My studio was plagued by flies last week, but they were all dopey and slower than normal. So I managed to smush a fair few in the air. They also sat more still for photos. Here is the last bang of the season, these two were porking on my desk for about ten minutes but check out fly number three on the keyboard peering down at them. He sat there waiting for his turn.

Click for larger version

And while I was at it I took a pic of the new set up. This wasn’t staged, I just happened to have  the ipad and wacom going at the same time. Fucking Batcave over here! No, on the weekends I have everything turned on. During the week it’s just the mac and then all day Sunday I go nuts drawing.

I just noticed the blog categories are missing from the right hand side. Well here is an illustrated blog about me killing flies and that big wasp thing

I think that kid has gammy arms

Here he is with some leg

Chilling out in a distinctly Moroccan setting

The inside pages, all three of them are corny. Mostly illustrations of historical costumes. If anybody has any scans of Sugradh etc, the Irish magazines they forced us to buy in school in the 80′s, please drop me a line.

Here’s a clip from the television show from which it all comes from. I like him, he’s cute.

And the official song

“Son, when you’re working in people’s houses. DON’T steal money or jewelry. Steal the cd’s, the first thing you go for is the cd’s”

I never stole anything from the houses I worked in. The only time I was ever tempted was when I was installing a fish tank in ‘Celebrity Chef’ Conrad Gallagher’s house. I was all psyched up to go on a bonanza but he was cool. No attitude at all. I got more static from middle class women who wouldn’t even give you a drink of water.

So my big, fat, stinking, sweating delivery man’s glass of water…

I looked at him dead in the eye and said no. What a dick!

“No you can’t have a glass of water because I’m a paranoid maniac” was the message.

But in reality I just worked my reverse Manuel on him “I no speaka Spanish! Me know nothing”. Man it’s great to keep that up your sleeve, to suddenly just pretend you don’t understand what’s being said or going on. I reckon I can get one more year out of it.

So he left. And instead of opening the iMac I dug out my extendable baton and put it on top of my bedside locker. I’m armed to the teeth generally. I’m from Tallaght.

To be continued in Part 4 of Switching to Mac from Pc

I’m sure I saw them before back in Ireland. I was always a Smurf nut and we would always find similar figures like Astrosniks and those little clowns with the white faces. But obvious cash in aside, the book is actually good. The artwork is great, all the vehicles and space ships are top notch.

They never made it to animation but there appears to be a fair array of figures and books, click here to see an overview, some manufacturer was cheeky enough to run off a few in blue.

The Sniks Smurfette. The masked dude is her boyfriend and currently on his way back from a space mission

A nice shot of the Snik city. Check out the barbed wire and guns!

Here the baddy uses a flame thrower. Papa Smurf just used poncey spells

These are the normal Sniks/Smurfs

And they have dogs...which look the same as the Sniks really

I ripped off the Smurfs too. I designed a series of Leprechaun figurines and I made one Sleepy, one Brainy, one Hefty etc.

The Sniks even go as far to copying the way Smurfs speak, adding “Snik” in place of other words. But as I said, far from being a heartless rip off, the book is good. It’s the only one I’ve read this year.

I’ve scanned some more odd Spanish gems I’ve found.

The whole thing is alien to me now, getting a bus everyday, wearing a coat and lugging around all my gear in my backpack. Now I wake up, put on a pair of shorts and sandals and don’t leave the house for days at a stretch.

I have this image set as my desktop background to remind me how lucky I am. I took it one morning probably around the same time as the bus pic. Kilclare in Jobstown…

Note the green, white and orange painted bricks on the left hand side, this was the house of a big Sinn Fein supporter.

So when the delivery man asked could he use my toilet I immediately thought;

“Oh no, I have to get in the lift with him…”.

We both squeezed in. Well there were four of us really, me, him, the iMac and his big belly. Which flopped out of his rancid t-shirt and touched the box.

He seemed to forget about the piss he wanted to take and became more interested in the box. I didn’t sign for it on an iPad as I hoped. He fished out a heavily folded piece of paper that was slightly damp from being in his sweaty pocket.

“So it’s from Apple..? Is it a computer?” he blurted.
“Yeah, an iMac…all in one type of thing” I said.
“Where’s your studio? Up there? Will I bring it up?”.

When I opened the door to him downstairs he was angry with me for having a strange name so his sudden friendly tone made my Tallaght instinct tingle. He was casing me. He was sizing my place up.

And so followed a rapid battle of wits. Him sussing me out and me shutting him down

Then he stuffed his docket back in his pocket and made a motion to turn around and leave before doing a Columbo on me.

“Just one more thing…can I get a drink of water?”

So what’s it going to be? Get him a glass of water and leave him alone in the hall with the iMac and with a chance to gauge what locks I had on my front door?

To be continued in part 3 Switching to Mac from Pc

As described in my comic entitled Breakdown, I have had serious problems over the summer with both by laptop and pc.

Everything seemed to bomb at the same time, and besides Blue Screens of Death and drivers going nutty, even the physical things are annoying me; my speakers are crap and my mouse is getting cranky. I work about 12 hours a day so I decided I deserve a decent set up.

I went nuts, I bought a 27″ iMac souped up to the gills. I never used a Mac before except for one awful, traumatic incident when I was 18 which will get the comic treatment soon. I also used one just for opening files and saving them for PC in a place I used to work. The death of Quark Express and my daily use of iPhone  and iPad really broke down the wall for me.

I just want something that works.

So after being seduced by the iMac in an Apple Store, I bought it online and paced the house until it arrived. Their website is so slick and friendly, the physical store is so slick and friendly, the packaging is so slick and friendly…

I dreamed of a pristine white van sliding up to my house. Like an ice cream truck from the 50′s. An impeccably dressed delivery man would carry the box on a clean, titanium trolley into my studio and I would sign for it on an iPad.

WRONG! And this is the weak link in the Apple experience. After all the beautiful work they put into their website etc, Apple don’t actually deliver the final product. Of course they can’t actually deliver it to your house but if you saw the fellow who delivered my iMac you would not feel too eager to switch from pc to Mac. What a wreck of a human. He smelled like a car my friend used to have. The ‘Party Car’.

Besides his slovenly appearance and dropping my machine on the ground. I think he was also casing my house for a break in.

To be continued in part 2 of Switching to Mac

At the very start, after the rebels surrender in the GPO, the survivors are all lined up and a policeman goes through the ranks, dishing scorn on them.

“There’s DeVelera…you stupid fool…and who’s this? Ah Michael Collins, the big thicko from Cork ” etc. And then he kicks one of the injured men.

Then he says; “Pearse…with the gunner eye” and the subtitles in Spanish said; “Pearse, el experto en artillería” meaning that Peasre was a crackshot with a rifle or mortar. When I was a kid, “gunner eye” meant you had boggly or cock eyes, with one roving on it’s own like the Cookie Monster.

So I laid awake for hours thinking about it. Was Padraig Pearse really an expert marksman gunner eye or did he mean he had a gunner eye? So first thing this morning I google him and lo and behold I reckon he really had a gunner eye.

Try it, google ‘Padraig Pearse’ and hit images and there you have it, every picture he has his head turned sharply in profile presumably to obscure his eye.

New page on Spazzmoid too