Thursday, June 30, 2016

More Kickstarter

Well so far so good!

Strike that. So far - VERY good!

The Kickstarter thing is going better than we expected/hoped. We've 19 backers and are 63% funded in less than 24 hours. We're surprised, and relieved, and happy - and that's without my mum chipping in... Hello, Mum!


Here's a shorter link to the page:



EDIT:  as I was typing this up we had another backer.... it's now 66%

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Kickstarter

Merriol and I just pushed the button on our first Kickstarter campaign!.... Actually,  to be truthful, we pressed the button, reloaded the page, waited for M's phone to catch up so she could take a photo of the momentous occasion, pressed the button again, wondered why nothing had happened, realised we had pressed the wrong button, scrolled down the page, filled in a box we'd missed - pressed the OTHER button and...

...we have a live Kickstarter project! - woohoo!  Yay Us!  And here it is:  Go click.  Go buy our comic book!


Please....



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/689964224/gosh-wow-comic-book


Pudding

We like puddings in JunkMonkey Mansions.  I suspect if the kids could work out a way of living on puddings (and crisps) they would be happy. Some go down better than others.

This was a recent one that came from our last trip to an Asian supermarket:

Mmmmm Pudding Powder! 

Mango flavoured pudding powder that's 100% - something...

Eating it reminded me of this strip I drew a couple of months ago and don't think I've posted here.

Nom Nom Nom


Oddly the usually bizarre Engrish that Asian packaging designers scatter about their boxes is uncommonly readable. Mind you 'Pudding softly or hard by adding or reducing water capacity.' is pretty good.

And the laws of physics are obviously different in the Far East.

Water in China boils at 'about' 90 degrees C????

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Ma foi!

J'écrit un petit BD en français... voila!

 En français! 

Thanks are due to a friend (who, probably quite wisely, wishes to remain anonymous) over at www.sffchronicles.com for correcting my spelling and some bits of really clunkingly bad grammar.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Boom


Boom Boom Boom Boom.

On my drawing board I have a piece of paper with various bits of good advice from artists writ up on.

Today I took this classic from Wally Wood to heart:
"Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up."  
90% of the basic panel of the guys sitting on a sofa was traced from a previous strip of them sat on the sofa and the arms were drawn separately and it then it was all cut and paste in Photoshop.  Pasted in layers like simple cell animation.  The fastest strip I've drawn in weeks.  It wrote itself instantly too. It popped into my head as I was opening the car door coming home from work - and I had it written down in the sketchbook before I turned on the ignition. 

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Ohh! My fear of commitment - on paper - takes another step backwards (or forwards). More proper drawing - pen and ink on paper then coloured in in Photoshop.

 (Clickify on the image to bigger it up.)

 Ruins 

 (I've been reading a lot of French comics recently.)

Monday, June 13, 2016

It's a long time since I wittered on about crappy movies here.  Partially because I haven't been watching many.  My 'spare' time recently has been taken up with drawing and reading comics.
Sometimes I read really bad comics. (Not that difficult really given that 90% of them, like everything else, are crap.) So I'll witter on about crappy comics for a bit.

One of my current fascinations is for the short lived publishers, Atlas / Seaboard, which, in 1975, set out a full-frontal assault on the Marvel / DC duopoly, an assault that lasted several heady months before folding.  A short history of the company can be found here.

There are several things I like about Atlas Comics:
  • They're cheap and not particularly sought after by collectors.
  • There are only 65 of them.
  • They are - for the most part - bloody awful.
Point one may have something to do with point three.

I'm slowly collecting the lot with my pocket money. Putting together runs is very easy; titles like Planet of the Vampires! only lasted three issues and, over its three issues,  manages to sum up the whole operation for me with the covers alone.

"A World Gone MAD! 
Six Astronauts Return to 
Earth and Find it Ruled by 
VAMPIRES!"

The cover of issue One (lovingly rendered by Pat Broderick and Neal Adams) shows our heroic hero, and heroic heroine, heroically shooting someone who is feebly throwing small rocks at them off-panel. They're doing this while standing in a manner that suggests they are trying surreptitiously pull twisted underpants out of their arse-cracks without putting down their weapons.

Our heroes ladies and gentlemen!


(Incidentally the 'six astronauts' promised on the front cover turn out to number five and one of them gets killed on page three having appeared in only two panels and delivered one line of dialogue.)

So, returning to a post-apocalyptic world (two years after they lost contact with Earth) our all American heroes find a society divided between disciplined, jumpsuit-wearing, well-armed, scientifically-enlightened dome dwellers on one hand, and the hairy, brutal street tribe savages so popular in Italian SF movies of the time. As you may have guessed all is not as it seems and the disciplined, jumpsuit-wearing, well-armed, scientifically-enlightened dome dwellers are really VAMPIRES! who harvest the rough, tough street boys to scientifically drain them of their blood and scientifically make a serum they need to survive the mutated plague that threatens them .. dah dah dahhhhh!

 I could hardly wait to see what happened next...

  

By issue two's cover the disciplined jumpsuit-wearing, well-armed, scientifically-enlightened dome dwellers are suddenly wearing cloaks and have claws, and widow's peaks, and fangs! and all the rest of the Dracula shtick - and what the hell IS that handy nipple-access zip doing on that woman's uniform? (and why isn't it unzipped?)

At this point I should mention that the four astronauts who made it past page four of issue one are two married couples. One couple is white, that's them on the covers of issues one and two, the other couple are black.

Here they are.  That's them on the cover of issue three (a logo change after only two issues?)

 
No seriously. That's them. The blond bloke with one arm? he's black.  And the large-breasted white girl girl with the ripped shirt (there was a zip, you morons!) with all the small turtles glued to her skin?  she's black too.

This is what they look like on the inside.

 (Knowing how people scream when they are
dying is part of basic astronaut training.)

I don't know much about the schedule that the artists and writers were working to, or how long a lead time they had, but you would have thought that by issue three, someone in editorial would have noticed that they'd got these guys' skin colours wrong. And it's not as if you weren't 'allowed' to put black characters on the front of comics.  Marvel had a black character on the cover of Captain America back in 1969.





Not that it really matters because one of them is dead half way through this issue and the other writes himself out of the plot a few panels later.

So. Of the promised six astronauts on the cover of issue one we are down to two.  And one of them dies before the end of this book.  Maybe that's why there was never an issue 4. The last remaining character snuffed it before they could get round to writing it.

EDIT:  Maybe not! I just found a double page splash in the back of the comic (which I managed to miss on multiple readings).  The splash looks like someone traced a couple of Jack Kirby panels and it shows our male heroes back together- in more of the endless supply of spacesuits they carry around with them (our white hero gets one Kirked to shreds in every issue.)


Utterly Kirked


Next Issue:   

In the Black Depths

Beneath the Fortress Dome -- 
a New and Terrifying Menace!

REVENGE of the VAMPIRES!



I would guess that the new menace was - oooh I dunno?  More vampires?  Hairy ones with stupendously long left legs?

(I hope that's his leg...)

Wednesday, June 08, 2016

I like drawing Hats. After tentacles they are my second favourite thing to doodle. I can doodle hats for hours and not get bored. Sometimes the hat will be dangling someone underneath it and sometimes that person will do something interesting or tell me a joke.

The Squid
Sometimes I manage to combine hats AND tentacles

Meet Fate. (If you haven't met him before that is.)  Fate turned up in my sketchbook, dangling under a hat while hovering over a depressed horse that was considering throwing himself under a passing truck. Three pages, an exploding ice cream factory, and a bus full of nymphomaniac Swedish athletes later he wandered off the page leaving a bemused, but no longer suicidal, horse behind him.  I possibly won't get round to presenting the world with that strip but Fate turned up again few days later (with less gratuitous nudity involved).


FATE! 

And he keeps coming back:

Fate

 
The Return of Fate 

I like this guy

Missing CD? Contact vendor

Free CD
Please take care
in removing from cover.

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 by me, Liam Baldwin. That's real copyright, not any 'creative commons' internet hippy type thing.

(this copyright notice stolen from http://jonnybillericay.blogspot.com/)

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