Not Dead, Just Sleepy

I started this Blog back in february. I stopped putting anything up in April. May and June passed. In July I put up a new blog entry. "Stay tuned" I said. "See if I can be bothered or not". I knocked out three entries in quick succession then for a couple of weeks, nothing. Today I thought, 'It's about time for another blog'. Problem is, I suffer from the entirely made-up, but not necessarily untrue, Dead Project Syndrome. A year or so ago I wrote a whole bunch of songs. I set up a musician page on facebook (you can search My Great Fanclub if you like), recorded and produced about four of those songs, did some artwork, started playing at local open mic nights. Then I stopped. I stopped updating the page, stopped recording, stopped playing live.

About five months ago I started writing a play. To my mind it was pretty good. It's about a mime, a clown and the commedia fool Pierrot being stuck at the end of the world. I got feedback from people who know about that kind of thing, I contacted some actors, had read-throughs, started looking at new writing festivals and showcases. I edited and re-wrote. I started to compose an original score. Then about a month ago I stopped working on the project. I have recently picked it back up, thanks to the enthusiasm of friends and family and am hoping that 'The Last Circus' will live again. I will keep you updated on that.

Last week I was on holiday, returning to my old university stomping grounds in Scarborough. I came back with another new project. I'm looking at writing a six-part comic series that features robot-prosthesis, sabre-tooth tigers and the suspicious goings-on of a group of geneticists. There will also be emotional relationship stuff to keep sensitive people (girls etc) engaged. I've plotted the whole series. I've scripted and done the panel lay-outs for the first issue. I'm about a third of the way through illustrating the first issue. I can't stop because if I do, I know that it will linger unfinished on my hard-drive. But then, I had the idea for a short-form strip called 'The Imaginary Life of Samuel Beckett' where the 'Greatest Playwright of the 20th Century' potters around being disgruntled by mobile phones and reality television. I don't have the time to do this yet.

I need a backburner.

Self-Portrait 3: Nemesis

It's one of those question that you've always asked yourself. You're pretty sure you know the answer, you're just waiting for science (TM) to come up with a final inarguable conclusion that you can put in the big book of facts and finally stop thinking about it. That question is of course 'who is the most famous bald person in the world ever?' Is it Billy Zane? Sean Connery? Bruce Willis? Gandhi? No, it's Superman's arch-nemesis Lex Luthor (or plain old 'Luthor' until it was seen fit to give him a first name in the sixties).

I normally have great, thick privet-hedge hair. The kind of hair that causes barbers, coiffures and other associated follicle technicians to all simultaneously take their lunch breaks as soon as I enquire about getting an appointment. I realise as I advance in years that this state of affairs may not be a problem for much longer. My relationship with my hair is finite. All I have to do to remind myself of that is look at my brother. I was thinking of things to do as a self-portrait and wondered to myself 'what would I look like with no hair?' The not-very-suprising answer turned out to be 'I look like my brother'. The second thing I thought was 'all bald people look a bit like Superman's arch-nemesis Lex Luthor', because I spend far to much time in life thinking 'things in life are like things in comic books' when, all in all, they're not. As a potentially interesting sidenote, Luthor wasn't even originally supposed to be bald, he had a big mop of red hair until Joe Schuster forgot to draw it one time and then he just stayed bald.



Batman has an arch-nemesis in The Joker, Spiderman has Green Goblin but they also both have huge 'rogue galleries'. With Penguin, Riddler, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Bane etc it's hardly any wonder that 'The World's Greatest Detective' often ends up the supporting actor in his own movies. Superman doesn't have this. He's been 'killed' by Doomsday, he's fought multiple incarnations of Bizarro, but those characters aren't iconic, aren't integral to the Superman myth the way that Doc Octopus is to Spiderman or Catwoman is to Batman. Superman only has one adversary of note and that is Luthor (Richard Pryor doesn't quite make the grade).

I don't have an arch-nemesis, I wouldn't know what to do with one. The closest thing I have to even a bog-standard enemy is probably the hairdressers. I fear a visit to the hairdressers in the same way others do the dentists. Obviously it's a fairly amicable kind of rivalry wherein a small amount of money is exchanged for a slightly lackluster service. In fact, what I consider to be the quest for divine retribution may actually be a trade agreement.

'Make me look like a film star'
'Will Doc Brown from Back To The Future be acceptable?'
'No'
'But you have hair like angry cotton wool'
'Here's a tenner'

It's unlikely that in sixty years time people will be writing comics, making films and developing computer games based on the eternal struggle between right and wrong that is my bi-annual haircut, but I think I'm OK with that.

Self-Portrait 2: Clark Kent is Superman!?!

Glasses are a brilliant disguise. Why do you think Bono wears his all the time? Even when he's indoors? It's so that people won't recognise him. Brilliant disguise. Clark Kent heroically hid in plain-view in front of Lois Lane at the Daily Planet for years with only his bi-focals to protect his identity.

Superman was the first 'superhero' in comics. All your arguments about The Phantom being the first are very interesting, but you're still wrong. "Batman's cooler" I hear you say, "Superman's lame, he's too powerful so he's never at risk, he's a do-gooder, kryptonite sucks, he's boring, Batman's better 'coz he's really dark..."

On and on you go, bemoaning Superman as the lamest thing since sliced lame, all the while forgetting one thing. Clark Kent makes Superman look like the freaking Fonz. Superman could leap tall buildings, stop speeding trains, he even made it cool to wear your underwear over your tights; Clark Kent got out of lifts on the wrong floor and spilled coffee over his mortgage application forms.



Today's self-portrait is me without glasses. I have removed the cunning disguise in order to reveal my heroic true self. Or something. I wore glasses when I was at school because I was having difficulty seeing the very important information about the poetry of Sheamus Heaney (something to do with cats?) written on the board just two meters away.

A visit to an opticians and the subsequent addition of lens to face paid off well and the B/B in GCSE English Language/Literature more than made up for the several years of playground punishment. After I left school I vainly stopped wearing my glasses for a couple of years. Years which I usefully spent falling over, ignoring close friends on the other side of the road and hailing a huge number of buses that weren't going anywhere near my intended destination. This may however be a natural state of being for an eighteen-year old boy.

Now I'm an adult and people aren't allowed to make fun of me anymore (this is definitely a true and real thing that is a law and everything) and I've finally come to terms with wearing glasses again. Now I get lost in Sainsburys on far fewer occasions, I can read the subtitles on Aldmovar films and I'm able to identify acquaintances without being over-reliant on my sense of smell or taste. Anyone dares call me four-eyes, I'll burn them with my FRICKIN' LASER-HEAT-VISION!

Self-Portrait 1: Comic Book Club

This past week, for a select few brave geeks, was the inaugral meeting of 'the comic book club'. Good times were had; comics, fanzines and graphic novels miraculously remained unsoiled by the flowing wine and everyone kept their trousers on. I made my way home at the end of the night clutching David B's 'Babel', Jeff Brown's 'Clumsy' and Julie Doucet's 'My New York Diary' (as well as Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics'), my head still turning over a conversation had hours earlier about the distinctions between auto-biography and fiction for comics writer.

Not that the two things are always clearly distinct of course. The pencil on the page begins the fiction.What I'm eventually getting around to is that, with a few exceptions (the late Harvey Pekar springs to mind), autobio writers tend to illustrate their own work (Joe Sacco (Palestine), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), the aforementioned Doucet, Brown and B). At some point they have to make a concious decision to sit down and draw themselves. Jeff Brown's graphic representation is little more than a stick figure, B and Satrapi use cartoon and abstraction. Do you make your nose as big as it really is? Or do you make it even bigger to show 'hey, I've got a big nose and I'm fine with that'. Or do you not even draw a nose? Will people even be paying that much attention to the realistic depiction of your nasal cavaties as they read your 'brutally honest account' of that time your parents caught you squeezing the family hamster into a jar of peanut butter?



I've decided to post a quick self-portrait. It's a simplified, rather than cartoonish or exagerated version of me. With a smaller nose. Possibly. I've perhaps made my hair look a little too tidy, or my beard fuller than it is. Somewhere among all that truth is a little lie or two. I'm intending to use the portraits as a way of getting me to put more stuff up on the blog so check soon for the next exciting episode of 'Can he be bothered?'!

What's the Deal With Dinosaurs?

Something new for the blog, I promised music but, as a special bonus, I've also made a music video. I've embedded the YouTube video which can also be linked to here:
If the quality isn't up to much then I'll upload the full quality version to this blog.

Wrestling Live from Ascot

Wrestling live from Ascot: The unemployed are pitted against former equine champions for big money prizes (Channel 5, 2pm-7pm, weekdays). Here a recently redundant sous-chef from Upminster has just pile-driven Red Rum through a flaming table.

Grimethorpe Colliery Band's Cat

Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s Mechanical Cat: The G.C.B are Britney-esqe media glamour-puppets for whom it would be physically impossible to play tubas AND carry out elaborate on-stage dance routines at the same time. This is the Grimethorpe Colliery Band’s mechanical cat who sits behind the curtain generating authentic brass band noises on his Roland JD-800 synthesizer. He has one laser eye and a sovereign ring.