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 in other wise tedious  gloomathon Alien 3 Brian Glovers swearing skills  almost woke me up. almost.

 Whether you love or loathe sandman, and personally I liked big chunks of it, I tend to look at it like this: if it wasn't for Sandman we would never have had  sandman mystery theatre, one of my favourite comics ever, even the enemies of faerytoss must like Wesley dodds gimp masked investigations.
 

 It was a pretty good title but unlike the other three comics mentioned it was curtailed early so the pacing goes out of whack towards the end and a lot of subplots are streamlined. Still if it's reasonably priced it'll be a good buy.
 what I really, really want though is for one of the big showcase colllections to be  suicide squad.

 It was a pretty good title but unlike the other three comics mentioned it was curtailed early so the pacing goes out of whack towards the end and a lot of subplots are streamlined. Still if it's reasonably priced it'll be a good buy.
 what I really, really want though is for one of the big showcase colllections to be  suicide squad.

 To be fair to the Pizza hut boss he's probably scared shitless after a racial awareness seminar that if he didn't take "positive action" then he's a sackable nazi. Some of the people who run equal opportunities training are swivel eyed loons who set back the cause their promoting. (I'm sure there are good, inspiring  ones I've just never seen one, and been offended by quite a few "we're all racists" "No I'm not" "Yes you are" being a particular favourite, not the best way to start a training day really)

Black light, darkness visible, Purgatory good underated stuff. also think the Pit is underated amongst the mega epics, only beaten by appocalypse war and necropolis for me.

 the book was bloody tedious though.

From the times on line, which having had a look around for this article appears to have some genuinely good stuff:

"The creator of the Inspector Rebus novels says that he is fulfilling his dream
 
 
IAN RANKIN, the bestselling crime novelist, will begin a new career as a comic writer after he finishes the last Inspector Rebus novel.
However, Rankin will not be abandoning his chosen field completely. He has decided to throw himself not into the world of muscle-bound, cape-wearing heroes but that of a supernatural detective, John Constantine, who appears in the monthly comic Hellblazer.

 
 
Rankin is the latest author to transfer his skills to comics after Jodi Picoult, who has written bestsellers such as My Sister?s Keeper, announced last month that she was writing storylines for Wonder Woman.

Rankin announced that he was in negotiations with Vertigo ? an imprint of DC Comics, which publishes Superman and Batman ? at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Thursday night.

He told The Times that he had sent Vertigo a six-line plot outline that would give Constantine a new set of cases to solve. ?The beauty of comic books is that you can do new things with the same character and the readers don?t seem to mind,? he said. ?In my version he is going to be much more of a pulp fiction-style private eye who happens to deal with supernatural characters rather than ordinary cases like divorcing couples.

?I will do stories for five or six issues, but DC might do it as a complete graphic novel.?

He suggested that he might weave his love of horror films into the plot.

The Constantine character was created in the mid-1980s by Alan Moore, the British writer best known for V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as a minor character in the Swamp Thing comics. The morally ambivalent detective, who has been to Hell and back, got his own series in 1988 and was turned last year into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz. The film made $230 million worldwide.

Rankin has been reading comics since the age of five. ?Sadly, at the age of 46 I?m still reading them,? he said. He grew up reading the Beano and the Dandy before moving on to more sophisticated comics including Swamp Thing.

He also tried drawing his own comics at the age of 6, but gave up when he decided he could not draw. ?I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I?d have a spy story, a space story and a football story,? he said.

He also drew comics about an imaginary pop group called Kaput, who were always No 1 in the charts.

Rankin was introduced to DC bosses by Denise Mina, a fellow Scottish crime-writer who wrote the most recent Hellblazer issues.

?She broke the barrier,? he said. ?This New York-based industry started looking outside its normal area for writers. I pitched the idea for a storyline, but I haven?t fleshed it out yet.?

He said that the discipline needed for writing comics was very different from conventional books. Some writers, such as Moore, can write pages of text for one panel. ?You never know what will happen,? he said. ?I may not be any good at it.?
 I'm cautiously optomistic about this, I think of rankin   as a modern pulp fiction writer and I think he will be a good fit for monthly comics. Certianly Rebus and Constantine have similar drinking habits. I can olnly hope it's not Johns Whiskey trail adventures.
 
 
 

  I'm guessing that they are trying to wind people up in those interviews, at least I hope so. Can only be glad Millar never got to do a relaunch of Dan Dare (I'm assuming they are not talking about Morrisons Dare project, wasn't that earlier?)
 is it Hive acceptable to admit I liked Big Dave,and even worse kind of enjoyed Purgatory/inferno? maybe it just looked good in comparison to the turkeytastic crusade, but I did enjoy it.
 really and truly, robohunter and maniac 5 however were pretty dreadful.

 I'ld love to join the shakespeare bashing however in 6th form we noticed that he actually wrote a fan fic last episode for 80s cheese fest dynasty. the following won't make much sense to anyone that doesn't remember that bastion of reagan values and was never a 17 year old pseud trying to annoy his english teacher.
 anyway anthony and cleopatra. If ceasar corresponds to blake carrington  alexis is cleopatra, dex is anthony and one of the carrington spogs is octavian then it kind of works. especially when you take into account the massive number of scene changes (which don't really occur on a similar scale anywhere else in shakespeare) and country hopping.
 Anyway thats probably the geekiest thing i've ever written, only dissapointed i never got to write my Bread: a scouse titus andronicus? essay. can't help thinking murder and canablism would have made that shitcom almost bearable.

 Star wars- oh god its crap...and I do mean the whole series (although I have a massive soft spot for Empire) wafer thin characters, ponderous back story, an adolescents attitude to women (there are 2 worth considering in 6 films, and lets be honest here padme's a personality free cypher), the worst dialogue in the universe particularly the romantic speaches "I like you your not like sand " WTF?! JarJar, ewoks, the dark lord of the sith is a stroppy teenager, oh god it's just all crap.
 Give me Captain kirk fighting and shagging his way throught the galaxy any time, even the 80s Flash Gordon  is a massively more fun experience, even though it is also crappy in its own likeable way.

 He's Iain Dowies metrosexual twin. the eyebrows being the telling clue.

 Hi,
     wasn't trying to make a false impression by missing out that line, it was originally going to be  a longer post with some information from the CBR columns which seemed to directly contradict the opening line which is why I left it out. Hopefully write it up again and post it up later today, I apologise if you think i was trying to deliberately spin the interiview, wouldn't do that as  firstly I genuinely like Moores work(very much looking forward to the Black Dossier) and the quote is pulled from something directly linked to here which I assume anyone who's reading this has already seen so it'ld be a silly thing to do anyway. In hindsight I should have left it in though.

Jim    

garageman he hasn't said that at all. what he has said is that the book is porn and he's also said the below


T"here's no more underage sex in Lost Girls than is probably occurring in this block at the moment. I think the first time I had sex, I was 17, and I was embarrassed because I was a late starter. So something sexually questionable might happen to an imaginary character that looks too young by our current standards? though not by the standards that we held 100 years ago, when the age of consent in Britain was 12, and working-class teenagers were married with children. But because these characters appear to transgress upon our current arbitrary line of when it's permissible to have a sexual identity, are people really going to be that upset? When there are children right now being blown to pieces, often at our behest or in our name?"

 the above suggets that it does involve sexual situations between children. I'm specifically not going to read it based on what Moores said himself. Not my bag, and again at the end of the day it is porn and it does sound as if it features minors. I'm a fan of moores, but this is not for me

 just for clarrification, as I could have phrased that better, I do not think that paedophillia will become acceptable to mainstream society I'm just reporting an idea that has come up a few time in interviews of paedophiles.
 Hopefully the point I was trying to make  that you can be concerned aboout the impact of moores work without being rabidly unreasonable or seeing the world through News-of-the-Worldo-scope did come accross.