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So sorry to hear this. What a lovely bloke he was.

A lovely guy, and the soul of 2K fandom, really. I was going to say I have many happy memories of him at cons Dredd, Shed, etc, but it'd be more accurate to say I have one amorphous booze-stained smudge of half-remembered moments. Which I'm sure is how he'd want it. RIP Stewart.

Went to see this last night, and was quite surprised to find that I didn't hate it.  Which is not to say it's not shit.

It's shot beautifully, and there is a certain element of gobsmacked amazement at seeing panels from the book transposed so directly onto the screen.  But it just serves to point up all the more that it's not enough to use the original as a storyboard.  It's got the same problem the Dredd film had - it's determined to reference as much as possible of the original, so you end up with a confused jumble of half-explained fragments of plot and set-pieces rather than anything that really works as cinema.  There's a huge amount of stuff there that doesn't really make sense if you haven't read the comic (e.g. why is Dr Manhattan wearing a giant thong in 'Nam?).  And the violence is pornographic.

I think the sort of knuckle-headed thinking that bungs "All Along the Watchtower" onto the soundtrack just because there's a quote from the lyrics in the book at that point pretty much sums up what's wrong with the film. And oh god, Halle-bloody-lujah when Dan and Laurie have a fumble in the back of the owlmobile, does it get any more lumberingly obvious? (Although at least they used Laughing Len's version.) That cod-punk version of Desolation Row over the end titles gives me a handy simile, because that bears the same relation to the original as this film bears to the comic.

Is everyone blinded so much by Dr Manhattan's cock that they didn't notice that he had no bollocks? No wonder Laurie left him.

And, duh, of course a giant Harryhausen-style squid would have been a better ending.

Ken Campbell. Bad week for comedy.

In 1947 Life Magazine, for reasons best known to them, asked a bunch of comics artists to draw their characters blindfolded. You can see the results here.

It's, um, interesting.

Obviously Wells's "The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds" have to be on any list worth its salt too.

Regarding the Dune sequels, if you care to trust my 37 year old self's recollection of my teenage self's opinion, as I remember it the other two in the original trilogy ("Dune Messiah" and "Children of Dune") are pretty good, "God Emperor of Dune" is over-long but agreeably mental, and everything after that's shit on a stick.*


*By "everything" I mean the book and a half I managed to get through before I gave up.

In theory, 8mb. In practice, as T*lkt*lk over-subscribe their lines and we live about a million miles away from the exchange, the kind of speed you could get with something run on a rubber band.

A list of the 50 greatest comics characters that doesn't include Dennis the Menace* is bollocks.


*The proper one, not that crappy American one

I missed the second one (I was in the pub instead), but my other half saw it and she said it was "utter bollocks".

"It's the new Torchwood!" I exclaimed.

"Actually, I think it might be worse than that", she whispered.

Gosh, thanks!
Ooh, I've gone all shy now!

Difficult one this. Do I really have to decide?

Oh well:

Bongo 1
Satchmo
Bolt 2

It's strange to think that this came from the pen of the same man who wrote the excellent "Midnight".

Overall it was toss, of course, but anyone who's surprised by that obviously didn't watch the finales of the previous three series, because it should be clear to all and sundry that Rusty D can't resolve a plot to save his life. You have to wonder what kind of masochistic urge drives him on to try and write big epic space-opera stuff when it's clear that that's the exact opposite of what he's good at.

On the other hand, Davros and Cribbens were brilliant (Davros and the daleks criminally wasted), Catherine Tate turned in a stunning performance (her Tennant impression was spot on, much better than his of her), and the very end was astonishing, and utterly bleak in a way I'd never have thought possible in an early evening family show. So many great things in there (Deutsche daleken!) and yet so much shit too (Towing the earth home? Fuck off!). Have so many MacGuffins ever been produced in such a short time to so little effect?

All in all, a bizarre conflation of everything that's great and terrible about RTD's era. Nuggets of pure gold floating in a sea of shit.

Oh, and wasn't leaving Rose with a clone Doctor sex-bot just about the weirdest, sickest resolution possible for her?! I still can't decide if that's a travesty or genius.  

Well, I did it a couple of years ago and met someone whom I've ended up moving in with, so it worked for me.

Be prepared for a long hard slog though, it's great fun at first but by the time you get to your 10th or 11th first date it can get a bit dispiriting, endlessly having essentially the same conversation with many different people. I think the average internet dater goes on about 16 dates before they meet someone they stick with.

This blog provides excellent advice, and is very funny to boot.

Thank god, I was in danger of getting something done.

I would never in a million years have imagined I'd get someone to give me money for drawing funny pictures, but that's exactly what happened last year. It came about because someone saw my Big Dog strips, and I wouldn't be doing those if I hadn't met pvs and Bolt through this here board and got involved with their small press shenanigans. And now Big Dog is enjoyed by literally tens of people all around the world (not all of whom were looking for suppliers of kennels for big dogs).

I'd also have got my work done much quicker if it weren't for this place.

Link: http://www.bigdogcomic.co.uk" target="_blank">Big Dog's Kennel