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You kind of need population density on a map like that too, to show just how much a lot of red areas are just a dozen shitheads and some cows.

Of course, a big part of the problem with the US political system is the disproportionate weighting it gives to those rural shitheads, both through the electoral college (which means that one person's presidential election vote in, say, Wyoming, counts the same as four people's votes in California) and the Senate (Wyoming, population 576,000 = two senators; California, population 39,000,000 = two senators).

Snapshot from 3 / 4 / 99.

Congratulations, Jim, and happy anniversary to you both.

Not sure why, but that image isn't displaying for me (in fact, I only realised there was an image when I quoted this post and saw the URL).

Anyway, thanks for the kind words, folks!

Belatedly, here's a photo of the happy couple at Whitby registrar's office in 1999... 

Oh, hello. Finally able to log back in... thank you for the fix, hard-working IT droids!

...because today marks twenty-five years since I married m'lovely wife. I genuinely have no idea how she's put up with me for a quarter of a century, but here we are. 

Can u say what it is I'm not on Facebook

I am on Facebook, but no power on Earth would compel me to join the 'Megaverse' group and it's set to 'private' — you can't view any of the content unless you're a member.

[You have my attention.]

completely unnecessary and gratuitous nudity

You have my attention.

It was in the Dillon exhibition at Lawless

Steve Dillon Exhibition

Fair play, then!

It's so weird for me that 2000 AD thought it was a good idea to hire on US superhero writers to work on the comic.

Fleisher, particularly, was a good friend of then-editor Richard Burton. To be fair, Fleisher was pretty well-regarded for his runs on The Spectre and Jonah Hex, so it's not like Burton just brought on some total rando... it's just a shame that Fleisher never really adjusted to the very different discipline of writing 5/6 pages for a weekly anthology.

Who did the rogue trooper print? Pretty sure that's not Steve.

I wondered the same — it really doesn't look like his work. There's strong hint of Rufus about it, definitely in the hands.

Outside of that, well it gets more complicated

Seriously?! I think I suffered a minor aneurysm halfway though the first paragraph...

[Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery]

Finally got around to watching Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which I'd been avoiding because it was so clearly sun-scorched compared to the rather bucolic original Knives Out.

Yep. It's great. Someone on Facebook was suggesting today that Knives Out 3 should be a Muppet movie, like Christmas Carol with Daniel Craig as the only human character... which I think is nothing short of genius.

'Eureka' - one of those comics that never was.

Yeesh. That lettering, though!

(Fascinating post, BTW — I'd never heard of that!)

[Hellman]

Reprint! Some Hellman, which is fine.

Although, I notice that the reprint credits Mike Dorey as the artist on Hellman but everything after the first episode is definitely Jim Watson.

I paint and draw for a living, and I've tried drawing comics - I just can't do it.

It's murderously hard work — I've said (numerous times!) that drawing comics is probably the most labour-intensive way imaginable of trying to monetise artistic talent.

I've sort of enjoyed the tiny number of sequential pages I've drawn over the years... but I just find it takes so long. You have to design the characters, the costumes, the environments, you have to design the pages themselves so that they're both readable and serve the requirements of the script...

And that's all before you've actually drawn a single panel. Then you have to make sure all that stuff you designed is consistent across multiple pages. Figure out the lighting, camera angles, make the characters 'act'.

It's a frickin' miracle any one does it all, never mind for the money most comic gigs are offering!

I was just rereading the first Sláine story, and it struck me that it was a real shame she couldn't have stuck around the prog a bit longer.

IIRC, Angie Kincaid was primarily a book illustrator at the time and comics really weren't her forte, with the pages of that first episode getting sent back by the editorial team for revision/redrawing multiple times... to the extent that McMahon had completed many of his episodes before that first episode was judged ready for publication.

Obviously, for it to take months to get six pages to a point where they're publishable is unsustainable — economically for the artist, and logistically for editorial, who are feeding the ravenous content beast of a weekly anthology and need stuff to arrive ready for lettering/colouring with minimal intervention on their part.

(Plus, even back then, comics didn't pay that well and I'm sure that book illustration paid more money for less work.)