… stirs.

Not much to say about this other than HELL YES! I’ve ranted about Hirst on here before and it doesn’t surprise me that he’s acting like this. He’s not about “art”, he’s just about “money”.

And I’m glad to see that Jimmy Cauty is involved in pissing Hirst off, as his exploits back in the days of the KLF always bring a smile to my face.

If Hirst wants to fight for the rights of artists then he should pop over to Paris and donate some money to some true struggling artists. Or just fuck off all together.

Bloody hell, didn’t think it had been that long since I wrote anything on here. Strange thing happened recently, I met a girl and developed a life, meaning I’ve actually been out doing things rather than sitting at my computer moaning about not doing anything.

After a month I still can’t believe it’s 2009, and after a week I still find it strange hearing the phrase “President Obama” on the news. I’m not gonna gush on about the guy, but it’s great that the “leader of the (so called) free world” is actually someone who can string a sentence together. He may not be perfect but he’s a start to a (hopefully) better world.

Another thing I can’t believe, and this is making me feel old, is that this year marks the 25th Anniversary of not only The Transformers, but also the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It also marks 70 years of Marvel Comics! I guess it’s about time I blogged about my love of the Ninja Turtles and how it all started in 1989. There’s plenty of time for that though.

Every now and then I find a new obsession that takes over a part of my life for a while. All my life I’ve been a Marvel Zombie, and I still am. I love everything about the Marvel Universe. However, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the DC Universe and have been reading up on it’s (fictional) history a lot. Aside from some Vertigo and Wildstorm stuff, the only DC that has ever interested me is Batman. I love Batman almost as much as I love Spider-Man, but due to a lack of interest in most other DC stuff I tend to only buy Batman in collections so I get a full story and don’t need to worry about tracking down any possible crossovers. However, last years Secret Invasion crossover at Marvel was terrible, for the most part, and as always I was keeping an eye on what DC were doing, as I keep an eye on most comic companies out of interest. Reading up on Final Crisis makes it sound so interesting, although I’m guessing my lack of continuity knowledge would be a problem for me. Hence my sudden obsession with reading anything and everything I can about the DCU. It hasn’t made me want to rush out and buy Superman every month, but it’s still grabbed my interest and is fascinating stuff. I have however been re-reading old Batman collections and am addicted to Lego Batman on the Wii. Time to go buy some new Batman collections methinks, and maybe dip into some other DCU titles. Any suggestions?

Oh, and all comic fans must check out Captain Britain and MI13 #10, from Marvel Comics this February. It’s a great title which could do with a bit of a sales boost to help keep it alive. More than anything though how can you not want to read a comic that involves Dr Doom and Dracula. ON THE MOON!

(More on Captain Britian soon, us fans are planning a big push for the book…).

I was gonna write a nice big post looking back over the year so that in a years time I can look back and see how different 2009 is (was) to 2008. Sadly strict deadlines and Christmas means I have about 5 minutes spare to write something.

Bad things:
Situation back home with my parents. Hopefully will be amicable on all fronts.
Not getting much comic work done that I’d promised myself. Slap on wrist!
Not going on holiday more!
Deadlines!!!!
Secret Invasion. Worst Marvel crossover in years.
Appearing to lose my muse and not having any creative energy for much of the year.

Good things:
Meeting Mark Millar! (Simple things…).
Dark Knight and Iron Man movies.
Loads of great comics.
Going to Paris (again).
Starting up a new band and re-forming an old band.
Christmas looking crap turning out to be looking like one of the best….
A voice saying “Do it then” that might just be my new muse….
Both of which are due to my new girlfriend, who is the best thing of the year and will make next year the best ever.

Goodbye 2008, roll on 2009.

It’s strange how things can suddenly happen. One minute I’m planning to use as much of my spare time to finally write and draw some comics, the next minute I find I’m having to re-learn songs I haven’t played in years on a guitar I’ve barely touched for almost the same amount of time.

24 hours. Or less, probably. That’s the time it took from a friend making a throwaway comment about an old band of mine re-forming to us all agreeing on it and setting everything up. The 4 of us have hardly ever been in the same room together for years, and this happens!

So yeah, strange how these things happen.

Some more nonsense before I actually type out something slightly interesting:

If anyone buys me any of these for Christmas I will love them forever: Lego Death Star, R2-D2, Storm Trooper hoodie. Amazing!

Or this will do!

This is about time!

And this is also about time, nice to see comic writers getting proper recognition.

For obvious reasons, already covered in the link, this is totally shocking. Firstly cos I didn’t know Roadrunner actually signed anything half interesting these days, but mainly because I can’t see a “fat” belly at all, what the hell are they talking about? She looks in great shape to me, which shouldn’t matter anyway. However, the good thing is now she can actually look for a deal with a decent record label and not crappy Roadrunner.

Today is a hard day for me, as I say good bye to junk food. We had some good times together, but I’m afraid it’s just not working out for me any more. It’ll be hard, but I’m sure I’ll survive. I hope.

In order: Triptych canvas based on Wolverine, first bit of painting I’ve done in almost 2 years, not 100% sure if I actually like it now it’s on the wall. My desk, tidied up ready for working on my first comic (finally). And my new favourite t-shirt.

This is a pretty cool idea, if I didn’t want to be cremated I’d request something similar.

Nice to see Batman comics getting a bit of coverage instead of just the films, and not a “Pow” or “Blam” in sight. The BBC reported the current story here in a sensible manner and then followed it up here, which for part of the day was both the most read and most e-mailed story on the BBC site. I’m also glad they treated the story, and medium, with respect (the spoiler warning amuses me too). If every time there is a new James Bond or Doctor Who it gets decent coverage then why shouldn’t comics? It really does seem that comics are slowly becoming a more respectable part of mainstream entertainment. Just a shame The Guardian had to ruin it with the “Holy *insert comment here* Batman” cliché. Their follow up article was a bit better, but why use images from the films for both articles? Use images from the comics and show non-readers how good comics can look! Of course, we all know that Bruce Wayne isn’t really dead. Not showing the body has been used in comics for years as a get out clause for bringing characters back from the dead. Mind you, Marvel have done well with Captain America, over 18 months and he’s still dead, and Jean Grey has gone 3 years without coming back, possibly a record .

Scary but edible!

Great little article about rising comic sales amongst kids here in the UK, my childhood wouldn’t have been the same without Transformers weekly and the Beano, so it’s great to see that the internet and computer games haven’t changed things as much as people like to harp about.

Michael Rosen, the Children’s Laureate, welcomed the rise of comics as “terrific”.

He said: “I don’t know how it is they came to be regarded as simple in this country. They are very complex.”

The main thing was that children enjoyed reading them as “an artform in themselves”, he said. If they graduated to books that was just an added bonus.

Rosen is a living legend, especially for that last line.

Awesome behind the scenes photography of the Iron Man film by Jeff Bridges himself.

Giant squid, this thing is amazing, around 7 metres I believe! Imagine what it’s dad looks like

Lastly today, better hide my copy of Lost Girls and my Sandman collections.

Some stuff that has amused me over the past week or two:

I want this office. Seriously. It’s the greatest single piece of real life architecture I have ever seen, I love it!

Doctor Who with no Tardis? Wouldn’t have been the same, but I love the idea of him having a secret mission to destroy the future. The Doctor is always at his best when he’s at his darkest.

50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography. Amazing stuff. If you don’t know what Tilt-Shift is then have a look and it will all make sense.

50 Movie titles that got lost in translation. Sadly a lot appear to be fake, but amusing none-the-less.

Spider Money. I’d have let him off just for giving me such amusement!

Saturday 22nd November. Carcass played Leeds. I was there. I was very happy. I am still very happy. And I’ll die happy. If At The Gates tour next year then I’ll never need to ever go to a metal gig again in my life, woo!

In order: French edition of Civil War #1 scribbled on by Mark Millar. Sketch of a Ninja Turtle in a Judge Dredd costume by D’Israeli (Reason being that he has drawn both so thought it would be cool to ask him to mix the two) My “art desk” in my office, frames 1 and 3 from a triptych I’ve nearly finished called “Wolverine”, for obvious reasons. Once that’s hung on my wall the desk will be cleared for my first comic to be started, finally.

Today was the second Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds. Last year’s event was, to be honest, a little under-whelming, this years however was the total opposite and one of the best days out I’ve had all year. The hall was massive, the atmosphere was excellent, the events were varied and the talent was top-notch.

There were many artists doing free sketches, with long queues (my friend queued 2 hours to get an excellent Daredevil sketch from Alex Maleev, but it was well worth the wait and I’ve never seen I’m so chuffed). I managed to get a sketch from English artist D’Israeli who is probably best know (to me anyway) for his 2000AD work, but he also did a one off issue of Tales Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was one of my favourite issues. So, to be different, I asked for a sketch of a Ninja Turtle in a Judge Dredd outfit (which I’ll scan when I get a working scanner again!). It was a very relaxed atmosphere and was great to stand and watch him draw while chatting about comics and sharing amusing stories of past conventions, and even letting me in on the true story behind why Spider-Man was given a black costume in the 80’s, something I never knew.

After a bit of food and a quick look round the stalls it was time to queue up to meet the main person I wanted to meet, Mr Mark Millar. After about half an hour of queuing I managed to get my French edition of Civil War signed, just because I wanted something different signed to everyone else (and he seemed genuinely interested in seeing his work in a different language and format), had a quick chat and a photo. A bit of a fan boy moment for me but it really did make my day. I didn’t know what to expect but he’s a genuinely nice and funny guy, couldn’t ask for more.

After that was the Millar Hour panel, where Mark Millar spoke for an hour about his experience in the comic (And now film) industry and took questions from the floor. It was a great hour full of laughs (I love animals but the thought of him punching a fox in the face to rescue his daughters pet rabbits had me in stitches!). He even dropped a few bits of exclusive news on us which was cool, and chatted about his upcoming work as well as movies.

It was also cool to see so many small press creators there along with all the big names, selling their own self published work which they have all worked hard on.

I realised something: I’ve been fucking lazy. For years my dream has been to draw comics for a living, and for the last few years I’ve been planning a few small titles of my own and have hardly done anything, I even started this blog simply to keep a journal of my work, which has yet to start.

However, it wasn’t any of today’s events that made me realise this, it was yesterday when my mum e-mailed me and said “Have you ever done any more drawings lately to send to Marvel? You should.”

I love comics. No, I FUCKING LOVE COMICS. What am I doing wasting my life working on computers all day? I read comics, I read about comics. I love them, I love the culture, I love the history, everything. I should be fucking drawing them!!!

So while todays event has been inspiring, especially when you realise that super-stars like Mark Millar are just “normal blokes”, it’s my mum who has inadvertantly given me the kick up the arse I truly need. And it’s hit me hard.

Once upon a time, what seems many years ago now, the internet wasn’t available in peoples homes. The online world was made up of bulletin boards and if you were lucky you could access one of these from your school library computer and you could talk to some other kids in a far off school in a far off country.

Back in those days I saw an advert in a magazine. I can’t remember the magazine, all I know was it was in a pile with many other magazines in our school art block. Our project at the time was to take images from the magazines, carefully wet them and then “print” them onto a blank sheet of paper and make new images. I opened this magazine and there before me was an image I just new was right for me. It was advertising a new Video (For those too young to remember, VHS is what came before DVD ). I tore out the image, carefully wet it and transferred the image onto my piece of paper. I then carefully left the image to dry and kept it.

What was this image advertising? Some porn snook into a Sunday paper magazine? A horror film I could get my friend’s older brother to rent for us? The latest collection of Transformers episodes?

Nope, it was for a film called Akira.

This was my first exposure to the phenomenon that is known as anime, or at least I thought it was. The image of Kaneda superimposed over a city with the words “2019. NEO-Tokyo is about to EXPLODE” dragged me in and wouldn’t let go. It was nothing like the cartoons I was used to seeing. I had to see this film. The company advertising the video was “Manga Entertainment”. Manga, hmm, that was a word I’d heard whispered around the school corridors. Then I noticed something, the rating on the film was a “15″. I’d never seen a cartoon that was rated a 15 before. How could a cartoon possibly be only suitable for over 15s? I was around 12 at the time and already some of my friends had decided they had outgrown cartoons, what kind of cartoon could a 15 year old possibly want to watch?

Around the same time a bunch of new computer magazines had popped up, reviewing games for the SNES and Sega Megadrive. On day, one of these magazines had a feature on some Japanese animated films and this was when my friends and I discovered the word “anime”. From that point on we scoured every games magazine we could and would buy any that had even the smallest article on anime.

Then one day, not long after, a friend came into school and said “You have to come to my house at dinner time, I have something you need to see!”. That weekend he had been shopping with his mum and found a brand new video called Project A-Ko, rated a 15 he’d had to get his mum to buy it for him. We rushed to his house as soon as the dinner bell rang and he put the video in, this was it, I was ready for my anime virginity to be taken, and what a wild ride it was! More exciting than the film itself though was the advert at the start for a whole host of other Japanese cartoons, each more action packed and violent than the last.

The door was now wide open for us, not only were we scouring magazines this stuff was now in our local video shops. Only a few titles, but it was enough to keep us going for a while. But then the itch came. Films we’d see advertised in imported American computer games magazines, films not available to us that we desperately wanted to see. Then we found out a lot of these films were actually based on comics. Or rather based on “manga”. So when the school holidays came it was time to get on the bus or train to the nearest city with a comic shop (Nu Earth in York) and scour the shelves for English translations imported from America.

Here we found Akira, a film we had still yet to see, reprinted in English in high quality collections. Project A-Ko comics. Something called The Guyver. And many other comics of which we had seen the anime versions advertised. One comic that caught my friends eye was one called Ninja High School. This one was different though. It LOOKED Japanese in style but was actually one of (if not THE) first American comics done in a manga style.

After all this time and effort we still hadn’t managed to see the one film that first started this obsession, Akira. No shops near us seemed to ever stock it, the local video shop never had it to rent. The Daily Mail had run a campaign to try and ban it, claiming it would corrupt children, obviously not being able to comprehend that there was a whole world of animation oversees that wasn’t aimed at children. I doubt this campaign had anything to do with the lack of Akira in or local shops though.

Then one day on a shopping trip to Scarborough with my mum I stumbled upon a brand new magazine in a newsagents: Manga Mania. This thick black and white magazine had news, reviews, interviews, articles, but best of all it reprinted Akira, amongst other manga.

Advertised in Manga Mania was a video called The Guyver, which I remembered seeing the comic of in Nu Earth. The plan with this video was different to anything we’d ever seen before though. Each episode, 12 in all, would be released separately once a month for a year, like a monthly video comic. A further shopping trip to Scarborough, and a Woolworths shop attendant who didn’t ask for ID, later and I was the proud owner of the first episode of The Guyver. And I was hooked.

A few months later Manga Mania announced the news that BBC2 would be showing Akira, along with a documentary on anime by Jonathan Ross. This was it, the day we had waited for since that art class. Christmas and New Year came and went and the BBC started advertising their showing of Akira. The video recorder was set and the next day I finally got to see what seemed to be the Holy Grail of anime. And it was worth the wait. (It was also great to find out that Ross was “one of us”, a bit of a geek. Later on in life I found out he’s actually a huge comic book collector and even once ran a comic shop of his own).

Through Manga Mania we discovered that we’d already been exposed to various forms of anime over the years, often in European co-productions like Dogtanian, Belle & Sebastian plus Pole Position, Ulysses 31, G-Force, Jayce And The Wheeled Warriors and the greatest of all: Mysterious Cities Of Gold.

We’d even managed to see a film called Laputa Castle In The Sky, which is famous now for being an early film of Hayao Miyazaki, but at the time we had no idea of the concept of anime.

It was exciting to slowly uncover new manga and anime, to track down shows and comics we’d seen in imported magazines which in turn we had to track down in the first place. It was exciting to save up pocket money and get on the bus or train and see what new amazing stories we could find on the shelves of York’s comic stores. Friends would find out about something and share it with each other in the playground. We’d swap comics and videos. We’d spend our dinner times in the school library drawing our own comics in a manga style.

I very much doubt that same excitement exists now, with the instant gratification given to us by the internet. There is no waiting for information on something, you just go online, search for it and there it is, everything you need to know. In many ways I miss those simpler times. Of course, growing up takes a lot of that to begin with, but for the most part I can still get excited about new things, it’s just the learning about them part that is over too quickly after a few taps on a keyboard into Google.

All these years later and I still haven’t seen a lot of the films I used to search for when I was at school, mainly because it turns out a lot of them were crap. It took a long time before a good wide range of decent anime was released to us here in the west. Back in those school days it was mainly just the shocking violent stuff that was seen as being different to our western eyes. Thankfully these days there is a great range of translated anime and manga and it’s made a huge impact on the western market.

The internet may have taken away most of the excitement, but the great thing about it is that it allows people to discover more things they wouldn’t have, and easily. It also allows us to buy things more easily (I’m currently reading Volume 3 of Akira, I managed to buy all 6 volumes off eBay for less than half the price that it would have cost me from a shop).

Kids’ road to discovering manga and anime is a lot easier now, there is a massive amount of product ready and waiting for them before they even have to search for anything. I wonder if, had the internet been around like it is when I was younger, would this “new craze” have fascinated me so much? In the end I guess it would, as I’m now living in a world of instant internet gratification and yet I still love discovering new manga and anime.