"Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot..."

I hate drawing Batman. I can't get him right. Or rather, I can't get him to not look absurd. I think something snaps in my brain, and I somehow bring out the silliness inherent in the character. When Batman succeeds as a visual, it's because he's a brooding, menacing figure. His reputation, his presence, his personality all go to distract us from what is really a very silly visual. He strikes terror into the hearts of criminals, but blue and grey spandex and a cape just won't do that. Heck, the only reason the Punisher gets away with his in-comparison-sensible outfit is because he's usually carrying a chuffing great machine gun.
I have to draw a Harley Quinn picture for someone. Meg suggests that I should put a brooding Batman as/in the background. It's an obvious choice that I was also considering, but my inability to do a non-silly Batman has given me second thoughts. The person receiving this picture also likes Spawn, so I could just use him as the backdrop, and I can certainly do a half-decent Spawn, but I suspect my brain will snap there too, this time because Harley and Spawn should never be in the same picture together...

Be the next M. Night Shyamalan!

Here's a new game. Imagine a film, any film. Now imagine the last shot in that film in which you can see a person's eyes. Now imagine those eyes turning bright, glowing red for just an instant. Voila, instant last-minute plot twist!

"Oh, you like to draw? Well can you do this for me..."

Now that the comic page (page fourteen) for Spooky's Dungeon has been done, I'm reminded that I have a stack of requests to go through. While it's flattering to an extent, I just wish that people would realise that I'm not that talented.
Or perhaps I am. Meg has pointed out that I have an inflated opinion of other people's abilities in certain fields. The way I see it, there's no such thing as a bad artist or a good artist, because in my opinion, anyone could turn out a lovely piece of art, and that it's just that the "good" artist gets there quicker. Take your time, pace yourself, and you'll be able to do anything. I mean, it's only drawing after all. What could be easier?
Meg says that of course I would think this way, because for me it is easy. I don't know...just makes me seem arrogant, and I have nothing to be arrogant about.

The new season of The West Wing premiered last night. I wasn't going to watch it, because I dropped out of the show a while ago, feeling that it was a bit too smug, artificial and arch for my liking. Plus, it was often actually quite dull, which no amount of clever scriptwriting and top-notch acting could hide. However, with current world events and an insane presidency, the writers have a real-world backdrop to let loose a little bit and last night delivered an exciting political thriller. There was a real sense of the whole thing falling down around the ears of our favourite characters, and the clincher was that it was all their own fault. Tense, exciting and emotional, I wonder how long they can keep it up?
(I have no idea when this will make it back to Britain. All the information I can find seems to point to E4 being half way through season four, which seems like an awfully long delay...)

Happy birthday today to Kevin Sorbo.

(It's a long, and not very good, story)

I've really got to get this page for Spooky done today, then I have one of my favourite films ever to watch.

Yesterday, I found myself watching the first episode of the new series of NYPD Blue. This was more due to me not wanting to get off the sofa than any desire to watch the show. The last time I saw the programme was about six years ago, and I didn't like it back then. I noticed that the programme, apart from some cast changes, is exactly the same as it was the last time I saw it, and I wouldn't have bothered watching if it wasn't for the fact that one of the cast members looked annoyingly familiar. I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn't place him.
Then, about halfway through, I realised, and what was a badly written, gritty, issues-based crime drama suddenly became an exercise in stunned confusion and disbelief.
To be fair, he's a pretty strong actor, and did a good job even though the episode gave him little to do, but still, what is Zack Morris doing on NYPD Blue?

"Are you a Mexican, or a Mexican't?"

Meg and I went out for dinner and a movie tonight ("Hey, that sounds like a date! You're married now, you don't have to go on dates, especially with your wife!"), and the movie was Once Upon A Time In Mexico, which I've been looking forward to for a while now.
It's loud, stupid, audacious and absurd. And I loved it. It's absolutely brilliant, harking back to the classic westerns its title references and putting a modern spin on things all at once. There's some surprising political comment in there, there's a villain wrapped in bandages, there's a blind gunfighter with a kid sidekick, there's touching emotional flashbacks, there's absurdly audacious stunts, there's good characters, bad characters, and ugly characters, and there's a remote-controlled exploding guitar case.
One of the reasons that the Hellboy comic is so successful is because Mike Mignola puts together all of the ideas that he thinks are fun (like Nazis, Rasputin, aliens, demons, etc), shakes them up, and delivers them with some nifty visuals. This is the filmic equivalent of that (and hopefully, so too will the Hellboy film!).
If I have a criticism, it's that there's almost too much going on, so some of the cool stuff isn't played with enough. Hopefully though, that means there'll be a special edition dvd packed with goodies.
Next up, Underworld.
(And no, that's not Catherine Zeta Jones in the picture...)

Remember China Drum? No? Can't say I blame you, but they really did do a marvelous cover of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. Rock, and indeed, on!

I've just spent a long evening pencilling the next page of the comic you can find at Spooky's Dungeon. This page almost looks like a real proper comics artist drew it, rather than the epileptic gibbon renderings I usually produce (and which you can see in the first twelve pages at Spooky's Dungeon). Two years of artistic improvement there folks!

Sometimes, I almost convince myself that I could do this professionally.

I've also been plotting the comic, taking it into exciting post-apocalyptic territory. All this to a soundtrack of late-80's/mid-90's MP3s, hence the China Drum reference above.

Dormammu Is Mad!

That one's for Tom.

Ten weeks it's been out, and Pirates Of The Caribbean is still in the top five at the box office! Deserves it too. I'm looking forward to seeing El Mariachi 3/Desperado 2/Once Upon A time In Mexico 1, and Underworld (even though I've seen it before), but I doubt I'm going to have as much fun as I did during Pirates until Christmas comes around.

This is utterly insane, but fun, as all the best things are.

Remember the spinning logo in between scenes on the old Transformers series? It would change from the logo of the robots featured in the previous scene, to the logo of the robots in the next scene, and sometimes (redundantly) spun around, but didn't change, because the same robots were in both scenes. Well, I dreamed of that last night. Now, I know that we tend to forget most of our dreams, so I could have dreamed about other stuff and have just forgotten it, but I'm pretty sure that all I dreamed of last night was that logo spinning endlessly. Which makes it officially the strangest dream I've ever had, even if I am a pathetically obsessed Transformers fan.

Meg's been very ill this weekend, which has led to me not blogging as often as usual, and has also thrown my sleep patterns out of whack. but at least I've got a decent book to read. The British edition looks much better, by the way, than the fantasy trash cover of my copy.

Meg's feeling much better now, by the way, thanks for asking.

How English are you? This is my result:

The epitome of Middle England, you prefer your Hovis to ciabatta and believe that England can win the cup this time round. You still feel frequent stirrings of patriotism, but deep down you know the world has moved on from the Empire and warm beer on village greens.

Hm...

I don't know the lass very well at all, but I'm still sending nice thoughts to Eloon. You should too.

Finally, for every stupid announcement about how scientists have wasted millions of pounds of research money on working out which side is up when a slice of toast is dropped, there's something like this which awakens the geek in everyone!

Thousands of characters, hundreds of storylines, and what is DC's response to Marvel's movie success? Another Batman movie.
So, what's that? Five Batman movies, plus this new one, plus countless others in development hell. Four Superman movies, plus an unofficial fifth, and another in development. A Batman Vs Superman film. There's definitely a feeling of desperate stripmining here.
Marvel's approach is almost completely opposite. They seem to have sold the film rights to every character they've ever created, whether it'd make a good movie or not. Still, I suppose they've already had success with one D-list character.

Oh well, at least Hellboy's coming out next year.