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[Captain Scarlet]

That's probably better than anything the Sam Worthington rumours will result in. It reminded me of the CGI Captain Scarlet animated series that Ant & Dec used to sandwich between Wonky Donkey and interviews with Steps, only much, much more violent.

Your facility for storytelling and dialogue is commensurate with that of Gerry Finley-Day himself, and I really enjoyed the movement and characterisation of the Souther troops; especially their Charlie Brown-style sotto voce dialogue. If Peter Serafinowicz finds that on Youtube and decides to revoice all the voice parts, you could have an internet phenomenon on your hands.

It's only a matter of time before someone on this forum is discovered by the tastemakers of Camden and Soho and is declared to be an outsider artist; my money's still on Burdis for the moment, but with that video you've staked a powerful claim of your own. Genuine thanks for sharing.

[big wave]

... Krishnan Guru Murthy gave me a big wave.

demonstrates how the relevance of books that deal with imagined realities can often be greater (and less tediously wanky) than those that describe life in Hampstead.

More honest too.

Correct. Martin Amis points out that religous nutters of one faith are just as dangerous as anyone who values adherence to an ideology over the rights of the individual, and he takes pelters from the same tossers who used to fawn over his every word.

If he'd written an episode of Doctor Who where the normalising, fascist zealots were the Cybermen, painfully sincere geeks would have listened to the substance of what he was saying, debated it endlessly on the internet, and financed his cosmetic dentistry for years to come with lucrative convention appearances.

Hay on Wye is Comic Con for Culture Show viewers.

[Fife]

Still pete's other commission proves that Dredd is quicker/luckier than Logan if nowt else. Had to look up neebs though. Fife, eh?

My misunderstanding; I just assume everyone is as obtuse and slow on the uptake as me. But Fife ? Fife ? Now I understand why that Report To Moderator button's down there.

Makes me wish MacNeil had got to feature those mechanised reinforcement units more prominently in his Chaos episodes.

It's not over yet. Mehanismo V the Dark Judges.

Do you work for Marvel?

Sorry, Neebs. I meant this little beauty:



Which offered a glimpse of the thicker lines and stylised shading of MacNeil's impressive new style months before Strange & Darke, and long before his new pen work hit the streets of MC1.

Makes me wish MacNeil had got to feature those mechanised reinforcement units more prominently in his Chaos episodes. MacNeil's Mechanismo sequence was the most fun of the three stories; if there's ever a return to the idea of Metal Mickeys policing the streets of the Meg, that image serves as a great audition piece.

I think you'd have to go a long way in anyone's writing to match the 'fucked up nastiness' of Surface Detail.  From indented intagliation to the concept and details of the Hells themselves, that is one seriously twisted book.

Yup. The sequence before and after Donalmacintyredisguisedasabugdemon commits a small, selfish act of betrayal in saving himself before the Mariecolvinelephantalien that he loves is just heartbreaking and an effective metaphor for the cruelty of a construct such as Hell.

The book's exploration of what psychological impulse lies behind the need to punish, and the social function of discriminating between the worthy and the damned, demonstrates how the relevance of books that deal with imagined realities can often be greater (and less tediously wanky) than those that describe life in Hampstead.

There's lots of cool stuff with armoured battle suits, inventive narcotics and wrong sex too.

...because it being our wedding anniversary recently and not being able to get away due to both her work and mine, today finally she and i are taking a much earned break from the kids for a whole day- and heading up to london.

We shall be staring at a model of her head made of cake in an art gallery, a painting of her on a wall, eating food, shopping in the fleshpots of soho, buying filthy underwear, and going to mega city comics in camden.

I may not feel at my best- im on the comedown after a week's course of zopiclone, resulting in fuzzy-headedness, a tendency to zone out, and a desire to crawl into bed at the drop of a hat, and after being kneed in the face on thursday my neck still feels broken... BUT we are out for the day!

Is there a causal connection between your being kneed in the face on Thursday and the fact that your Anniversary seems to have passed without memorial some time ago?

[LRAD]

To enforce justice during the Lunar, I mean the London Olympics...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18042528
Are they allowed bionic implants this year?

'The company deny it is a weapon and say it can be used to "peacefully resolve uncertain situations"'

I suppose your view of the LRAD depends on whether your defintion of peaceful encompasses the use of 'piercing beam(s) of ... highly directional, ... deafening sound (at) levels of 150 decibels'.

My Mum's got something similar that stops cats shiteing in her flower borders.

Use of Weapons would have been my candidate to replace Stainless Steel Rat if Carlos fancied a change of material to adapt. Given Ezquerra's aptitude for grand guignol, I'd love to have seen his version of that piece of furniture.

That's quite a thought: it'd give the story a weird pulp feel, that's for sure.
I think my favourite of his sci-fi is another of his non-Culture novels, Against a Dark Background.

I love that book.  I think that often Banks tries to squeeze in to many shocks so you almost expect a twist.  For me Complicity is probably his best (and straightest) book. For his Sci Fi writing I think Use of Weapons is probably the best Culture book, as Trout said earlier he really has created something in the Sci Fi field beyond his ability to shock in his "contemporary" books.

If it's the fucked up nastiness of Banks that appeals, Use of Weapons and Complicity probably represent the twin apogees of that strain of his writing, and they demonstrate that there's much more read-across between his two pen names than is often credited. The video games Colley plays, his drug use, the meaningless fucking, the amoral political violence; all echo the concerns of his spaceship-y stuff.

Like Wagner, one of the things that appeals to me about Banks's work is the way, even when they're working within the confines of a genre, their stories reach out to the politics, culture and concerns of the real world for inspiration- even when they involve implausible violations of the human body and bizarre sexual transgression.

Another excellent blog Pete. As someone who dabbles with drawing, it's great to see (week after week) the creative process from some of my favourite artists. A real joy.

I too would like to see Chris draw a retro-2099-strip.

No-one makes stuff look simultaneously retro and new like Weston. The Filth, Ministry of Space, his take on Rogue Trooper; the man's art should come with an index of references and visual quotations.

[Pete Wells's commission]

The praise already given to Chris Blythe's colouring on Day of Chaos is richly deserved. Not only do the colours on the first page of Dredd make Fire- a character who's easy to get wrong- work brilliantly, it foregrounds the spike-helmeted Mad Mental in a way that effortlessly guides the eye through the page and on to the next one, by weighting the balance between thick black lines and solid colour.

It's an effect Blythe uses again to great effect later, by dropping out the strong blacks on all but Mortis's skull, outreached arm and Logan's doomed corresponding limb (i). The green miasma that envelops Mortis, and seems to accompany the Dark Judges everywhere they go, is a nice reminder of their first colour appearance in Necropolis and the sickly pall that hung over the city during that more successful assault on MC1. Those kind of touches help tell the story and are like rubbing the belly of longterm readers.

Colin MacNeil's new chunkier inking style (ii) fits the change in the Dark Judges' narrative mode from gothic horror to something more rational and corporeal. It's difficult to imagine the delicate brushwork of Bolland or Cliff Robinson selling the visual of Fire TWOCing a JCB as well as MacNeil, whose depiction of MC1 has always displayed a solidity and cohesiveness that suggests he's given the same kind of thought to exactly how that fictional world would operate as greats such as Cam Kennedy and Carlos Ezquerra.

If this episode provides an indication of how Wagner has managed to find a new way of writing Death and his retinue (iii), emphasising the practicalities and physical threat as much as the supernatural aspects of the characters (the 'alien' as much as the 'superfiend'), then it bodes well for the future. Greg Staples seems the perfect choice to strike a balance between those two poles; his Deadworld felt like a Hammer Horror set, while his take on the characters was the most tangible since Bolland.


(i) I'm enjoying seeing Ennis's gleeful dismemberment of Herr Starr applied to a sympathetic character. It's even more funny, and it provides another rationale for all those tutors at the Academy who sport stumps instead of body parts: some people just aren't meant to have a full compliment of limbs.

(ii) Wasn't Pete Wells's commission a scoop?

(iii) "I find it difficult to write any story without adding large dollops of black humor. This, however, tends to diminish characters like Judge Death, to dilute their level of menace. If I couldn't handle them in the way they deserved, then it was better to leave them alone" (http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=38457

[Mudcrab]

I was disappointed to hear I'm NOT going to see Death Grips at the ATP gig in a couple of weeks, they've cancelled all dates to work on a new album, despite having released one very recently...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W43aQxzjyeM

Replaced by A Storm of Light, which isn't bad. Will see them twice in a week as they're supporting Sleep in Glasgow too  ... Interestingly, their last EP had Vinnie Signorelli on iton drums, formerly of Swans and now Unsane. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GxfYW2Jqrc

Mudcrab; after your previous recommendation of them, Death Grips have made it onto my playlist of new stuff. I appreciate any recommendation for fucked up heavyosity, since raking through the landfill of hair and sweat that Kerrang and The Rock Show dump on my doorstep for the few pearls I'll actually like is more bother than its worth. Thanks for the tip off, but I'm not sure you're losing out by not seeing them.

I'd only just discovered that Unsane were still going; they still sound great and they're on Alternative Tentacles now: catching up with their newer stuff will feel extra special now I know I'm helping to stick it to The Man and paying Jello Biafra's legal expenses too.

[LOUD]

It's definitely Can-flavoured all right and only works played LOUD.

Not sure how much of Drokk was eventually written with the film narrative in mind since they continued with the project after they were 'dismissed', 'specially given the current names of the tracks.

I'm wondering did Barrow & Salisbury's music form part of the edit-room debacle of last year?

Great imponderable there, Soap. This film's caused more punch-ups than Chris Brown's Sent Messages folder, so it's possible (what became) DROKK was another source of friction. It's certainly not the "super-contemporary, propulsive score" Stuart Ford is so proud of. Barrow seems well disposed to all involved, though.

I imagine the tracklistings are retrospective; for 2T(fru)T, read Slo-Mo.

But his science fiction is amazing. I think he's made a really important contribution to the genre. I particularly love the Player of Games.

Use of Weapons would have been my candidate to replace Stainless Steel Rat if Carlos fancied a change of material to adapt. Given Ezquerra's aptitude for grand guignol, I'd love to have seen his version of that piece of furniture.

The Bridge and its hilarious Oor Wullie use of colloquial Scots (i) stands out in my memory, but you won't need to be Derren Brown to see where the story's headed. Every time I venture into the spare room that's increasingly dominated by my books, comics and CD's, I'm reminded of the living arangements of Walking On Glass's Grout. Clever metaphor, from the boy Banks, there.

(i) See also, Feersum Ennjin.