Messages

"To be fair, though, a lot of the criticisms are exactly the same thing: just "it's crap" without any kind of explanation."

Ahem ... mine haven't been. The writing on large chunks of this series has been dreadful, with (to pick just one aspect that's annoyed me) massive over-reliance on Deus Ex Machina resolutions that make little or no sense.

The laziness and/or complacency that this demonstrates borders on contempt for the audience, and has squandered almost all of the massive goodwill I felt towards this series.

Cheers

Jim

[1] Shall we start with the first episode's "Let's mix half a dozen antidotes together in a bucket and miraculously come up with an cure for everything" and work our way forwards?

On second thoughts, I can't be bothered.

[Fiction]

"I'll be joining Paul on the "Fuck RTD" picketline..."

If our worst fears are confirmed, then I, too, will be joining that line.

And I'll be bringing a pick-axe handle with the words "Russell T Davis" carved into it.

"Ahem ... excuse me, Mr Davis ...

"It's called ... Science [THWACK!] Fiction [THWACK!] because it's [THWACK!] Fiction with [THWACK!] science in it! [THWACK!]

"Billie-fiucking-Piper [THWACK!]

"And her fucking mum! [THWACK!]

"Timmy fucking Mallet [1] [THWACK!]

"You [THWACK!] fucking [THWACK!] tosser!" [THWACK!]

Bah! Again!

Jim

[1] Timmmeeeeeeh!

"Oh, and mind the spoilers for next week, please."

My apologies ... I didn't think spoilers mattered when it was a dreadful load of old shite!

But the apology is genuine: sorry, chap!

Cheers

Jim

[upgrade the UNIVERSE!"]

"I thought the episode was pretty cringeworthy in the most part "

Not as bad as the snippet from next week:

"Daleks plus Cybermen ... we could upgrade the UNIVERSE!"

Oh ... Mr Tennant ... would you mind jumping over this shark one more time? I don't think everyone got it the last time ...

Bah!

Jim

"Maelstrom's another space judges story, by Robbie Morrison and Colin MacNeil."

Can't remember much about the story, but I do remember it having some particularly nice b/w artwork by MacNeil.

Cheers

Jim

"which is why I said "

Yes. Yes, you did. Speed reading the thread at work and missed it -- sorry about that.

I'll get me coat.

Jim

"Also a Massimo cover gallery"

Err... that second one is Ian Gibson ...

Cheers!

Jim

"Although mentioned before, I wonder if he'd be up to doing a non or loose-deadlined piece for the prog. A star scan or even better something like the old Supercovers would be unbelievably great."

I would like to second (or third, or whatever) that suggestion ...

Cheers!

Jim

[AAAAAH!]

"I did a whole load of animal-related logo concepts recently - and all of them got trounced by an image the client nicked off Google and asked me to copy for the eventual design. I did so with a heavy heart."

Oh God, the horror ...

I remember doing a mini-catalogue for a shoe shop. Bear in mind that almost half the stuff in there was New Rock product, or variations thereon.

I found this fantastic font (Dmitri, I think), a great, heavy, angular thing - all straight lines and 45? angles - lower case the same height as upper. The company name was VIVID and the word looked fantastic in this font - changing the first 'I' to an exclamation mark made the logo look like it should read the same upside down (although it actually didn't) and I finished the thing off with a lovely distressed metal texture and a bevel.

Looked fucking great. I'd seen the shop and some stationery, and there was no specific branding - design-wise, they were a mess.

"Oh, no," says the client, "we wanted the logo to look like this."

... And produces a piece of paper with the word VIVID, all in caps, Comics Sans, with a rainbow fill left to right.

AAAAAH!

Jim

[other]

"This happens on the same type of job as when you put a great deal of time & effort into a top-notch design, only for the client to insist that the original which they knocked-up in Word is better - and ultimately what they want printed.

Slowly, genius artwork turns into a mere InDesign version of what they started with, and you begin to wonder, "What's the point of me?""

And that, right there, is the other reason I abandoned design work ...

Because even fairly basic software lets people produce something that looks vaguely like a logo, no-one sees why they should have to pay for it these days.

I once spent two whole days on a brochure that a customer had done in Publisher. He insisted that it was printed exactly as he'd supplied it.

Except that all his proofs were done on a six-colour inkjet and his images were RGB.

Two days, just to make his document look the way he wanted and match his crappy layout. I could have done him something lovely from scratch in about four hours, including doing the scans myself instead of having to extract them from the Publisher job, get them into Photoshop, etc, etc ...

[Sigh]

Cheers!

Jim

"BALLCOCKS!"

Indeed! There's money in them thar drains ...

Of all my contemporaries, by far the most successful, by any measure I can fathom, is the one who didn't waste several years at university and went off to set himself up as builder and plumber.

?250K house[1], two cars, two kids, works for himself, generally seems very conent with his lot.

Cheers

Jim

[1] In Nottingham, 250K still buys you quite a lot of house ...

"Or facing the prospect of working 60 hours in three days?"

One of things that got me out of design work was the job where I did 35 hours straight, early Thursday morning through to late Friday afternon, after which my boss told me that I could have 'a couple of days off' as compensation.

Foolishly, I didn't think he was referring to the weekend which followed. A 19 hour day ensued on the following Monday.

"Anyone else got a crummy aspect to their job they want to share?"

The above experience was central to my decision to get out of the graphic design business.

This has left me working in customer service, two years of which has led me to understand that the great British public can be the most unreasonable, unpleasant, whinging bunch of fuckers on the face of the planet.

I am thus considering re-training as a plumber and wondering why my careers advisor at school never counselled this as an option.

Bah!

Jim

"I'm already pinning my hopes on series 3, but then I did the same with series 2."

I'm very undecided on the New Who ...

Series 1: I have to say that I didn't particularly like Ecclestone. Liked the Dickens one, liked the Empty Child, quite liked Dalek ... none of the remainder made enough of an impression to comment, other than being fairly disappointed with the series finale.

Series 2: Liked the werewolf, quite liked the Coronation one, did like the Satan one because of the Old School vibe. Actively disliked the Cybermen two-parter, didn't object to the Peter Kay one, and thought this last was utterly "Meh."

The writing needs a much firmer hand, IMO. If you're going to do a science fiction show, I don't think it's acceptable to adopt such a slap-dash approach to the actual SF -- it needs to be more than an excuse to drop a Deus Ex into a more mundane plot to get the writer out of a hole.

The frustrating thing is that I don't think there's been a bad episode that couldn't have been very easily fixed.

Cheers

Jim

"Some brilliant villains in Red Jack, The Shadowy Mr Evans, The Cult of the Unwritten Book and The Brotherhood of Dada. "

I know I've mentioned it on another thread, but 'The Beard Hunter' from Doom Patrol is the most fantastic piss take of the Punisher (and his ilk) that you will ever read.

It's sublime: every aspect of the character-type is systematically demolished or ridiculed and the (guest) artist really got the gag, playing the artwork entirely straight.

"Niles Caulder -- I've come for your beard."

Cheers!

Jim

"I'm going to go out on a limb and assume Morrison's run on Doom Patrol comes highly recommended?"

It's difficult for me to view it from a fresh perspective. You have to remember that the aftershocks of Watchmen were still rumbling around the comics mainstream and everyone and their dog was producing grim-and-gritty-superheroes-with-an-edge [1] ...

... And along came Morrison's Doom Patrol, by turns funny, absurd, scary and touching. I've said elsewhere that I never liked the art, but the plotting was like an explosion in an ideas factory, whilst the scripting was exquisite.

It trod a fine line between intelligence and pretension and (for me, at least) always pulled it off. How it reads now to a new reader, I really cannot say ...

You can get the opening stories in the 'Crawling from the Wreckage' TPB. I'm not clear on how much (or how completely) the rest of the run is reprinted, but if you like 'Crawling', then you should enjoy the rest of the run.

Cheers!

Jim

[1] Honourable exception: Giffen and DeMatteis' 'Justice League', one of the few books that used to make me laugh out loud pretty much every month.