A few weeks ago I was at the Bristol comic convention. There was a group of 5 lads dressed as Stormtroopers from Star Wars. They looked the part and I was amused to see that they had the voice changer things so they sounded like in the films. But I’m a grown man and the amusement wore off after about 20 seconds.

I thought nothing more about them, well except how hot the must be in the costumes because it was a scorcher of a day. They hung around outside and gladly posed for photos with children and idiots. But when I was off having something to eat AWAY from the convention centre, they entered the outside cafe area and tried to jovially intimidate the customers. People who were just sitting there and nothing to do with the convention. I began to realise that dressing up as a Stormtrooper and traveling in numbers was their thing, their reason for living, their highlight of the year…their chance to escape.

It reminds me of the song Halloween by the Dead Kennedys. ‘…Tomorrow your mold goes back on’. They were getting increasingly pushy as the day went on and by Sunday I saw one of them being shouted by a girl who got a hand on her arse while she was getting her photo taken with them. She demanded he take off his helmet but of course he just stared back from inside his smelly mask with the biggest boner of his life digging into his leg. He felt invincible and powerful.

But he’s not. He’s a 35 year old IT loser who beats it to Babylon 5. Dressing up as a Stormtrooper is a bit of fun but dressing up for the whole weekend and living out your repressed fantasies is gay. I’m off another con next week, the 2d festival and there’ll be Stormtroopers apparently. I can promise you that I will clothesline the first one that gives me lip.

Here’s a gem from 1997, horrible art but it’s a funny story. I only drew about 5 pages of it though. It’s based on real events in that I used to hang around with a bloke and we’d play Tekken 2 all day. For some reason this little 5 year old kid from a few doors down was always appearing in the room on his own and whipping me at the game.

I was meant to be the king of that fokkin game, there was even a Wexford vs Dublin Eight man tournament that was narrowly won by my button mashing skills. But this little prick kept beating me so we’d shout abuse at him and call him a rentboy etc. He became my enemy.

Large size here

Large size here

Speaking of games, I got PuyoPuyo on my phone and it’s great. One of the best games ever, here’s some Puyo Puyo Porn for everyone. Phwoar

Hey hey pals. Man the new Indiana Jones is the biz. Went to see it on Saturday as part of Stephen Mooney’s Stag party. Great day, great film. That scene with the ants, I just keep replaying it in my mind, it gets me all worked up.

So two weeks ago I came up with an idea for a new comic and have decided to put it through ZUDA, DC’s web comics thing. I hoofed through it, wrote it and did the character designs in a day and have alot of it drawn already. It’s tricky because you are limited to 8 screens. A lot of the entries on zuda have no ending, they just stop after the 8 screens so I really tried to have action, exposition and a definite ending.

That’s the mock up logo, looks good so far.

Like Hitler himself who kept raising new divisions and directing resources into stupid projects while losing a winnable war, I know I should be finishing up my Twisted Tales for 2000AD and marketing Amperduke. But this is fun! Well lettering it isn’t fun. God Bless silent comics.

This chap is an Albino Negro. Much like the scary reggae star Yellowman

This lad is Bulgarviest, the leader.

The synopsis: A fugitive scientist escapes to PreHistory with an instrument vital to Nazi Germany’s victory. The Chronos Battalion is formed to pursue him. So it’s Nazi’s vs Dinosaurs vs Robots. Wahey!
It should be finished and if accepted, live in July. More info as it happens.

There’s an Irish entry in this months competition by Brendan Mc Ginley so go vote for him here

A diary entry from 2000 about an incident in 1998/99 where a drugged man nearly died because of my prank. Details to come! Click here for full screen version

Yellow Bentines of course comes from this:

The giddy schoolyard classic recreated here back in 2001

Another comic diary from 2000

Ninjoid from from around 2002

No they didn’t.

Loyal Clamnutoid, Kyle spent waaay too long making an animated version of my 24 Hour comic STOCK CAR NINJA. It’s a little stretched but it relates the story well. I really like that comic still. Cheers Kyle! Now come over to my place and re-grout my tiles.

Best watched with this audio playing; the Granny version of Buzzbomb. Let her rip

I posted this last week and here is the background to the story. I used to do comic diaries like this, just meandering waffles and doodles that would take a lot of explaining. But this is a good one.

In the year of our lord 2000AD, my life was a mess. I was drinking way too much and generally just wasting my life with a vengeance, weekdays for were drinking and skanks and the weekends for bad hash and flarn.

One Monday I went up to Quinner’s where me,him and DC smoked our brains out. Quinn had just gotten 3 massive reptile tanks made, two of which where under his bed, raising it to the height of bunk beds. They were uninhabited. So we took turns sitting in the air tight tanks where we had to smoke a full joint to yourself and sing a song into a mic which was broadcast by speaker to the two sitting on the bed. Childish but funny times. I sung ‘ Should have known better’ by Jim Diamond. I love that crappy song.

I left around 1 and begun the 40 minute walk home. I was walking through Watergate park when I saw what looked like a bended tree going all wobbly, as I got closer I saw that it was alive and coming towards me, it revealed itself to be a Heron with it’s big bendy neck. I laughed out loud. Way up ahead I could see two bus inspectors coming towards me. I continued along staring at the ground and the Inspectors stopped me. They were Garda.

I had been stopped and searched once before but that was with other kids and it was during the day. I was alone in the dark with these two. I was wearing a bomber jacket thing and a hat which is meant to deter troublemakers from approaching but the other side of that coin is that you look like a troublemaker. They asked me a series of where what and whys? ‘What are you doing out this late’, ‘Do you have anything in your pockets that you shouldn’t have?’. I agreed to the search but then remembered the half smoked spliff in my pocket.

Thankfully I hate littering so my pockets were FULL of crap, dozens of bus tickets, an empty can of 7up, a video tape, an audio tape and two dead mice. I told them that I had two dead mice in my pocket and one of them looked ready to hit me. I produced them and explained that I was meant to give them to Quinner to feed to a snake. One snarled the other one laughed. I palmed the joint and they never saw it. I spoke as eloquently as possible to show that I was in fact a decent member of society. They handed me back all my stuff but the angry one had popped the lenses out of my glasses.

They let me go and told me that they don’t want to see me around the park ever again. I walked off and blazed up to calm my nerves, thinking what nazis they were, all I was doing was walking home. Why were they skulking around without their hi-viz jackets, why were they hassling me?

Then I realised why they were patrolling that area. *Somebody* committed an awful act of street art vandalism a few weeks before around there. And I still think it would have been the universe’s just revenge if they found the joint. But off I went, free as a heron.

Fuck the police.

So I didn’t win the Eagle award. Neh. Great weekend though, will post about it this week.

Here’s some more gick from the archives

From 1998. Roughs for some Clam Land story that never happened.

Recentish, about 3 years ago. Wobots…

1997. Clam Land stuff. Chunswick the Prune Horsey yolk

Anybody seen BARAKA? Watched it over the weekend and it rocked my world. Absolutely inspiring, depressing and thought provoking.

So here are some more ancient sketches, rather than call each post Ancient Sketches Number 134 or whatever, I’ve decided to name them something odd to see if people are searching for these terms.
Leave me alone.

From 1999, I was so lazy then. I took a job in a bakery working 8pm to 8am 3 days a week telling myself I’d have loads of time to work on comics. But no, I smoked dope and beat my dick like it owed me money.

Not too ancient from 2005. This will be a great comic when I figure out what I’m doing, have tonnes of it written but I really don’t want to be described as having done a comic about elves in a mystical Dark Crystal knock off world.

1998, a prototype Amperduke in some kind of stiff, badly drawn trouble.

Hewwo fwends! I finally got my PC reformatted and can now use my scanner and printer. 6 months after I bought the thing. So last Saturday I scanned in loads of crap, 563 pages to be precise and now you’re going to be regularly subjected to the archives.

View the larger file of this here

One of my early attempts of computer rendered and lettered comics. This crappy printout is the only copy of it. 1998

1997

1997

I’ll expand on the above soon. A nutty story how I was stopped and searched by the Garda and I had 2 dead mice in my pocket. The pricks broke my glasses.