Hewwo chumbles! Oh you’re all so cute and lovely I want to keep you in a shoebox and feed you worms and bread.

This week is Amperduke week over on Eclectic Micks and a few other renegades have been sending me their Fanperduke art to be included in either the second edition or in the gallery on the new site. Any and all artwork is appreciated.

Below is a hastily cobbled and dodgy model sheet for you

I bought Robocop 2 along with 20+ videos for 28 quid from a weird INLA wannabe when I was 15. I loved that film as much as the first one. I was still reeling from how deadly Dark Knight Returns was and the whole Frank Miller connection just sealed the deal for me.

You can’t draw comics without having an interest in guns. And the guns in Robocop 2 are brilliant. The one that I always think about is the little machine gun that the kid carries around like a lunchbox

Imagine the cigar like lump in my pants when I found out that the gun is actually real. It’s a UC-M21

Nice

UPDATE:

This years 24 hour comic day is the 17th to 18th of October. I’m going to do it properly this year and see how many pages I can do digitally. I might go for dialogue depending on the random titles.

Here is the new site.

And here is animated version of my first one, made by Kyle

Pop down to the Exchequer, there’s lots of things happening this year, looks really well organised.

Yes yes, the stars have aligned and the creative juices are swilling around my ankles here, I’ve started planning a new Amperduke book. It’s going to be brilliant, I spent all day yesterday mapping it out.

The current Mister Amperduke book will be in this Novembers Previews and I’ll be relaunching this site with all manner of new things including a multilingual Amperduke section where the preview of the new book will be. So The Duke is finally going worldwide this year. If sales are good I’ll drop all my freelance design nonsense and concentrate full time on it. Oh yeah, there’s also a ‘making of’ section in the new site that takes you through the behind the scenes of making the book, all in comic form.

Nice.

I’ll write up my thoughts on the bullfight soon, man it was nutty. It rained! Anyway I don’t know why this popped into my head at 4am, sometimes I feel like keeping my laptop beside my bed so I can google all the niggling thoughts I have.

Married with Children is shown over here dubbed and it’s a big hit. This morning I was thinking whether I imagined it or not but it was true, ITV tried to remake it with Russ Abbot and it sucked dick.

Called ‘Married for life’.

Judging by the meagre 170 views on youtube, everybody seems to have forgotten about it. I remember watching this version, having being a fan of it when it first aired in Canada and just recoiling. Awful. Listen to that music.

I’m going to a bull fight later on. Should be……fun.

It’s a weird thing. I’ve watched a fair few on telly and youtube and I read Death in the Afternoon a few years ago. I don’t know what to think. Yes it’s cruel in a sense but hey what isn’t it?

Bullfighters are like popstars here, in fact they bang all the popstars and singers. My bird is in love with the dashingly handsome chap we’re going to see today and now I’m secretly hoping that the bull eats his face off.

Or tries have sex with him like this:

She spent all morning making a big hamper full of sandwhiches with all special ham and all, plus we’ll be bringing a rake of beer so it’s going to be sloppy either way.

Me and Don Baker? We go waaaay back. Here is the rough cut of the trailer for a short movie I helped out in. I storyboarded some of it and tightened up the ending with some of that Twisted Tales zong factor. Look at me getting all Holywood, I’m doing a music video for a Spanish group over the next few weeks

It’s a silent movie mostly.

I was reading comics last week and here is something that has been nagging me. This is an example, for me, of how silly using words in comics is or how one clunky page can disturb the flow of the story. I must say that other than this page I enjoyed We Kill Monsters, a fun and really well drawn comic.

But here it is

What kills me about its that it takes one whole page to say nothing badly. The first panel is great, the next two are wacky and then the third one where he explains just what happened is classic. ‘The juice that came out of it’s brain..it healed me’.

Either show the juice healing his arm more effectively with pictures or do it with dialogue and reactions. To do it with a stiff time lapse shot and then that classic line just doesn’t work. Then the last panel, the text is redundant, we know they never saw anything like that before. That panel would work better as the first shot on the page to show him lying injured in the juice to set out the premise of what’s about to happen.

But again let me stress that it’s a fun comic with lot’s of gags so it’s not exactly high drama but this scene is the most emotional so the tone has to be right. Words in comics don’t always work. You see it all the time where the spoken text describes what’s happening in the picture ‘Ah, it’s a monster with tentacles!’ ‘Don’t run! One of the tentacles is wrapped around my leg’ etc.

Okay I’m finished. I need to mop up the juice that came out of my brain

I have ants in my studio. Only a few but some days I notice them. I also have a gecko that lives under a poster who I presume likes eating ants so it all balances out I suppose.

I was gazing absently at the floor when I saw a tiny spec crawling along. I then noticed another and another. But they’re so small that you have to look for them. On each large floor tile there is an average of two. I’m sort of into it. I love insects,especially ants.

A panel from one of my 2000AD stories

It reminds me of the time I had headlice. The initial revulsion turned into curiosity about the little colony of creatures living on my head. I was 20 or 21 and working nights in a bakery, at the end of the 12 hour shifts I’d pull off my hair net and overalls and walk home dreaming about a shower. I worked between the extremes of the ovens and the freezer-house so you were caked in grime and grease by the end. One night I yanked off the hair net and I noticed the black dots clinging to it here and there.

I was freaked out. I couldn’t sleep because I could feel them crawling all over me.

After nearly a week of scalding my head with water I had to go the chemist and I was more embarrassed than buying condoms, tampons and small dick cream combined. In fact I chickened out at the first one because the girl was too good looking. The Lyclear cleared them up straight away.

Then they came back. I got rid of them. Then for a third time they came back. A notice appeared in the locker room and I realised it was from wearing the freezer suits which were shared. I had been eliminating them but some scruffy dope let them fester for over 2 months. Plus I was running out of chemists in Tallaght to nonchalantly score my goo.

The outbreak was quelled eventually. Then around a month later I’m mooching around the kitchen at home and I see three different sprays and creams for headlice in a press. So somebody else in the house was infected before me and maybe I brought them to the bakery. I lived with 3 girls and one of them was a proper slut, unbelievably so. I asked a house mate who I got on really well with if she ever head lice and she says no, but Mrs X (the hooer) keeps getting them, ostensibly from all the men she brings home.

So that was the first and hopefully only sexually transmitted bug I got. I think about this now and then. Was I ‘patient zero’ in the bakery? Did somebody from the bakery bang Mrs. X? Was it two independent colonies? It’s interesting once you get past the creepiness of the whole thing, how these tiny blood sucking creatures flourish in this sterile modern world, despite ipods and hover-boards we are still hairy apes, transmitting parasites through contact.

To quote the poet:
“He fucked the fleas off a bitch
He shaked the ticks off his dick
And in the booty, he buries his motherfuckin bone
And if there’s any left over
He’ll roll over and take a doggy bag home”

Amen to that.

When I lived in Canada as a kid there were a few everyday,normal things that blew my mind. Apple juice came in a huge barrel that had to be pierced with a special tool and milk came in a bag.

As crazy as it sounds, the environmental logic quickly became clear to me and I’m still amazed that the rest of the world hasn’t followed. Here’s a picture (or a pitcher ROFL LOL xxxx!!! Pwned)

I think the Irish and English are too into dairy products to put them in a bag. Living in Spain I’ve noticed the inherent snobbery I have towards inferior Spanish milk and butter. I don’t know what they do to it but they don’t keep the milk refrigerated in the supermarket and it lasts for weeks. Tastes normal to me but it feels weird seeing it stacked in pallets and its warm when you pick it up.

Which brings me to the next diagram. I bought these three items last week. Which one is milk? Its an innate consumerist prejudice we all have towards packaging shapes. I’ve been conditioned. Look at the pics below and which would you reach for? These shapes are no more related to milk than a bag is but the link is there. It’s something you depend on when drawing comics, icons and glyphs. The silhouette of a milk carton on a table easily sets a scene without the reader realising that they’re thinking.

It’s interesting isn’t it? I worked in a place where the toner cartridges came in sleeves shaped like the boxes of the apple pies from Mc Donalds and I noticed it subliminally triggered a fat lad to get a Drive thru at lunch every time I changed the ink.