Yes it’s that time again where I ask you to now leave this wonderful hive of activity and go visit Spazzmoid. This week begins the enchanting story of how I put the moves on/assaulted a girl in a plastic tube. Read it here

Plus I also drew a fun pick of B.A and Murdock for A Team week over on Micks if anybody cares which I strongly suspect you don’t.

Heh heh, if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you will know how much of a dope I am, getting dates wrong, not knowing vital contemporary topics etc but check this one out. I drew a piece for what I thought was called ‘Everything that I wanted’

And now just finding the link I read it’s called ‘Just what I always wanted’ and it has to be about a toy you wanted. Ah well, I suppose a meat grinder is a toy. It’s all for charity. I’ll probably bid on Phil’s or Chris’ if I can. Fair play to Craig and Liam for organising this and hopefully they can get their ‘press photos’ into the Metro on the back of this.

I don’t read emails I just glance over them so I miss things, and when they’re written with ‘flair’ I just zone out. An example of flair would be this, written by me:

“Hey all you groovy go getters, Just slinging an old e-mule into the inbox to drop the lowdown on those of you who aren’t privvy to whuz ‘appenin. If you have not had a chance yet to peruse my previous mail, we here at Twisted Pepper towers are proud to announce we have secured a new dining station!! so be sure to swing by and kick back with a Corona and lime.”

When it could just say:
‘Hello, we bought a new table. We close at 11 during the week’
See,all the info you need. I fucking hate this ‘perusal’, ‘privvy’, ‘we here at Clamnut Towers’ shit. Grow up. It’s 2010 in a month

‘There was always that one toy you really, really wanted.

www.thecomiccast.com

Wowzers, those young pups are producing some really good work. Check out the most recent Comic Jam. The one with the lad getting the tattoo and the ice cream is genius. Every time I attended I got lazy and just drew mickies on stickmen but the lads really put the work in.

I should also mention that I am putting the pages of the classic Say a Prayer For Me up on Spazzmoid until Christmas every week. New page tomorrow innit. Innit?

Look at this

A fantastic piece of artwork from Salvo. And he was good enough to send me the orginal art which is amazingly detailed and crisply executed as is all his work. See his blog and more of his work here. He works in a classic meticulous rendering style that puts my scrawlings to shame.

He is best known for the fantastic Windell Comics Superhero Showcase, by far the best Irish made comic.

Trailer here:

And a more recent short here

There’s still a few days left to send in your Amperduke pics for the new site thing.

http://www.windellcomics.com/

Booya! Finished my 24 hour comic this morning, clocking in at 25 pages in 13 hours. It was a struggle though, we came back from Portugal by air and train on Friday and I was wrecked starting the comic. I started at 1pm and between dinner and dicking around I finished it this morning after a decent sleep.

I’m happy with it though. I picked ‘The Dangerous Voyagers’ from the random title generator and wrote it as I went along.

This is a Zuda page that I sent to a colourist to work their magic on. What think ye? There are a few things I’d tweak but I think it’s really good. I don’t mind colouring my own stuff but I usually get lost and spend too much time messing with it so I’m trawling the net looking for fresh meat.

EDIT **what the fuck is wrong with me, 24hr comics day is on the 17th, NOT tomorrow**

Before I go on, you have to see Thompson’s rendition of the Panzer Meister over on Eclectic Micks, man that chap can draw.

The Micks Sketchbook is now available to buy too. We’ll be selling it at the Dublin Comic Con, this November 14-16th I believe, already bought my flights and can’t wait for it.

Uncle Spunk Nugget ends this week. Does anybody even read that shit any more?

So 24 hour comics day is tomorrow, the plan is to start at 12, pick the random title and have it roughed out by 1:30 and finished by midnight. It all comes down to what title I get, if it has ‘robot’ or ‘insect’ in it I’m laughing. But if the mood takes me I’m going for a normal comic with humans and speech balloons, maybe a Bunty type romance comic. I’ll post it all in an issuu reader thing on Sunday or Monday

And finally heres a video from my mate John, the css wizard who is feverishly reconfiguring the clamnuts.com matrix, he runs Mixtape.ie, a great site showcasing new Irish music and live gigs, this is a good one, Fearghal McKee and the Shitty Shit Shits.

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:

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

The first issue of RiRa , the new irish language comic was the first piece of post to arrive here for me. I drew the cover for it and I have 3 pages in it. All bias aside it really is a quality publication, Phil Barrett’s ‘Nicol Og’ is brilliant.

Aidan Courtney the editor and man behind the comic says its going well and I really hope this is the start of something sustainable. Go buy a copy here you bum.

It’s mad though, I know NO Irish which is sad. My views on the way it is taught in school are well known but it really is true. That post is up to 98 comments at the time of writing!

Its Friday so toddle over to SPAZZMOID and see the ultimate Spunk Nugget weapon