I danced an Amish boy to death

Today I am redrawing feet because I jinxed it by mentioning them yesterday, and rewriting dialogue because me from the past was an even worse writer of things and stuff than the me of now.  Seriously, dialogue that has to exposit and infodump and still be organic is a pain in the old hole - wish I was writing them teen dramas where people look each other in the eye and say things like "your dad is the chief of police" or "you're the head of a Fortune 500 company" right to someone's face and no-one goes "Yeah, I know that - that's my life, man.  Why wouldn't I know what me or my father does for a living?"
Also I am writing blog posts and prevaricating about getting back to the writing, so it looks like a late night until I rewrite these two whole dang panels... no BS, I will probably end up redrawing them because it's easier to draw something else and then write new dialogue for those new panels.
I need to plan my work a lot better.

If voting could change anything, it would be against the law

So Rob Liefeld wants you to write him a story... an offer that has obviously attracted the expected comments about submitting stories featuring grimacing, lots of pouches and no mention of feet - oh what hilarity!  I would probably join in if (a) this wasn't a chuffing great offer to make potential writers that would get their name and work under the noses of the editorial community a lot better than small press work would, especially in the current comics climate where companies are actually making it much harder for new creators to get into the industry rather than easier, and (b) I draw pretty whack feet myself and shan't blame anyone for cutting corners there.  Amusingly, though, draw better feet than I do those pointy sock-things that you see in superhero comics that are supposed to be boots or something - just cannot fucking draw them at all, I can't get my head around what they're supposed to be, or what they look like in three dimensions.  They're mental.

Please do not turn me marrying my daughter into something ugly

Been watching: 
Lord of the Elves, which is an awful title to see onscreen - or even on the bluray box - as it looks fleetingly like Lord of the Flies, which misleads you as to what genre/specific film this might be ripping off (as most Asylum films tend to do).  The story is pure SyFy Channel cheese and it's basically Caravan Of Courage without the Ewoks, though there's a bit where Christopher Judge - still defiantly and unironically making a career playing the black dude with a spear in any old bit of tat going even if it means being the only black guy in a tribe of prehistoric Indonesians and no they do not explain what that is about - turns to face the camera and stands his ground, wielding his spear like it's going to fire lasers from the end and the music swells like David Arnold wrote it... it's an oddly charming touch for an Asylum movie, as they're usually typified by their nastiness and leanings towards shock schlock, while the setting is gorgeous, even if the film shot in a way that they somehow manage to film a panning bird's eye view of the characters running past what are clearly the only tire tracks for miles around.  The tribal chief is also really awful, though I think he's actually supposed to be - it's a strange performance and no mistake, someone would definately have noticed and said something if it wasn't deliberate.
Cheapo cheese that's not exceptional in any way, but passes the time if you don't mind it being slightly nastier than a saturday matinee romp needs to be, which the makers kind of acknowledge with really glaring cuts to some of the gore and the thing still comes in rated 12.
No-one is a lord and there are no elves, though.  Not sure what title's about.

What you call the atrocity of crazed dogs tearing a helpless fox to shreds, others call a pleasant jaunt in the park

Haha.  Oh God, there is just no saving some stuff.  The unreachable past is there for a reason.
Onward!

Noticed Colin Smith had made a post with a title that me think "the inevitable has come to pass", but oddly it is not a dissection of the latest PR fluff from DC or a catalogue of the latest bunch of scabs to work on the property, it's just a sweet cameo that I think even Mr Moore would not object to... if anyone but DC had done it.

But yes, After Watchmen is inevitable.  If anyone wants to make some money, I suggest patenting that name and squatting on it for a while, because that is some easy beans when DC come around in year or two looking to get busy.

Rudy shot two families and a goat in Iraq, and he wasn't even there for the war

Ugly inking is ugly.  What can you do?

I have been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas again.  If you don't know it, it is a videogame set in a fictionalised American state that is a portmanteau of California and Nevada and the game is one amazing bit of design even today, mere months away from being two generations of console technology removed from its release and I am still finding new things to see in it.  It was succeeded by Grand Theft Auto 4, a game I have yet to sit down and finish because it is pretty unambitious and banal in comparison, stripping away all the things that the series had logically progressed towards in order to create "realism", which I find hilarious because "realism" is a band aid no game outside pc flight simulators really wants to go picking at.
I suppose I have been thinking about verisimilitude in various ways, but this is the one that grabs me the most if I think of where the pursuit of realism gets in the way of things, and having to sit down and write an all-ages story that is theoretically set in "reality" without getting bogged down in the details, I really hate that I can't just throw exposition at the page and call it dialogue even though it's a necessary evil because it's just the kind of thing that takes me out of a story and I work from the assumption that the reader is at least as smart as I am and if I wouldn't buy it then they probably won't either.

And it is blimming crippling me, here - how do writers at the CW just churn this shit out like they don't give a fuck?  They're amazing people.  They have to be.
Anyway, dialogue is hard, is what I am saying.

...crazy dreams - monkeys fisting me, I mean, that's kind of wierd, right?

Anyone following the blog AHAHAHAHAHAHA why am I laughing I am actually quite sad will remember I have to pitch y'all a comic strip by throwing my idea out there with a detailed product description, graphs, market research and some focus group feedback - well okay, I will write a paragraph with the rough idea then do a bunch of sketches and a sample page or two, I'm not Hollywood here - but buggered if I didn't go and take my first brain fart to submit it somewhere in the blind hope of success that drives many a sane man to insane actions like... oh, actually making an effort to make a living.
What that basically means is that I'll post it here later when I fail.
In the meantime, I shall pad the blog with screen grabs, nonsensical titles and general waffle -business as usual!

I am going to teach these girls to kill and gut a pig tonight, Danny

Been watching:
Our Friends In The North.  Like most BBC fare it is a show not afraid of the loving embrace of cliche, but has the odd good performance and an early glimpse of future Bond Danny Craig.  I gather this was a big deal at the time, though I'm not sure why.
Weeds seasons 6-7.  Maybe I am remembering wrongly because it has been a while since I saw this show, but characters didn't seem to act quite so arbitrarily before, though Nancy's eldest son remains reliably and deeply unlikeable - mainly I think because he does that thing where he calls one or more of his parents by their first name, which I cite as being up there with hating dogs as a sure sign of a rum 'un.  A lady friend points to matriarch Nancy as being the major troubling presence because of her quote wonky mouth that makes her drink stuff all the time to disguise it unquote, but I put that down to women occasionally not liking each other for reasons I am not allowed to fathom because penis that's why.
Space 1999.  I occasionally come back to watching episodes of this stored on my PS3 and it is a daffy load of old balls and no mistake.  Often nonsensical even by its own random logic, it's saved by great FX, a stonking theme tune, and a surplus of ideas which later sci-fi shows like Star Trek: the Next Generation would come to owe a great deal.

From now on I'm gonna take my baths at the YMCA like daddy does

Didn't have time for much blather this week as I was busy away from the scribbling doing other stuff - lesser men would probably fill their blogs with talk of their bout with man-flu or something, but I consider anything short of blood-stained mucus to not even warrant a second glance into the hanky.  Also, instead of running up a comic pitch each month here on the blog, I need to patent the name Blood Stained Mucus quickly before some punk revivalist scumbag snipes it and bungs it on a ballad about his dead cat or whatever it is those jerks sing about these days.

When life gives you lemonade make lemons and life will be all like whaaaaat?

Don't name him, just jab a hook in his face

Another hit and run post because that is what happens when you start work at 10pm - you choke when you have to come up with blog filler.

Nobody's having sex and someone's yelling

Just stopping in to post a screen grab to show that work continues at Brigonos Towers* on a comic that was completely finished four years ago...

* I do not call my house this.

This is the most unfun threesome I've ever been a part of

Still on the retro kick, only three or so more pages of rejigging and then I can give up entirely and go back to heavy drinking during the day.  Sorry - thinking out loud again.  I really should stop typing it out after these thoughts occur to me, or at the very least just delete what I've already written.  Anyway - a couple more pages and hopefully I can put this turkey to bed and move onto the next pitch...

I ain't no grown up, I'm a musician, god-damn it

If Jim Campbell is reading this, the lettering is supposed to look this terrible - honest, I've been paying attention!

I am here to dominate the men

Still drawing anachronistic kids comics - or rather re-drawing them.  Editing something I did ages ago is an odd experience, seeing what I would have done differently if I was doing it now - mostly it's technical stuff like using grids to create better perspectives or using smaller brush sizes or image resolution to create less jaggies, but the script gets tweaked, too.

so desperate for money I've snuck into fountains at night and stolen the wishes of children

I do not know if it is a good or bad thing that I have forgotten how to draw as badly as I used to, but I am nonetheless redrawing old comics in the style of my younger, less experienced hands to get those old comics ready for people to actually read, rather than just illustrating twenty pages of vaguely-linked scenes and calling it a story like I usually do when I want something to use for swapsies with other small pressers seeing as I don't actually have any money to pay for indy comics but still want to read them, especially now that I seem to be going off superhero comics again as I periodically do - though paradoxically, this seems to be when I end up attempting to make my own superhero comics with wilfully daft names like Turbo Katie or Cannibal Salad, even though I keep telling myself I'm supposed to be taking the drawing dead serious these days and shouldn't be mucking about with stuff that's clearly for a laugh like comics are fun or something.