Ma foi!

J'écrit un petit BD en français... voila!

  

Thanks are due to a friend (who, probably quite wisely, wishes to remain anonymous) over at www.sffchronicles.com for correcting my spelling and some bits of really clunkingly bad grammar.

Boom

On my drawing board I have a piece of paper with various bits of good advice from artists writ up on.

Today I took this classic from Wally Wood to heart:

"Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up."  

90% of the basic panel of the guys sitting on a sofa was traced from a previous strip of them sat on the sofa and the arms were drawn separately and it then it was all cut and paste in Photoshop.  Pasted in layers like simple cell animation.  The fastest strip I've drawn in weeks.  It wrote itself instantly too. It popped into my head as I was opening the car door coming home from work - and I had it written down in the sketchbook before I turned on the ignition. 

Ohh! My fear of commitment - on paper - takes another step backwards (or forwards). More proper drawing - pen and ink on paper then coloured in in Photoshop.

 (Clickify on the image to bigger it up.)

  

 (I've been reading a lot of French comics recently.)

It's a long time since I wittered on about crappy movies here.  Partially because I haven't been watching many.  My 'spare' time recently has been taken up with drawing and reading comics.
Sometimes I read really bad comics. (Not that difficult really given that 90% of them, like everything else, are crap.) So I'll witter on about crappy comics for a bit.

One of my current fascinations is for the short lived publishers, Atlas / Seaboard, which, in 1975, set out a full-frontal assault on the Marvel / DC duopoly, an assault that lasted several heady months before folding.  A short history of the company can be found here.

There are several things I like about Atlas Comics:

• They're cheap and not particularly sought after by collectors.
• There are only 65 of them.
• They are - for the most part - bloody awful.

Point one may have something to do with point three.

I'm slowly collecting the lot with my pocket money. Putting together runs is very easy; titles like Planet of the Vampires! only lasted three issues and, over its three issues,  manages to sum up the whole operation for me with the covers alone.

"A World Gone MAD! 

Six Astronauts Return to 

Earth and Find it Ruled by 

VAMPIRES!"

The cover of issue One (lovingly rendered by Pat Broderick and Neal Adams) shows our heroic hero, and heroic heroine, heroically shooting someone who is feebly throwing small rocks at them off-panel. They're doing this while standing in a manner that suggests they are trying surreptitiously pull twisted underpants out of their arse-cracks without putting down their weapons.

Our heroes ladies and gentlemen!

(Incidentally the 'six astronauts' promised on the front cover turn out to number five and one of them gets killed on page three having appeared in only two panels and delivered one line of dialogue.)

So, returning to a post-apocalyptic world (two years after they lost contact with Earth) our all American heroes find a society divided between disciplined, jumpsuit-wearing, well-armed, scientifically-enlightened dome dwellers on one hand, and the hairy, brutal street tribe savages so popular in Italian SF movies of the time. As you may have guessed all is not as it seems and the disciplined, jumpsuit-wearing, well-armed, scientifically-enlightened dome dwellers are really VAMPIRES! who harvest the rough, tough street boys to scientifically drain them of their blood and scientifically make a serum they need to survive the mutated plague that threatens them .. dah dah dahhhhh!

 I could hardly wait to see what happened next...

  

By issue two's cover the disciplined jumpsuit-wearing, well-armed, scientifically-enlightened dome dwellers are suddenly wearing cloaks and have claws, and widow's peaks, and fangs! and all the rest of the Dracula shtick - and what the hell IS that handy nipple-access zip doing on that woman's uniform? (and why isn't it unzipped?)

At this point I should mention that the four astronauts who made it past page four of issue one are two married couples. One couple is white, that's them on the covers of issues one and two, the other couple are black.

Here they are.  That's them on the cover of issue three (a logo change after only two issues?)

 

No seriously. That's them. The blond bloke with one arm? he's black.  And the large-breasted white girl girl with the ripped shirt (there was a zip, you morons!) with all the small turtles glued to her skin?  she's black too.

This is what they look like on the inside.

 (Knowing how people scream when they are
dying is part of basic astronaut training.)

I don't know much about the schedule that the artists and writers were working to, or how long a lead time they had, but you would have thought that by issue three, someone in editorial would have noticed that they'd got these guys' skin colours wrong. And it's not as if you weren't 'allowed' to put black characters on the front of comics.  Marvel had a black character on the cover of Captain America back in 1969.

Not that it really matters because one of them is dead half way through this issue and the other writes himself out of the plot a few panels later.

So. Of the promised six astronauts on the cover of issue one we are down to two.  And one of them dies before the end of this book.  Maybe that's why there was never an issue 4. The last remaining character snuffed it before they could get round to writing it.

EDIT:  Maybe not! I just found a double page splash in the back of the comic (which I managed to miss on multiple readings).  The splash looks like someone traced a couple of Jack Kirby panels and it shows our male heroes back together- in more of the endless supply of spacesuits they carry around with them (our white hero gets one Kirked to shreds in every issue.)

Utterly Kirked

Next Issue:   

In the Black Depths

Beneath the Fortress Dome -- 

a New and Terrifying Menace!

REVENGE of the VAMPIRES!

I would guess that the new menace was - oooh I dunno?  More vampires?  Hairy ones with stupendously long left legs?

(I hope that's his leg...)

I like drawing Hats. After tentacles they are my second favourite thing to doodle. I can doodle hats for hours and not get bored. Sometimes the hat will be dangling someone underneath it and sometimes that person will do something interesting or tell me a joke.

Sometimes I manage to combine hats AND tentacles

Meet Fate. (If you haven't met him before that is.)  Fate turned up in my sketchbook, dangling under a hat while hovering over a depressed horse that was considering throwing himself under a passing truck. Three pages, an exploding ice cream factory, and a bus full of nymphomaniac Swedish athletes later he wandered off the page leaving a bemused, but no longer suicidal, horse behind him.  I possibly won't get round to presenting the world with that strip but Fate turned up again few days later (with less gratuitous nudity involved).

 

And he keeps coming back:

 

 

I like this guy

A new strip up on the Flickr page.

 


The first Jet Starr for a couple of weeks. (I must get round to finishing the football saga. There's only one more page to draw but two or three more pages to letter and ink in Photoshop.)

I drew today's page when I was in Sheffield visiting the in-laws a couple of months ago, and then it sat for a long time doing nothing because I quite liked the pencils I had done.

My least favourite bit of drawing my comics is the inking. I'm not a natural inker. Of all the stages involved in getting from a stupid scribble to a strip that I can put up on the web, and walk away from, inking is the one that brings most disappointment. I like writing the jokes, which I usually do as I'm drawing rough thumbnails so I pretty much know what is going where as I write, and the pencilling is just the best bit - but inking to me is often a joyless chore. This page of spacebabe/squidulon wrestling sat on my drawing board for a week waiting for me to have the courage to ruin my pencils. Then I had an inspiration. I inked the girl's tits in the first two panels. Then I had to do the rest of those panels so it didn't look like I was even more of a perv than Merriol thinks I am already. And then I had to do the rest of the page because it would have looked silly otherwise.

The other thing that held me back was I couldn't get the punchline quite right. As I was shading it tonight in Photoshop I threw out the original line and found this one.

I'm a bit chuffed with it. In a week I'll think it's awful.

As usual.

Hello world.  It's getting on for a year since I posted to this blog.  Time to get it back on its feet and stumbling forward again.

One of the reasons I'm doing this is because Merriol (wife, mother of my children, and crochet ninja) has linked to this blog from https://www.instagram.com/gosh_wow_comics/

I have no idea what the hell Instagram is all about, it appears to be some sort of 'liking' site, not dissimilar to Facebook, where people compete to see how popular they can appear to be.  But she is determined to drag me and my comics kicking and screaming into the Twentieth Century....

So, until I can think of anything interesting to say, here here's a picture of me trying to think of something interesting to draw.

And here's the last thing I drew, as posted on the twice a week (Wednesdays and Sundays - weather permitting) Flickr page where most of my cartoons end up these days.


More soon.

Pride

Six years ago I wrote this in my film diary:

The Man With Two Brains - I laughed. A lot. Steve Martin used to be funny and still is. By which I mean the films he made then are still funny now - unlike people like Gerry Lewis, or Arthur Askey who were funny then but aren't now and haven't been for a long time. Though there were people who went on laughing at Arthur Askey years past his (and their) sell-by dates so maybe I'm just laughing at stuff that I used to find funny but that isn't widely considered really funny any more.

Maybe I just haven't noticed.

I guess the acid test will be whether my children find The Man With Two Brains and The Jerk funny in a few years time. Fast forward six years and I can almost hear one of my girls saying to the other (or possibly one of the others depending on the sex of child number three, due in less than four months): "Oh crap! Dad's going to do one of his 'Is This Funny?' experiments on us again, just pretend to like it so he doesn't feel old, will you?" I love my kids; they're so considerate....

Time for an experiment...

Sorry, long abandoned blog. Been busy doin' drawin's and that: There's a few more here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/junkmonkey/ Nunsploitation! Superheroes drinking coffee! and a Tale of the Old West: featuring Jeff Randall of the US Postal Rangers! Please enjoy! I may come asking for money later....

Questions to Which I Don't Suppose I'll Ever Find an Answer - No. 675a

Why are all pterodactyls in French* comic books coloured red?

etcetera etcetera etcetera...

*all right, '...and Belgian'.

Here's an eight panel strip that fell off my doodle pad today and somehow became worth inking.

Page one of  'Senga: The Braw Jungle Lassy'

 

Or whatever I eventually call it. 'Senga: Quine of the Jungle' is another possibility.

Work in Progress:

 

Work in progress. I've got a bit stuck in the comic I'm drawing with this character. Her name is Senga the Jungle Girl.  I'm 12 pages in, a few good jokes and no plot as yet - so to avoid dealing with my total lack of plotting ability I'm taking time out to draw a pin-up of her with copious armpit hair. Not sure why I'm giving her such luxuriant pits, but I was planning on having her have riotous underarm fuzz that would blow in the wind from the start - but Holly made me take it out on the grounds that it's "too weird".

A semi-naked Scottish girl living with an Amazon tribe of white girls battling Nazis deep in the African jungle is okay but armpit hair is "weird"?  I don't understand kids. Mind you, they don't understand me so I guess we're even.

(Though I do have some sympathy for their position.)

Here's the (maybe) cover :

How Mobile Phones have Fucked up Everything: Part NtyX

Strange but true: People used to be able to eat food without photographing it first.  Honest!

Mobile Phones are Evil (Part Deuxty-fünf)

Here's another thing I've just discovered that have been screwed up by mobile phones.

In years past when people showed you their holiday snaps at least you could see the buggers.

"Here's us on the sea front at Frinton... and here's another one of us on the beach at Frinton.  oh and here's a picture of that man walking his dog.  Remember, Gladys?  and here's another one of us at Frinton...."

Whether the pictures were on small glossy prints, handed to you one by one to be passed around, or   on slides, projected onto the wall with the lightest, least garish wallpaper - at least you could see the buggers.  They might have been the dullest least interesting thing in all God's creation but at least you could see them

"Oh, this one's upside down... I'll just have to... help yourself to some more Twigletes..."

Last weekend Merriol and the girls spent two day travelling by train to go to The Harry Potter TM  Making of  Harry Potter TM World Studio Potter TM Tour in London.  They had a great time. Lots of Harry Potter TM stuff to look at and buy.

Gathered around on the sofa the next day I got to see some of these Harry PotterTM delights via the gazzillion photos Merriol'd taken on her spanking new phone- well, I would have done if her thumb wasn't in the way swiping to the next picture, or rotating the screen, or the phone was so angled that all I could see was reflection - if I was lucky.  Sometimes I couldn't even see the phone at all let alone the screen. To be fair that was often Eben getting his bonce in the way as he tried to get a look.  Boy has that kid got a big head!* 

"And here we are at Gringots (whatever that is) again, and here we are with Grubious Penile's costume, and here we are at Dubious Krotchkiss Whumping Wardrobe..."

...and all I can see is a thumb or Number One Son's left ear.

They tell me they had a good time.

  * He's  also got chocolate belly button at the moment - he coloured it in himself, but that's another story.

Overheard in Morrison's supermarket this afternoon:

"They've got a good deal on the Frozen DVDs.  They're twelve ninty-nine but buy one get one free.  That's two for a tenner!"

I officially avoided becoming old a couple of weeks ago. I can recommend it.

Many many years ago (this was well before the kids).  I was self-employed and working long hours making crap jewellery which for some reason was selling by the bucketload. My partner and I were making lots of money, we owned our own house outright (not bad for a couple in our mid twenties) and didn't spend much on anything but cat food (for the cat) and the odd crate of fizzy falling down water (for us).  At some point, in an attempt to put some of this money we had sloshing about to some use, we bought ourselves a couple of pensions.  I think the plan was we would keep adding to them and have a healthy nest egg for when we were wrinklies but I never did get round to it. Things went a bit tits up shortly after we started them and I've never really had disposable income since. My partner and I moved to Scotland, got mortgages on a couple of semi-derelict buildings, spent all our cash doing them up - and then we separated.

I pretty much forgot about the pensions - apart from the (dutifully filed) annual statements telling me that, when I retired, I would be able to buy a cup of coffee with the accumulated surplus.

This year the letters were different; they were asking how I wanted the money.  When I had sat in my accountant's office all those years ago (I used to have an accountant!) the age '55' and the year '2014' seemed as far distant as I could imagine.

It's tomorrow.

The other day, after weeks of avoiding facing up to the fact that people in multi-national investment companies were trying to turn me into a pensioner I rang them up.  Rather timidly I asked if it would it be possible for them not to pay me the pension for a few years?  They looked at me down the phone like I was some sort of an idiot.  If you translate what I was saying into multi-national investment company terms I can see why:  "Please, take my money away for a few more years.  Don't pay me...."

Yes, they said, wondering what the catch was.  There isn't one.  I'm no longer going to be a pensioner tomorrow; I'm happy.  They've got my minuscule amount of pension fund to play poker with for another few years; they're happy. 

If they win a few hands I might be able to afford a packet of biscuits to go with the coffee.

The day after my Birthday we all vote in the Independence Referendum.  If you haven't bought me anything you could just vote YES.  It would make an old man very happy if we won.

Another Brief snippet From the Screenplay of my Life:

EXT. THE FAMILY CAR - DAY.

Various members of the family (and a family friend) are returning from Fort William after the usual Thursday kids' drama and adults' shopping session.   Daddy has the car up to 60mph on the only decently fast bit of road. It is a fine day; bright and sunny and, unusually, the windows of the car are open. Holly, sitting in a back seat sticks her face out of the window and lets the rushing air batter her about the head.  (Like the way that dogs do when they get the chance.)  After a couple of minutes she  flops back into her seat, flushed and exultant.

HOLLY:(Happily)

That was the best thing EVER!
 - I can't feel my face!

There's a thread over at the sffchronicles forum entitled 'The 5 Most Influential Books in My Life'.  Here's my list.  As you would expect from a group of SF and Fantasy enthusiasts there are a lot of SF and Fantasy books in people's lists and a lot of 'this book changed the way I looked at the world' titles.  Here's mine:

The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard - a 1957 book about media manipulation and advertising techniques that turned my 12 year-old self into a hardened cynic and really really difficult to sell things to. Reading that book has saved me a lot of grief and money over the decades.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by neurologist Oliver Sacks - confirmed my belief (which is obviously true) that my subjective reality is as weird as yours and no one can prove anything from their own subjective experience and that God is therefore unprovable and obviously therefore does not exist.

Tokyo Style by Kyochi Tsuzuki - a thick, small format book containing hundreds of pictures of Japanese house interiors. Not nice, elegant, classically traditional, Zenny interiors but cluttered, everyday, untidied messes. Unmade beds, and piles of unwashed pots. When I get depressed, fed up with the state my kids leave this house, I go read it for a bit and cheer myself up. All the text is in Japanese. I have no idea what 99.9% of the words mean - but wanting to know is one of the reasons I'm trying to teach myself the language.

{Turns out there is an English language edition.  Same pictures.}

The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne - the first book which made me cry like a baby at the end of it. And then I turned back to the first page and the characters were still there and it hadn't ended. I could repeat the experience! It was a revelation!! I was in my mid-twenties; I think I must have been stoned out of my box. (It was still a revelation though.)

Have Space Suit Will Travel by R A Heinlein. The Golden Age of SF is 12. I read all Heinlein's 'Juvenile's when I was 10/11/12. The Sense of Wonder those books generated in me is something I will never recapture - partially because I went and read The Hidden Persuaders so it's my own fault - but I miss it. Been looking for it ever since.

-----~#~-----