The teddy army rolls on in this latest panel. But what are they witnessing?
Been suffering from a nasty sinus infection this week. I don’t want to jinx it, but I think I’m over the worst of it, now. Nothing weirder then having infected eye-sockets. It’s been like I woke on Tuesday, and my skull had shrunk in my sleep. It’s becoming a yearly tradition, sadly, when the cold weather sets in (you could probably scroll back to my posts from this time last year, or the year before that, and find similar tales of woe.)
I plan to get my sickly hands on some hot chocolate, whip-cream and marshmallows in next 24-hours. Wrap up warm in a big blanket, and spend as much of this weekend as I can watching dvd boxsets of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Tales From The Darkside, relaxing and keeping my fluid levels up.
Just because you tart it up as a gif, or a meme, or some other bollocks, doesn’t mean you’re not ruining it like a regular blabber-mouth. Just because it’s animated or meant to be ironic, doesn’t mean you haven’t just blown the ending for other people just because you did it in a trendy way.
I’ve never been able to watch a season of Dexter without already knowing how the season ends. When a new series of Doctor Who comes around, I’m tried of having to go into tunnel-vision mode. I feel these days like I need to pay someone to go online just before me, and check the way for spoiler-mines that people just lay all over the web.
How feeble is your headspace, that the moment you see something you know other people haven’t, you have to make sure people know that you know, by plastering the net with your little, crappy homemade banners.
They reserve the lowest circle of hell for hipsters and their ironic, glittery memes, as far as I’m concerned.
NOTE: I think you’re meant to spell meme in capitals, but I have so little respect for them, I didn’t bother. I didn’t want to bring grammar into this war, but they started it.
I’m gonna pepper this bitter rant with something sweet, too. File this under every thing sounds better in 8-bit. Feels weird that it’s probably been about ten years since I went to see the Pixies reunion show in London in college. Still waiting for that new pixies album… been a long time coming. Really long. Like… really, really, really long.
Something a bit sinister to end the week on. This shot is me trying to ’Bring It’ with the horror ambience. My best attempt to set a spooky tone, as it were. I’m 99% sure I haven’t posted this shot already. Hopefully this panel doesn’t look too familiar?
Been watching old episodes of Tales From The Darkside, this week. They go well with the dark, cold autumn nights that are setting in. They remind me of when I would watch these on late-night TV as a kid in the 90‘s. I still think the pilot Trick Or Treat, written by George Romero, still has a great chilling ending. Only downside is I’ve got the creepy intro theme-tune going around in my head, these last few days. Having that jingle playing in my head as I walk around at night, or trying to get to sleep, is an unwelcome side-effect. I still think it’s the creepiest opening to a horror TV show, ever.
Speaking of Halloween (which we kind of were… I mean, the episodes called Trick Or Treat, right?), I think I’ve figured out my game-plan for Halloween. I don’t think I’m going to be able to beat pumpkin-headed zombies from a couple of years ago. But I do at least this year have a design I can run with. I’ll see where it goes. And hopefully I’ve had this idea early enough in the year that I can get it done little-by-little, just in time for the big day. Fingers crossed.
Just been watching the Federico D’Alessandro Halloween pitch-reel that been doing the rounds online lately. Out of all the slasher movies, the Halloween sequels are the ones with the lowest batting-average for me. Part 2 is ok, if a little underwhelming, all the others are pretty forgettable (in that I watched them as a kid, and now I’ve forgotten all of them.) Most slasher flicks have at least one or two decent sequels, and Halloween is long overdue for one.
I have to say, even if it wasn’t a Halloween\Michael Myers movie, it would still be an incredibly strong opening scene for a horror movie. But saying that, I hope he does get the Halloween gig. I guess it’s just what he’d do with the other 81-minutes of the movie that really counts.
I’d like to see a Halloween sequel, where Michael Myers catches and skins William Shatners face, paints it white, and uses it through the whole movie as a mask as a giant in-joke.
Feeling a little bit disappointed that Doctor Sleep won’t be out for a whole year. Was hoping for an early 2013 release, maybe something in the next six months. Still… it’s the book I’m most looking forward to reading in 2013.
Considering this is a horror comic, I found myself drawing a lot of teddies in issue #3. They kind of became a motif in one particular scene. It wasn’t planned, they just kind of took over.
Look at their dead teddy-eyes. Nothing scarier than a care-bear.
In the last couple of years, I’ve found my thirst for documentaries has grown hugely. I’m not sure if it’s a guy thing, when you start to get a bit older, and it starts to get all about TV shows about Sharks, Nazis and Serial Killers. Maybe it’s the fact that with digital TV, there’s so many of these documentaries about now. But anyway, these days they’re my program\film of choice. I guess it might come from DVDs, too. I love a good DVD extra. I really love documentaries on horror movies (for obvious reasons.) This week I watched Corman’s World, which was good, but could have been longer and a bit more in-depth. It was a bit bare-bones, for me. Then watched Blood, Boobs And Beast off the Troma Youtube channel last night. Very low-budget doc, but I actually really enjoyed it. Had heart. And if that wasn’t enough for one week, for this coming weekend, I've managed to get my hands on a germen import Blu-ray of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. Clocking in at 4-hours, it’s a mammoth documentary. I’ve already stocked up on drinks and twiglets. It’s gonna be a massive nerd slob-out.
Of course being a documentary fan can blow up in your face sometimes. I made the mistake of watching Paranormal Witness before going to bed last week. Every time a fat seagull landed on my roof during the night (I live by the coast, and they crash down on my roof a lot), I keep thinking “Eeekkkkkkk! What if it’s the Monkey Man of Oregon?”
Actually, if we’re talking awesome horror docs, might be a good excuse to post this.
God, I used to love these as a kid. They seemed to appear, then disappear pretty quickly on the toy-market, but they were awesome. They never caught on as a craze, like other toys, like Boglins (or rather mini-boglins), but I think they were a pretty underrated toy. They only had two flaws in my eyes. (1) You couldn’t see which one you were buying, you just had to pick a bag at random, and hope it was one you needed when you dropped it in water. And they weren’t that cheap for something you’d be buying blindly. (2: which is more of a personal flaw, anyway.) I’d buy one of these hoping to get a cool little monster, and they always turned out to be a little space-guy. Sure… the little space-guys looked cool enough, but even back then I was a horror guy, and the monsters were the cool ones I wanted.
Is it weird, that I find it a little depressing that these guys don’t even have a wiki-entry? If I was one of those guys that won too much money on the lottery, and didn’t know what to do with it… I’d probably spend my days trying to hunt down and collect all the monsters from this franchise, off the internet and from collectors. Then I move onto mini-boglins. Then maybe Monster In My Pocket (that brand sounds a lot more phallic to my adult-ears.)
All I’ll say about the above panel is this… If you’re reading a horror comic, and someone pulls out a knitting-needle, it usually means bad things are going down. When does anybody use knitting-needles for knitting in horror comics? I can’t post the gory money-shots, for obvious reasons, but hopefully this panel sets the scene well enough.
On a weird side-note: turns out it’s really fun to draw balls of wool. I mean, as a comic book artist, there’s all kinds of stuff you dread drawing I.E. cars, crowd scenes, guns, tricky anatomy. But drawing balls of wool was just delightful. I always thought monsters were the most fun thing to draw in all the world, now I’m not so sure. My next graphic-novel will be called ‘Bikini-Babes In Wool-Shop Massacre.’ I know, sounds like a dodgy Troma movie or something, right?
Speak of which… I see recently Troma has put a lot of their back-catalogue up on youtube. This is very cool for me, as living in the UK, very few Troma movies have been put out on region 2. There’s a lot of Troma movies on there, I’ve been wanting to see for a long time. As well as ones I’ve been wanting to re-watch for years. I’ve got a lot of love for Troma (even if they’ve never technically ever made a really decent horror movie in nearly 40 years of film making.)
There’s a kind of trick-or-threat element when you watch a Troma movie. Some of them are rare little low-budget gems, while others are just god-awful. I remember recording one off late night TV back in the 90’s (I’m pretty sure it was this one), and watching it the next day was just painful. Even someone who has recently just had a lobotomy, couldn’t sit through this flick. I know people throw around the phase “worse movie of all time” so much it’s lost its bite. But even if this film wasn’t the worse movie of all time, it would be on the short-list. I think if you watch this movie all the way through, it officially counts as a cry for help.
I love that someone made the ‘save walt’ a real website. It looks the same, right down to the tiniest detail.
I feel a little better now, knowing The Doctor is as bad at bowler as me. Bowling is one of those things I thought I’d be good at, but tried it once, and really, really wasn’t. (Like the little nod to Big Bang Theory with the Wesley Crushers bowling shirt, too.)
I personally think the Sun-gods have been a little stingy with their love this weekend.
Issue #4 is chugging along nicely. Not being a fast artist, I still find it strange that I have a folder thick with sequential pages. I mean, I guess I should have, considering I’ve been scribbling away now for just over three years. But doing this mini-series, I’m suddenly very aware why a lot of comic-book artist don’t do their own graphic-novels. Unless you’re lucky enough to be a fast artist, it’s like chewing your way through cement. It’s so time-consuming. I try not to think about how many thousands of hours have gone into this book, because it kind of freaks me out a little.
Two good things about this being the forth and final issue is, (1) I’m in the homestretch, and therefore it should be all downhill from here (still recently been having some tricky moments, however.) And (2), every time I get those pesky doubts about this project (like am I doing the right thing? Is this mini-series any good?) at this point, I’m pretty much pot committed. Win or lose, I’ve invested too much not to see this through to the end, now, so I may as well enjoy the ride. All my chips are in the middle of table, and it’s just a case of waiting for that river-card. (Apologies to non-poker fans, if that just sounds like weird jargon to you.)
I’m trying to work out if I can free up some time this year, to do something for Halloween. I know it’s a couple of months off, but maybe if I get my shit together now, I can do something special this year. No promises, but I’m gonna try this year.
