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Time Warp was the second book of Ed “Ilya” Hillyer’s End of the Century Club stories. The stories were wonderful pieces of gutter level millennial magical realism with a dirty sense of humour. I highly recommend Time Warp and the first part, Countdown, but the reason I’ve been thinking about it today is the 8-page mini story which starts volume 2 and depicts the national rejoicing at the death of a certain politician. It’s chock full of the sort of Bacchanalian excess and joy that the Daily Mail imagines everyone else has been participating in, but also has a character voice their concerns that her legacy is still there.
I love Bryan Talbot’s lush Grandville graphic novels, so news of a new one makes me very happy. Grandville Bete Noire is published at the start of next month.
Warren Ellis » SPACEGIRL And Why Your Funny Webcomics Bore Me.
Wouldn’t this be a demented, lovely, quixotic thing? If a bunch of people said fuck all you people who do nothing but newspaper comedy strips on the web, we’re going to do newspaper dramatic strips and do crazy stuff.
I didn’t do an adventure strip, but I did try to do an adventure serial with US comic size pages. Point of Contact fell victim to my usual lack of time/discipline and an uncertainty about where the story was really going. I came in with a plan for hundred plus page tale, but began to lose my way quite quickly.
I still want to do some graphic storytelling, and maybe I’ll make Mr. Ellis’ day by having it be a newspaper strip (or blogstrip, sized more appropriately for screens and the three column layout I prefer). I certainly have a bunch of half ideas ready to throw at one another. Whilst unpacking I’ve been stopped by Timularo and Akira and want to do something crazy and apocalyptic.
Possibly with ninja. And zombies.
Let me see how soon I can clear space for the drawing board.
Black Bob is a brave, loyal and resourceful sheep dog who is always having adventures. Most often they involve sheep rustling and less well behaved dogs but sometimes there are runaways to protect and mysteries to solve.
Each Black Bob card features a panel, and the associated text, from a Black Bob tale. Each one is unique. The interiors are blank and they come with an envelope.
Spinneyworld does not like to damage otherwise healthy books and wishes to reassure you that the publications from which these images came were too badly damaged to be rescued.
Hand made Black Bob cards – Spinneyworld.
Amongst the many things distracting me in the last few months has been a website called Mangafox. It’s a site dedicated to’scanlations’ of manga series- scans of the originals translated and re-lettered by volunteers. It’s not legitimate, of course, but hey.
As I have a long standing interest in erotic comics I went looking for stuff in the Adult category. Two in particular got my attention. Koibana Onsen is the ongoing tale of an inn which specialises in erotic romantic getaways- and the various hang-ups of the staff. Itoshi No Kana is a paranormal romance which inspired a story idea from me.
Itoshi No Kana, according to the scanlators, means My Lovely Ghost Kana and concentrates on the relationship between the eponymous ghost and Daikichi. As the story opens Daikichi, whose name ironically means lucky, has lost his job and home and taken to squatting in an abandoned apartment block. Here he meets Kana, the ghost of the girl who committed suicide in the room he has chosen to inhabit. Their relationship soon becomes intimate, rescuing each other from their respective hells.
There’s a lot of sex in the first Kana book- the second is more concerned with their growing connection with the outside world- and it’s a lot of fun as well as being very hot. This is despite Japanese censorship rules which mean genitalia aren’t explicitly depicted- there’s a lot of allusion and, when that runs out, erections are often reperesented by a bar of white space.
Itoshi No Kana is a naughty example of the manga subgenre known as Magical Girlfriend. The MG can be an alien princess, witch or hot demoness who makes life complicated for some hapless protagonist. Most often, the protagonist and MG never get to consummate their relationship, continuing through endless scrapes punctuated by panty shots and other tittilation (aka fanservice). Kana ignores the rule of delayed gratification to tell a different story.
I’ve been tempted to do something Magical Girlfriend-y, on and off, for a while and Itoshi inspired me again. So I’ve started the tale of a young man who bumps into a girl who isn’t there as he crosses an old bridge. Having knocked her back into the physical world he becomes her lover and they embark on an exploration of hauntings, beasts and Boggles, all the while tracking down the man who killed her.
I see an episodic series, short stories with different monsters each time, but with an overall arc- the story of the ghost’s murder and revenge. The main characters’ sex life- and the mating habits of were-creatures, vampyres and assorted ghoulies- would be a major part of the stories. Not often enough to warrant the label of Paranormal Erotica (a popular genre on Amazon), but regular and hot nonetheless. So I’m going to do this series under my Garth Owen pen name, I think.
The first story in the series is tentatively titled The Girl On The Bridge and I’m 6000 or so words into it, using it to flesh out some details of the back story and world. I’m far too easily distracted by other ideas and stories I want to work on, but I hope to have this one finished soon.
In the queue for the MCM Expo, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.
And behaving myself. There are superheroes behind me.
But not this one. (Warning, contains cartoony boobs. Other Oglaf comics are naughtier, if you’re thinking of delving into the archives at work.)
Captain America was here, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.
There’s not much left of the Captain America on Dale Street, apart from these signs.
I’m still surfing the strange and cool cars on eBay, and have just found a Batmobile. It’s one of three based upon the TV series car, produced for promo work. £23,000 will buy you the right to say “Atomic batteries to speed” every time you go for a drive.
Matt Brooker, AKA D’Israeli, has collected his Timulo strips from Deadline, added other work featuring the character and released it as a collection called Timularo.
Remember Deadline magazine? Remember that weird strip with the writing round the edge of the page? That’s Timulo. When glum Esperantist Mateo Timulo quits reality and goes off to live in a world of his own, he isn’t prepared for the complications that follow. First he’s abandoned by his male power fantasy, Mark E D’Sade, then he finds himself stalked by those cubist Yuppie nightmares, The Nietzche Bros. And as for D’Israeli, necromancer, polymath, and zombie of England’s greatest statesman, just whose side is he on? Collecting the entire run of Timulo, the 1998 sequel Consequences, and more than 20 pages of previously unseen material, Timularo is wilder than a bucketful of killer haddock, and stranger than even the enigmatic Curse of Kong… 168 pages, black & white.
Damn you D’Emon! I’m supposed to be clearing my bookshelves!
Hack/Slash is not the same idea as the story I’m currently considering, but it comes from a similar place. I knew somebody had to have done something like this.
Hack/Slash is an ongoing comic books series, launched from several one shots of the same name, published by Devil’s Due Publishing that has also been adapted into a stage play and a feature film.
The series, starting as a series of one-shots, was created by writer and sometime penciller Tim Seeley.
The focus of the series is on a horror victim, Cassie, who strikes back at the monsters, known as “slashers”, with Vlad, a disfigured “gentle giant” who frequently wears a gas mask.
Buy Hack/Slash collections at Amazon
An Ames Guide is an odd little plastic device used by architects and comic book letterers to help create consistent guide lines for their lettering. I’ve got one, and used it on a comics project ages ago. I wasn’t satisfied with the results and have lettered on the computer ever since, though that’s less than perfect as well. I may go old school again next time I try my hand at comics, and I shall refer back to these guidelines by Dustin Harbin on how to do it properly.
via Drawn
Warren Ellis on the hero-coming-out-of-retirment subgenre. He’s talking about the film version of his comic Red, which I’m looking forward to. I read the first two issues of the comic then, for one reason or another, completely missed the rest of it. Plus the film version has, as Ellis kept pointing out, Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle.
The Irwin tales fall into the unretired spy genre, after a fashion. Irwin has retired from MI6, though he did it far younger than Bruce Willis’ character in Red. After being injured one time too many he called time on a career that was trying to kill him, and has managed to find some less dangerous pastimes to take up his time. Of course, as the Irwin stories unfold, we’ll see him being dragged back in, as well as getting into dangerous situations entirely of his own accord.
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