what a shame he couldn't bring the same ideals into his dealings with the people around him. This action did not sit well with Karen however. Fortunately he has his blog set so he gets to approve every comment before it's published so I doubt it will be seen on his blog. Hopefully the comment will prick his conscience although, judging by his behaviour to date, he will more likely throw his toys out of the pram once more, striking out at those around him.

I should have thought of that before commenting but it would seem I'm still impulsive in defense of friends and family.

Grow, Illustration Friday

2007-10-24T22:28:00.001+01:00

My latest piece for Illustration Friday. Four days in production, eventually I had to stop or miss the deadline. It lacks a little in execution but I'm happy with the idea.

life gets in the way

2007-10-18T21:40:00.000+01:00

There are times when life just gets too hectic and something has to give. This has been one of those weeks and so Illustration Friday had to give. I'm disappointed because having a reason to draw and a deadline has been a very good thing for me. This week work has been absolutely hectic, my lovely Karen hit 32 years of age, we had to sort out Molly's upcoming birthday party, there've been a couple of minor family crises and Karen's not been feeling to grand which has meant looking out for both the ladies in my life.

I've missed drawing for I.F. but I'll be making an early start this week on whatever the new topic turns out to be.

Indio Poster art

2007-10-15T14:28:00.000+01:00

One of my favourite forms of art is advertising poster art. I'm a big fan of the classic poster art of the 30's and 40's for air and sea travel, the London Underground posters and the European car manufacturers posters of that time as well. The combination of a clear message and a striking graphic has always struck me as an impressive skill that is somewhat lacking in many of todays artists and illustrators working in the field. There are great poster artists out there but many seem to work in niches now, photography has pushed them out of the "mainstream".

Now this bit seems to go off on a tangent a bit but bear with me. I have a site counter on Inclined to Ramble that gives me info and statistics on visitors and one visitor who's been back a time or two comes from, according to their ip address, Indio, California. Now the novelty of knowing thast someone half a world away is even glimpsing at my ramblings is quite a novelty so I googled Indio, California and it seems to be a pretty art loving town. It has some stunning wall murals and what appears to be a massive annual arts festival and each year the festival has a poster. See you knew I'd get back to the point eventually.

The posters are uniformlly stunning and featured below is my personal favourite.

If your taste lies towards such posters I heartily recommend you check out the rest through Southwest Arts Festival Posters

And if you're in Indio and reading this, thanks very much for dropping by.

Blogger action day

2007-10-14T22:15:00.001+01:00

Apparently today some 7000+ bloggers have agreed to include an environmental issue on their blog. When it comes to environmental issues I am trying, like many people, to balance practicalities and ideals.

I was born in a country village which meant chasing escaped pigs down the road when they escaped from the slaughterman's van, necking chickens, skinning rabbits, collecting chestnuts, hazelnuts and blackberries. It meant you treated the environment with respect because it it helped in part to feed you and if you didn't respect it then it would turn around and bite you on the arse. Such as when a friend and I decided to frighten some cows. Not a wise decision as, for such big eyed and docile looking creatures, they can be bloody terrifying when twenty of them come stampeding towards you mooing insanely, a lesson learned and an act not repeated.

The problem today comes because the respect is not there as evidenced by something that happened to my Brother in Law.

My brother in law, Steve often walks with his wife, daughter and Springer Spaniel at the Royal Victoria Country Park, which fronts onto the Southampton Water and is home to a large number of seabirds. Walking there one day they came across a bunch of teenagers stoning a seagull. My brother in Law is a fireman with a shaved head and can look incredibly ferocious and scarey, particularly when faced with this sort of loutish behaviour and my sister, Wendy, although very feminine can be equally scarey when necessary. They saw off the group of kids with little worry or any backchat and Steve then stripped to his boxers and plunged into the chilly water to rescue the bird. I believe, though stunned by the stones, the seagull was okay in the end. He reported the teenagers to the police and carried on with his life. Steve, to me, is something of an environmental hero (on a small scale). He's not afraid to get involved, he has an allotment where he and Wendy grow a fair amount of their own veg, he cycles to work and he supports small local businesses and farmers markets where ever he can.

Steve and Wendy are an example of how to make a difference, if everybody followed their exampla and looked after the bit of the world around them as well as they do the world would be a better place.

PostSecret

2007-10-14T21:50:00.000+01:00

I'm not a fan of reality shows, talk shows and fly on the wall documentaries as a whole but PostSecret is very different. PostSecret is like looking into the windows you pass while driving or riding on a train and briefly glimpsing an intimate moment of a stranger. It's anonymous and a little voyeuristic but carries an immense amount of emotion in every card. It's as if every life has the dramatic and emotional highs and lows of a classic 40's movie, there are hints of the last moments of Casablanca, Mrs Minerva and The Ghost and Mrs Muir. There are sad secrets and happy secrets and secrets that are like barbed wire around your heart.

PostSecret is one of those things the word "poignant" was created for

Look at the ad for the book

PostSecrets video

Look at the website

PostSecret blog

or buy the book

PostSecret book

Which ever you do have the tissues to hand.

illustration Friday (part 2)

2007-10-10T06:10:00.001+01:00

I also came up with this

which was a sketch for a western comic I'm working on at the moment.

Now I'm torn between the two.

Update; on a snap decision the door won out but I stuffed up posting the thumbnail on IF so it probably willbe seen by very few people.

Illustration Friday part 1

2007-10-10T06:07:00.000+01:00

initially I came up with this, I've tried not to be too clever and just work on straight forward interpretations.

But then....

DIY (Sketchpads that is)

2007-10-08T19:28:00.000+01:00

One of the bug bears for the more reserved artist, like myself, is how to sketch in public without drawing attention to yourself, (pun intended). The moleskine is the smallest quality sketchpad I've so far managed to find but even that can be a bit obvious when you're out and about working in it. Then I found this website, thanks Stumble Upon, and I have sketch pads for all occasions in all sizes for a fraction of the cost a Moleskine.

Make your own sketchpad

These are pictures of my first book, I found 3 or more signatures works better as it's easier to sew them tightly.

The instructions are clear and easy to follow and using off-cuts from a printer at work and odds and sods lying around the house I have a hand sewn 32 page hardback sketchpad that fits perfectly in my pocket, total cost £1.10 and an hour of my time.

The downside to Illustration Friday

2007-10-06T18:16:00.000+01:00

Actually the title's a joke. From what I can see there is no downside. In the first 3 days after I posted my entry I had over 120 visits to inclined to ramble from people following the link for a better look, I got 3 very complimentary comments from other artists, who when following links back turned out to be very fine artists themselves, and praise from peers is always much appreciated. Finally I've got the enthusiasm to keep going.

So now I'm back to the sketch pad to think about "open".

my daughter the sports hero

2007-10-02T22:52:00.001+01:00

My daughter, bless her, is proving to be most unlike her dear old pa in someways, particularly her appreciation of football. Molly is the only girl out of 20 kids in an after school football group. Each week a small trophy is awarded to the best player or the person who tried hardest and this week, the fourth week, she brought it home with her. She was so excited with a grin so big I thought she'd swallow her ears. The trophy has pride of place on our mantelpiece now I've managed topry it from her fingers.

blues, illustration friday

2007-10-02T21:59:00.000+01:00

Blues was a good one to start with. The image is nothing groundbreaking but it's a start. As confidence grows so will the quality of the work, hopefully.

Naturally I stuffed things up so the thumbnail appears twice. Still it's out there so that's something. Next time better drawing.

Alan Watts on Faith

2007-09-25T20:38:00.000+01:00

Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Which speaks to more than than just faith in God, it also speaks to faith in ourselves and our abilities. Last night a friend asked me to make her a model slug, a bizarre request on the surface and not one where the reasons need going into. Suffice to say it was important and I agreed to do it. She had faith in me that I could come up with the goods and that gave me faith in myself. This morning I gave her the slug and she did what she had to do with it. What usually holds me back in creative situations is clinging to the belief thatI am a particular type of creative person and strangling my abilities. Instead I need faith that I can do what I want to do and just do it. There is an intuitive, zenlike quality to creativity, a moment of touching god, where things work out the way they should,problems come from over thinking what is essentially an emotional response. I think that is true of all creativity, be it art or writing or cartooning.

post 100

2007-09-24T16:27:00.000+01:00

This is my 100th post. Something of a landmark for me as I'm not reknowned for sticking at things. Over the past 99 posts I've talked about things that inspire me, things that influence me, things that hold me back and things I think are just out and out great. The posts have been largely unfocussed however and have not really fulfilled their purpose. The purpose of the blog was/is to focus me on producing something on a regular basis, maybe not daily but aiming for several times a week. Blog entries were produced fairly regularly but now it's time to step things up.

I need to back myself into a corner so first off, I will check out Illustration Friday and enter something for it each week.

If that goes alright then second, in a few weeks, I will post a page of a comic each week.

I will be creative even if it makes me miserable.

Alan Watts meets South Park

2007-09-24T14:25:00.000+01:00

Sometmes you just stumble across something that puts things into perspective. Trey Parker of South Park fame apparently had a Buddhist for a father and this seems to have lead to him arranging these animations of the work of Alan Watts. Watts is a British philosopher and writer on comparative religions and was a very entertaining speaker. Check out life ands music

Alan Watts Animated

nightmares and privacy issues.

2007-09-23T16:34:00.000+01:00

Work this week has been an absolute nightmare. My boss has been off for the week and the entire and I and my two colleagues have spent it sorting out things she's either forgotten or neglected to do or things she's stuffed up. We're also working on a tight deadline for a major project that has been blown out of the water by cleaning up after her. This has played havoc with everything from team relationships, hit rock bottom, to the rest of the company's view of our team, also plummeting.

I work in a largely male dominated business and my boss is a young woman in her first management role. My colleagues are very unforgiving of failure and have been putting the knife in with management and the board at every opportunity. I've been following round trying to remain supportive and pointing out that she's trying to do the job she was hired for, with very little quality support, rather than doing the job everyone, apart from the director who hired her (who has now left), wants and expects her to do. Something I'm struggling with because of the number of headaches she's causing me. Between that and her relative inexperience, and the problems that come with her youth and inexperience, she's got very little chance of surviving in her post unless she gets some decent guidance from her management.

Coming home and having a chance to watch both the second part of Comics Britannia and Jonathan Ross's documentary "In Search of Steve Ditko" brightened my weekend immeasurably. Comics Britannia looked at British adventure comics from The Eagle to Battle and Action in the seventies and was, once again, excellent. Listening to Pat Mills talk about Charlies War was definitely the highlight. The clever intercutting of images from the comic and documentary footage from the first world war showed how sublimely perfect the comic was. Hearing MIlls describe the story as something more from a girls comic of the period was a real eye opener. I'd realised on a subconscious level I think that the book was very underplayed and more concerned with the personal relationships of the teen protagonist and his friends than the heroics that were standard fare in boys comics, but it never really entered my conscious brain. In many ways it was very much a forerunner for Alan Moore's Halo Jones.

In search of Steve Ditko didn't really tell me anything new but it's always interesting to hear others talk about genius. The history of his work in the medium, even with the focus on Spider-Man and Dr Strange, was entertaining and the ending, where Ross, in the company of Neil Gaiman, playing Etta Candy to Ross's Wonder Woman, finally met Ditko, and chatted to him for 25 minutes, sans camera, were priceless. How many people could have made a documentary about a semi reclusive artist and actually respected his wish for privacy, not speaking of the details of their meeting? Very few I imagine. The style of the documentary was similar to those of Michael Moore or Louis Theroux but I doubt either of those gents would have put Ditko's right to privacy above their film or programme. Good work Mr Ross.

Lunch and bed

2007-09-21T11:56:00.000+01:00

I'm pissed off and I'm going home to bed.

Comics Britannia

2007-09-18T10:52:00.000+01:00

Finally saw the first part of comics Britannia last night and I have to say I was mightily impressed. The comics panel framing of interviewees worked suprisingly well and the background on DC Thompson, Beano and Dandy and the wonderful artists who worked there, Dudley Watkins and Leo Baxendale particularly, was in depth enough to avoid the "pow zap" approach of many comics related documentaries and newspaper articles. My appreciation for the penmanship of some of these British Cartoonists has grown considerably over the past few years as I've come to appreciate how much harder it is to create non-photographic style artwork that is clear and consistent.

The show was well put together and nicely covered the politics involved in the publishing world as Watkins was exempted from military service because he was more valuable drawing for DC Thompson, and how Baxendale was stiched up by various publishers as he tried to get some sort of reasonable control over and recompense for his work.

Dudley Watkins penwork leaves me in awe.

Amazed or horrified

2007-09-18T10:23:00.000+01:00

Just found this via Warren Ellis.com and I'm not sure if I should be amazed or horrified. The superb photos speak for themselves and the idea of aiming a supertanker at the beach and rammiing it full speed sounds like the ultimate thrill ride, but 200,000 Bangladeshi shipbreaking in these atriocious conditions is horrifying. Yet any international outcry against the work and conditions would probably cost half these people their livelyhood.

Go look and see. You can even click on the link now I found out how to make it work.

amazing photos

43 and a week

2007-09-15T22:40:00.000+01:00

usually, for me, birthdays have been a miserable time of reflection on missed opportunities and lack of productivity. My lovely wife Karen has spent much of our married life trying to make me enjoy my birthdays with varying degrees of success. This year she succeeded beyond anybody's expectations and I had a fun, relaxed birthday spent largely drunk in the company of friends and family. It was the sort of birthday I always told myself I would hate and I loved it. I smiled, laughed, chatted and was generally sociable in the extreme. I gave no thought to the passing of another year or to things I had or had not achieved. It was birthday Nirvana.

destruction as stress relief

2007-09-15T15:32:00.001+01:00

Work at the moment is a nightmare. My new boss is very young and doing a job that was mis-sold to her. She wqas hired as a marketing manager by a director who came into the very insular and hide bound ( I think that's the term) public transport industry from outside on a fasttrack to somewhere else. The marketing post has not previously involved an awful lot of marketing, it was mostly ensuring that internal and external communications needs were met. The public had timetables and the press were dealt with. The progressive director who thought we should be doing marketing and wanted a marketing manager left and now my boss is at the mercy of colleagues and management who feel she isn't doing her job properly, because she's doing the job she was hired for rather than the one the post needed. This has lead her to make quite a few errors and errors in other peoples view. This is leading to a great deal of backstabbing, bitching, moaning and general bad feeling. If I had an office to myself that would be bad enough but, unfortunately, I'm stuck in an open plan office that is also a through fare for a lot of folks looking to share an opinion.

So over the last week I've noticed I'm drinking more. Not to excess, 2 or three bottles of beer a night, but I felt I was going a bit crazy if I drank 2 or 3 bottles a week previously and a several hundred percent increase is not a good thing. Anyway, today I'm home alone, the girls are out having a girly shopping afternoon. I was aware our front garden was overgrown and verging on a jungle, so I went out and hacked a whole load of vegitation to the ground. There are now three big piles of garden detritus in a much tidier front garden awaiting disposal, I can hardly see from the sweat dripping in my eyes and I feel so much better for the exhertion. The urge to scream is gone, as is the urge for a beer, although I may have one tonight, and my mind feels much clearer.

The question of course is, was it the destruction or the activity that made me feel better. I'm hoping the destruction because if it was the activity then there's a point to excercise after all.

Life on Mars

2007-09-08T17:22:00.000+01:00

I finally watched the last three episodes of Life on Mars (series 2) which definitely got a BBM1 rating. The series as a whole was absolutely superb and the lack of a really clear explanation at the end was probably the only way to go. Karen and I spent some time discussing what we thought happened. I plumped for John Carter of Mars style psychic time travel in the end. I think the coma freed Sam's psyche to travel back to 1973 where it took on a corporeal form, connected to and interacting with his "real" self in 2006. For me this explains how the hospital was abl to affect him in 1973 and means he is still alive and free in 1973, his anchor to our present now gone. But I am something of a romantic so I couldn't look at his return to 1973 as the last delusions of a dying man.

The show was a nostalgic, though not rose coloured, view back at the 70's with strong overtones of "The Sweeney" and "Get Carter". A show set in the past never captures the true reality of the period, only a nostalgic reflection of it seen through a slightly tarnished mirror. That said the setting of the show definitely hit a chord with me as someone who grew up during the 70's and it captured the brown and tan tones the decade had in my memories and anything British set outside London is a bonus still.

Life on Marswasagreat show that will bear up well under repeated viewings.

Music

2007-09-05T06:38:00.000+01:00

Most men of my acquaintance are fixated on music or football. The football thing escapes me but the music obsession fascinates me There seem to be three basic types of male music obsessive. Those obsessed with a music style from before they were born, this can be anything from Mississippi Delta blues to the work of Lonnie Donnegan, those fixated on music from the best period of their life, punk, dance, electronica etc, and those who need to be always on the cutting edge, out with the old in with the new. (Warren Ellis is probably a fine example of this type). Men whose obsession lies elsewhere tend to have no specific leaning towards a genre of music.

The third type seems to me to be mainly a way of fighting off the encroachment of old age by being, or at least appearing, hip. Being only a day away from my 43rd birthday I can understand the feeling behind that. The other two groups seem peculiarly self limiting. They focus on one corner of a vast artistic arena to the exxclusion of everything else. Admittedly this behaviour isn't restricted to music, people do the same thing with books, tv, comics films and theatre and in many other areas as well.

I cannot imagine going through life watching only medical dramas, or Sci Fi movies or only reading murder mysteries or reading Archie comics or going to musicals. It would seem as stiffling as only eating cornflakes for breakfast everyday and kippers for tea and only drinking water. The mind craves variety.

When confronted by this closed attitude to other areas I am reminded of my late Grandma who refused to eat brocolli as it was "foreign muck". This sort of closed mindedness verges on intentional stupidity and I find I need to challenge it wherever I meet it. Don't let the human race get any stupider introduce someone you know to a new eperience today.

The Big Blue

2007-09-01T09:16:00.000+01:00

The wife has a rating system for movies based on "The Big Blue". we disagreed on whether the ending was happy or depressing. I felt it was a positive ending but Karen thought it was pretty darned depressing and started to rate movies on that basis, hence Solaris was a Big Blue Movie(BBM) and last night Danny Boyle's Sunshine was a BBM. Maybe it's a male/female thing but any movie where the leads defeat a psychotic villain, reignite the sun and save the Earth, that's a positive ending. Admittedly they all died, some pretty horribly, but they achieved a greater good. For Karen, however, everyone dying makes for a sad ending.

So the rating system goes like this

BBM +3 A film where everyone starts off dead and it goes down hill from there
BBM +2 A film where everyone dies at the end
BBM +1 A film where it would be better if everyone had died
BBM The Big Blue. A movie where one or more main character dies
BBM -1 A film where the main character ends up very depressed
BBM -2 A film where everyone survives but with some change. A Hollywood blockbuster
BBM -3 A Hollywood Rom-com

It needs some refining but thisis what we're currently working from.

Holiday

2007-08-26T21:26:00.000+01:00

Started our week holiday today with a visit to the Alice themed Adventure Wonderland near Bournemouth Airport. Took our daughter Molly and her best mate Aedan who had the finest time. Tomorrow we're off to London for a few days to take in the Natural History and Science Museum. Full report to follow on Friday.

A railway Station of my own

2007-08-24T14:55:00.000+01:00

Apparently there's a railway station bearing my name in Copenhagen.

Holy shit it's the Human Fly

2007-08-24T10:37:00.000+01:00

Look! It's the Human Fly. Thanks Warren Ellis. I'd forgotten there was a "real" Fly until I saw this,

The Human Fly was a 70's Marvel comic with very cool art by Frank Robbins, Lee Elias and Bob Lubbers about a "real" escape artist and stunt man. Art aside it had very little to recommend it but Robbins, Elias and Lubbers were enough for me. The book was written by Bill Mantlo in a sort of A Team style that was entertaining but essentially very throw away.

Stephen Fry don't read this.

2007-08-22T09:42:00.001+01:00

Scandinavian film, literature and legends often seem to have a melancholic air about them that reflects something in the nature of the land or the people. From the doom that hangs over the Norse myths to the Little Mermaid to the films of Ingmar Bergman. For me however few things illustrate this melancholia as well as Tove Jansson's Moomin books.

I've just started reading Moominvalley in November, coincidentally BBC 4 have just started advertising "The Secret life of the manic depressive" with Stephen Fry. This is not a book for a manic depressive and I heartily recommend Stephen Fry doesn't read it. If the book was a painting it would be all in shades of blue and grey, it's an early Autumn day when you know the world is about to get colder and darker, if it were a song it would be the plaintive sound of Edith Piaf, it's the lone cry of a solitary dog in the night.

I read the first three chapters sat on a crowded bus and can rarely recall feeling so alone.

Yet for all it's sadness it has a beauty to the prose that is compelling, all the characters so far are longing for something more.

I'll update this when I've read more.

you can go home again

2007-08-17T14:52:00.000+01:00

Today I picked up a dip pen for the first time in maybe 6 years and I feel like an amputee who's limb has grown back. The dip pen was probably the first thing I drew with beforetrying out brushes and a variety of more portable and less messy fibre pens and penbrushes,every one of which was so uncomfortable I soon moved on to the next thing to try. Recently I'd been reading a lot about artists work tools and was suprised to see so many people still advocating the dip pen. Now I'm no luddite or technophobe but I've never been able to get to grips with drawing on my wacom tablet and technical pens, with their one width line, still seem a little soulless to me. Alternately I have a great deal of respect for people who can make a brush dance to their tune producing art of such fluid lines it's like watching waves come in on a seashore. But it's not me, it's not my style. Pencils and pens and a piece of paper in front of me, that's the way I need to work. I can manipulate the artwork in photoshop or whatever afterwards but the main work needs to be done with a dip pen and bristol board.

For this revelatiopn I'd like to thank Richard Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Bud Fisher, Frank King, Billy Debeck and Harold Gray whose varied pen styles reminded me that the brush isn't the only tool.

new toy

2007-08-17T10:00:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we bought a new toy, a laptop, with my back dated pay rise. It's very nice, 15.4" wide screen, great for DVD's, and it has a dvd burner, which is another upgrade for us. It's almost a necessity in a house with three computer users and only one computer. Between my wife and my daughter I usually have to use the internet at work these days if I want to look at anything or update on here. Now at least there'll always be a computer available in the evening.

Shadow over Baker Street

2007-08-15T10:31:00.000+01:00

I'm not a great fan of Sherlock Holmes, I've read many of the short stories and been pleasantly suprised by them and I'll watch Basil Rathbone happily, although Nigel Bruce's Watson was always far to bumbling and blustering. For Crime I'd rather check out the Americans, be it Chandler or Moseley in writing or Bogart and Robinson and Cagney on screen. Nor am I a fan of H P Lovecraft. There are few books I've given up on in my near 40 years of reading but Lovecraft I couldn't even finish one of his short stories, the writing was turgid and I couldn't see the magic fans seem to be able to see. So I suprised myself when I picked up the short story collection, Shadows over Baker Street and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The collection was based around the conceit of the ultimate rationalist, Holmes, encountering the "irrational" world of the Cthulu mythos and in general the stories work very well. Some vere towards pastiche and some, like the Mystery of the Hanged Man invoke the voices of the cinema Holmes better than the literary Holmes, The adventure of the Voorish Sign felt more like a Hammer horror and left visions of Peter Cushing burning down buildings made of coal. Most of the writers remained true to the spirit of Conan Doyle without aping his style and probably only Neil Gaiman let his personal style over-power the source material.

Strangely, all the writers, although showing an obvious affection for the Lovecraft material, chose not to write in a style like Lovecraft thus placing Cthulu in Holmes world rather then Holmes in Lovecraft's. Caitlin Keirnan and Simon Clark wrote the standout stories for me and both are writers whose work I shall check out in the future.

Scooby Doo

2007-08-14T15:38:00.000+01:00

The nice thing about children, for someone like me with a popular media fixation, is how they introduce you to new things. Molly has introduced me to the newest version of Scooby Doo. I never liked Scooby Doo in it's varied incarnations since it began in 1969 or whenever. It was one of those things where the idea was superior to the end product. Finally, however, someone has produced a version of Scooby Doo that actually works for me. "Shaggy and Scooby Doo get a clue", produced by Ruby Spears under the auspices of WB Animation, updates and redesigns the characters for the current decade. Both Shaggy and Scooby have been given real personalities that reach beyond the usual hungry coward scenarios. These two have finally been brought to the fore, recognising that the rest of the gang were really only supporting characters, given a fortune and a high tech mansion to operate out of and, while still scared of the villains they face they now stand up to them.

The rest of the gang are occasional guest stars in the series with very agreeable updated designs. The colour and design are both flatter, more cartoonlike, rather than the very modelled and airbrushed look of previous series. The stories are also less cliched, the monster isn't old Mr McGinty, the caretaker and no one says, "I'd have got away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids". The monster of the week is replaced with a regular recurring villain, Dr Phibes, who again is given more personality than any old time baddy. My daughter loves the show and it's something we can share rather than Fifi and the Flowertops or My Little Pony. The show is worth looking out for and if you don't have access to the Boomerang channel check out Youtube which has video of the excellent theme tune and part of the first episode.

Checking around the internet I found numerous posts decrying this new version of Scooby Doo. Strangely they all seemed to be from adults, who obviously aren't the intended audience, upset about someone playing with their childhood toys. My daughter and her friends on the otherhand love the show, and the older versions as well.

God bless Mr Weiringo

2007-08-14T13:20:00.000+01:00

Mike Weiringo died a couple of days ago. I'm getting kind of used to losing the old guys but Weiringo was, I think, only 44, 2 years my senior. Kind of scarey. I don't think I ever read anything he drew, never read Tellos, Flash, Fantastic Four or Spiderman when he was drawing them. I did check out his blog on a very regular basis to see all the wonderful line art he put on there. The one thing that always struck me about his work was the sheer joy of his work. His characters always looked like heroes rather than protagonists, in the Alex Toth mold rather than the Frank Miller mold.

My prayers go out to Weiringo's family and friends.

The coolest

2007-08-13T15:37:00.000+01:00

Is this just the coolest news or what, Mike Kunkel (Herobear) on Shazam. For kids, Finally something I can show my daughter.

And Art Balthazar of Patrick the Wolf Boy fame on Tiny Titans. Molly's gonna love that. I just hope she understands the one month wait where she's used to english weeklies.

Misanthropic, that's more like it

2007-08-09T16:28:00.000+01:00

You Are 76% Misanthropic

Here's the truth: Most people suck. You are just lucky enough to know it.
You're not ready to go live alone in a cave - but you're getting there.

How Misanthropic Are You?

Sociopath, what's that?

2007-08-09T16:26:00.000+01:00

You Are 40% Sociopath

From time to time, you may be a bit troubled and a bit too charming for your own good.
It's likely that you're not a sociopath... just quite smart and a bit out of the mainstream!

Are You A Sociopath?

Curses

2007-08-07T14:46:00.001+01:00

This is another fine book. Kevin Huizenga was someone I knew by reputation only prior to this splendid hardback volume and this was an expensive impulse purchase that really paid off. Huizenga's art style lies somewhere between that of Herge and L Z Segar but his writing is what makes the book more than anything. Working through a literary alter ego, Glenn Ganges, Huizenga takes elements of autobiography and weaves them together with the spiritual and the mythological yet remains fully grounded in a way the same material would not do in the hands a more fanastic writer. Huizenga retells Le Fanu's "Green Tea" within the context of events his lead character is living through, the appearance of a ghost dog and tells the tale of a golfing buddy and theological professor who is concerned for his spiritual welfare and rethinks his idea of hell based on his meetings with Glenn Ganges. The best tribute to the strength of Huizenga's storytelling is that the book bears up well on subsequent readings and will probably become one of a small number I read each year.

Kevin Huizenga has a handful of strips on line at his USS Catastrophe site

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-08-07T09:56:00.000+01:00

I first saw Del Toro's movie on a tiny screen on a flight to Sydney and watched it twice in a row, stunned by the overpowering atmosphere the film generated. I then rented the DVD on my return home and watched it a further 3 times. I am hard pressed to think of another movie that has made open woodlands seem so oppressive and closed in as this one did when the soldiers, mounted on their horses, chase down the "Communist" rebels in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Even the dark and gloomy interiors seemed less threatening. Ofelia, the young girl lead played by Ivana Baquero, is superb, constantly understated in her performance, and is totally believable as a child mourning her father and hating her step father. Her wandering into the Labyrinth and her acceptance of all that follows reflects her desperation to find something to cling to in the face of her mother's new relationship. Sergi Lopez, who plays the central villain Captain Vidal, is incredible, a Mexican comedic actor who gives the sort of performance only comedians can give in this sort of dark role. Vidal is a tragic figure, destroyed by his father and his father's reputation as a soldier he has become a twisted and totally evil character. At the same time you are able to understand why and so he doesn't become a charicature. The make up and creature designs are equally unusual. The Faun looks like a C Scott Morse design, with it's strangely wide head and curling horns, and the faeries look like stick insects with leaf wings.

The whole film is closer in style to old folk tales with their somewhat bloody stylings then the more bloodless versions that came from the likes of Charles Perrault on down to Disney. And all the more watchable for it.

Watch it, or better yet buy it and watch it over and over again.

Alice in Sunderland

2007-07-31T11:34:00.000+01:00

A new book from Brian Talbot is always a a treat, something to be pored over, and Alice in Sunderland is a true confection. The book is a history of Britain, the North and particularly Sunderland, seen through the lense of Lewis Carrol and his most famous book. Along the way it considers public art, the public's treatment of war heroes, the conspiratorial nature of literary criticism, the almost supernatural interconnection of lives, parental relationships, propriatory behaviour towards literary icons and the geographical mirroring of Sunderland and Wonderland with a passing mention of Hartlepools claim to fame (monkey or frenchman?). All of this is done in a smorgasbord of styles including la ligne clair, collage, heavy brush work and fumetti style photo comics.

The book is fascinating as a whole, but this is primarily down to the author. The material could have easily been dull and boring in another writers hands. Talbot's style is that of a popular history of the sort that makes best sellers lists and can be bought off the shelf in Tesco's, something that could be a channel 4 series perhaps and as such it may not appeal to the more seriously minded students of literary, social and geographical history. For someone looking for a broad and popular history of Sunderland tied to a literary icon you'd be hard pressed to find better.

eight weeks

2007-07-26T14:50:00.000+01:00

Eight weeks ago I had a hernia op and have been laid up at home, mostly, until this week. Coinciding with that AOL screwed up our connection again and we still aren't back on line. (I'm blogging from work)

Never believe that surgeons are warm, altruistic people who care deeply about their patients. If my recent experience is anything to go by, I've known butchers who take more care of the meat on their table.

I went in for day surgery for an inguinal hernia, very low down in the groin area. On the advice of nurses I pre-shaved myself, I'm a fairly hairy guy and apparently they dry shave youwhen your sedated. When I woke up they'd shaved even more of my abdomen, including a large square patch on my thigh, and beaten my body around so much that my left testicle was swollen to four times it's normal size, the muscle inside my left inner thigh was so battered I could barely stand and I had a six inch bright purple scar from open surgery instead of the tiny keyhole opening I was lead to expect.

Although I weas allowed to drive after the first week I couldn't with any comfort because getting out of the car left me in scrotal agony. The itching from the hair regrowth was maddening and my groin was either extremely painful where their was feeling and horribly numb, like an everlasting dental injection, everywhere else.

On top of that it wasn't until week seven that it occurred to any member of the medical profession to inform me I should be massaging the scar with baby oil to break down the scar tissue that was continuing to cause me great discomfort.

On the other hand I read a hell of a lot of books and many movies. More on that later.

Australia the fair

2007-05-01T11:06:00.000+01:00

Australia's Gold Coast is a bizarre place, a strange hybrid of Florida style landscapes, buildings and gated communities with genuine aussie charm and less fat people. Holidaying with my wife, two sisters, parents and assorted friends meant a fair amount of time was spent shopping and it was interesting to compare the U.S. service focussed style with the more genuine Aussie version. Shopping in Florida, the "Have a nice day" routine sounded frequently forced, spoken by rote from a learned script. Australians by comparison sounded far more genuine, less emphatic (like they were hoping you'd have a good day rather than ordering you to have one) and generally far more human. This seemed to be an extension of the national spirit and was visible in the the people you'd pass in the street, interact with in restaurants and taverns, talk to in parks and theme parks.

Although it was far too hot for my liking I'll take Australia over the USA any day.

Australia

2007-04-25T06:04:00.000+01:00

Just back from a few weeks in Australia. more to come.

realms of experience

2007-02-28T15:48:00.000Z

One of the things I value most about reading is the ability of a well written book to put you into a world outside of your realm of experience. With much of my fiction reading those worlds are outside everyone's realm of experience, I don't know anyone whose lived through "the Princess Bride" or Pullmans "His dark materials" books. They are fantasy and are given meaning through the skill of the writer in creating "real" characters and situations within the fantasy that have greater resonance with the world outside. Then there's Walter Mosely's "Little Scarlet" set in the aftermath of the Watts riots in LA at the tale end of the 60's. I have no idea what it would be like to ride a segregated bus, to be threatened by police or attacked by strangers because of the colour of my skin but reading Mosely's Easy Rawlins books I can get a small insight. Mosely captures the sense of fear and anger that comes from living in such a world so well that it becomes tangible and it's made all the more real when you read of gangs attacking a mna simply for being Polish or black teenagers being shot in London.

We live in a country where racism is still institutionalised to too great an extent and a chance to walk in another man's shoes gives you a chance to see your part in this evil and see what it's like on the other side.

viral enteritis and vampires

2007-02-25T17:49:00.000Z

two weeks of viral gastro enteritis, so I've done little more than read over the last fortnight. No work, rarely out of the house but my mind has been busy getting out and about into fictional worlds.

Just finished Joann Sfarr's "Vampire Loves". Never read Sfarr before although I knew of him and after this I will give anything with his name on it a close look. Despite the vampire and monster theme prevailant among the characters I can think of few books that seemed more autobiographical. The book is a collection of four french albums telling, primarily, of the romantic misadventures of Ferdinand, the vampire, and his circle of friends and aquaintances. The mixture of romantically confused characters carrying torches for loves unrequited and failing to find love in other places has the potential of turning into crass soap opera but never makes it thanks to the believably awkward dialogue that characterises each coupling and encounter. Ferdinand is suprised, and I think a little horrified, when the woman he moons after rejects him but the women he treats with disdain seem to love him all the more. An experience that has to be almost universal.

Another plus for the book is the scratchy, shakey, heavily rendered artwork. European comics seem to have an interesting dichotomy in art styles. The European split seems to be between the "ligne claire" of Herge and his ilk and the blotchy and scratchy pen work of Sfarr and people like Tardi. Although each school runs a gamut of styles from realistic to cartoony there are few artists I can look at and not put into one camp or another. Sfarr is slightly reminiscient of people like Glen Dakin in the organic fluidity of his art style and the surreal nature of his stories. Like Dakin, Sfarr is much more concerned with the relationships between his characters and uses his art to emphasise the nature of each of them. Ferdinand, the Vampire, insecure and dreamy, is drawn spindly and angular, staring at his shoes as he flies. The treeman is solid and reliable in appearance and this is how he is perceived by the other characters although the changability of his appearance demonstrates his inner conflicts.

Despite connections to Sfarrs "Little Vampire" this isn't a kids book like his "Sardine" volumes. There is little action or excitement in the conventional sense but once they've felt the pangs of a first unrequited love this book will speak volumes to the reader.

Oliver Jeffers

2007-02-25T16:34:00.000Z

Lost and Found, How to catch a star, Oliver Jeffers is a wonderful creator of kids picture books with a captivating, ethereal style that is actually enjoyable to read to a child several days in a row. His website is somewhat slow loading but a treasure trove of wonders. , visit if you've time on your hands.

2007-01-30T06:04:00.000Z

Just took the "Which Science Fiction Writer are you?" quiz and I'm happy with the results, Ursula Le Guin is pretty good.

I am:

Ursula K. LeGuin

Perhaps the most admired writing talent in the science fiction field.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Just plain wrong

2007-01-29T13:02:00.000Z

There's something very wrong with a bakers that buys it's bread in from the supermarket down the road.

Nothing happening

2007-01-17T11:35:00.000Z

So work's very busy, Battlestar Galactica is back on tv and I've got a dozen or more books backed up to read.

Buy Fantagraphics new Popeye book.

Merry Christmas everyone

2006-12-24T23:02:00.000Z

Tomorrow morning, all things willing, I shall be opening presents with my wife and daughter and crying while Jimmy Stewart runs through town shouting Merry Christmas to all and sundry. A sentiment I can only echo.

Comics economics

2006-12-21T13:16:00.000Z

the collecting obsession has grown weaker as I've gotten older. Once upon a time I would follow any superhero I liked through whatever came along, feast or famine, fair or foul, just for the sake of a complete run. I read the Pittsburg JLA for god's sake and, nostalgia aside, they were crap characters in crap stories!

These days I read what I like and if I don't like what the creator are doing I don't read it. I love Daredevil but didn't like Bendis' writing so I didn't read it. Love Batman but psycho Batman did nothing for me and so I've read little of it since Post Dark Knight grim and gritty transformed into unstable psychopath.

Further, sheer economics stopped me picking up the Brubaker Captain America, Morrisons Batman and various others. £2+ a pop was outside my budget. Many times have i seen suggestions that, six months or so later, Marvel and DC should reprint each months output in an essentials style collection for the reader, perhaps by family, rather than the collector so that cheap colour or black and white reprints were available to draw people in to the world of Batman or Superman or The Avengers. In this country we already have something similar, Panini/Titan monthly collections 3 issues for £2.50/£2.60 of top us titles. Titan have just released first issues of Marvel Legends, with Captain America, Thor and Iron Man and Batman Legends, reprinting All Star, Morrison's Batman and Batman/Superman (World's Finest?)I've not read them yet. Brubaker's Captain America is the main reason for buying either but I'm intrigued to see what's happening with these old friends. I'll let you know what I think.

My daughter's art

2006-12-19T22:27:00.000Z

This was an unexpected gift from my daughter, she tells me it's a chicken but not a real one. (She knows I get confused easily)

No Fear of white space there.

Joe Barbera

2006-12-19T05:13:00.000Z

So Joseph Barbera Died. Until I was about 14 and developed a massive fascination with animation I thought Hannah/Barbera were two women who made cartoons. I was never a big fan of their television work although like anyone growing up in the 70's I watched it because it was all pervading. It was virtually impossible to turn on the TV to any of the three channels available without finding a Hannah Barbera cartoon on at least one of them, be it the Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound, Maggilla Gorrila, Topcat (Bosscat), Touche Away, Scooby Doo or any of the hundreds of other's their studio turned out. What tends to be forgotten though is that these two men were behind many of the best Tom and Jerry cinema cartoons of the 40's before TV all but wiped them out and, love them or loath them, these two men were in many ways responsible for the survival of animation outside of Disney Studios. You can see their influence in the work of many TV animators, illustrators and cartoonists today from Samurai Jack and Kim Possible to Les MacClaine's Highway 13. Hannah Barbera cartoons are so much a part of the fabric of popular culture they're referenced everywhere, like Disney, like Elvis and the Beatles and that's one hell of a legacy.

The cobbler and the thief

2006-12-16T19:20:00.000Z

Watched the Richard Williams Movie, The Thief and The Cobbleron youtube last night. It's in a cobbled together version, (so it is titled)made up from pencil tests, completed footage and storyboards. It's apparently the truest to the creators intentions, unlike the Warner Brothers version which was released over a decade ago. (I'm not sure it was released through Warner in the end as I think the bond completion company eventually took control as Williams failed to meet his contractual obligations). There are interesting lessons to be learned from the eventual fate of this movie. Williams had an artistic vision for the movie so strong that he worked on it for over 25 years, largely in his own time and at his own expense. He believed in what he was doing and the cobbled together version suggests it would have been a true classic of animation. Williams appears to have taken the animation style that best suited each set piece and blended the whole together in what looks like it would have been a fairly seamless work. The early parts of the film, set in an arabic city, blend a series of backgrounds cobining the look of a Gustav klimt painting with character animation design reminiscient of Gilliams "Python" work. Later parts, set in a clockwork mechanised mountain have a dark horror to them reminiscient of "Akira", and the wrapping of the whole has an artistic integrity that put me in mind of those wonderful cartoons from the Filmboard of Canada, flowing on glass. Williams however appears to have eventually bought into the promise of corporate money and in essence, unwittingly perhaps, sold his soul. He failed to meet his contractual obligations and lost control of a work that had taken more than two decades of his life. The lesson I guess is be careful who you sell your soul to.

Rex

2006-12-15T22:05:00.000Z

Our Hamster, Rex, just died. The foolish beast tried to hibernate, not a natural act for such a creature. We revived him but it seems the damage was done and Rex is no more. Rex was only the third pet I've owned (jointly this time) of any character and I'll really miss him. Rex was probably more my hamster than anyone elses, I handled him most and fed him most (and occasionaly held long boring conversations with him while sat at the PC late at night). More heart breaking still was telling Molly he was gone. Watching your daughter cry and not being able to make it all better is possibly the worst feeling in the world so far.

comfort Zones

2006-12-15T21:37:00.000Z

Every year for the past 24 years I have produced a Christmas card. Even in years when I have drawn nothing else, and there've been a few years like that, I've always done the card.

Each card I've done has been within my comfort zone. Early on I loved pen and ink so they'd inevitably be black and white and often animal themed. Later I took to watercolour and inks and cheap colour copying. Still in the comfort zone though. This year I decided it was time to give acrylics a go. I haven't painted in acrylics for over 20 years, not since college, and was extremely nervous. It was hard work, it all felt so unnatural, no line work visible, trying to paint properly. I know I could have taken a more illustrative approach with flat colours and outlines but this was what I wanted to try as it was something new for me. I'm quite pleased with the result, inspired by Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns.

"The Christmas Fox"

Look and Learn

2006-12-10T17:09:00.000Z

When I was a nipper there were comics you wanted, like Valiant and Tiger and Mighty World of Marvel, and there were the books your parents wanted you to have, the prime example of that group being look and learn. I saw very few issues of look and learn, my parents understood the importance of Johnny Cougar and Captain Hurricane over the Indsutrial Revolution and the history of pantomime, and must admit to being greatly bored by the issues I saw. Even The Trigun Empire seemed somewhat staid next to seminole wrestlers and California Highway Patrolmen (Zip Nolan?). yesterday the Guardian included a free copy of the best of Look and Learn and, even from the position of my now advanced years, I cannot imagine a 7 to 14 year old kid who would be interested in it. Even on newsprint the magazine is a thing of beauty with a classic layout and design and quality illustration that truely deserves the glossy paper printing promised for the regular magazine and I was fascinated by many of the articles, but I'm 42 not 14 and the original target for this magazine was that spotty preteen nerd that answered all the science questions on "Ask the Family". The producers have sensibly aimed this at the nostalgia market though so who knows, it could be successful. Any 7 to 14 year old who wants the info in the magazine will find it better and faster on the internet however and look strangely at the parents and grandparents trying to push this antique on them.

An interesting aside however. The much lauded Trigun Empire is apparently now owned by DC comics. Maybe they should consider archive editions of that, they'd be the firt Archives I'd be prepared to buy.

VGA phone images

2006-11-24T16:21:00.000Z

I'm fascinated by how the low res VGA camera on my phone reproduces images. The low quality of the picture creates something I think is very atmospheric.

This is a view of the yard at my work, a handfull of buses and the sun setting in the background. I just like it and I'm trying to figure out why.

Robert Altman's dead

2006-11-22T16:28:00.000Z

My grandmother always said these things come in threes. Who's next?

Rest in peace Mr Altman. Thanks for MASH and The Long Goodbye. I've forgiven you for Popeye as that probably wasn't your fault.

Depression

2006-11-21T06:22:00.000Z

I've just done half a dozen on line depression tests, all of which tell me I'm suffering from mild to moderate depression. Guess that makes me normal then.

2006-11-21T05:25:00.001Z

Your Depression Level: 60%

You seem to have mild depression.
A lot of people fall into your range, and it's quite possible you don't need treatment.
If you've been feeling this way for a while, you may want to seek help.

Are You Depressed?

Should I start worrying?