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| Special Announcement Posted 19:00 (GMT) 31st January 2012 by David J. Bishop
I remember this feeling, or something akin to it, from when I was a child. Then there was my teens when everything felt wrong and I spent weeks at a time contemplating my delicious misery. Then, in my early twenties, an unshakeable confidence in my grasp of the way things worked undermined by a racking anxiety about my future. A cynical person (e.g. myself about four years ago) might have attributed a transition from easy-going happiness to melancholy and self-doubt to a similar transition from innocence to experience, which is to say that babies are so happy because they are so ignorant of the way things truly are and that as we mature into teens and adults we become sadder because we learn what the world holds in store. A lot of people seem to trot out this message, many of them artists-- and you should ignore it. That's just something sad people say. I used to be sad myself and I found it very easy to believe that I was sad because I wise. I realise now that was quite narcissistic of me. The truth is that I was sad because sad things were happening to me, or things were happening to me and I couldn't deal with them. Things got better. Maybe I got better. Maybe both. Because now, as a grown adult, I'm suddenly back to how I was when I was a child. I never thought I would ever feel this way again. I never had a word for it back then, never needed one before. I suppose "joy" will have to do. The kind of joy you feel when it's your birthday or when you win a contest, only every day. And Katie is the source of all this. She reinvented the universe, without even thinking about it. I don't know how anything works in this new world, I just know that I like it here and never want to leave. Nobody spends a whole day contemplating their despair here, nobody spends a week in their dressing gown eating nothing but hot dogs. Instead everyone gets hugs and kisses. All thanks to one person. What else could I do? I asked her to marry me. She said yes. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Posted 07:44 (GMT) 15th December 2011 by David J. Bishop
I’m going to spend my Christmas catching up on my reading and trying to improve my art. Speaking of improvements, when I come back from my holiday I am going to completely overhaul the website. It’s the most hideous and broken thing I’ve seen since I smashed my arm against the ice last winter. I designed it when I was first getting started, aged 16 or 17, and uploading comics to it feels like sticking them in a great big bin. Please come back on the 24th for your special Yuletide bonus cartoon and on the 15th of every month for a new comic. The new update schedule will be launched some time in the new year (soon I hope). Have a great time out there and don’t drink too much eggnog. My NaNoWriMo Adventure or The Power of Suck Posted 07:46 (GMT) 5th December 2011 by David J. Bishop
My friend Jason was the first tell me about the thing on-line where people try to write a novel in a month. I remember my response was rude and dismissive, as it always is when anyone tells me about anything they like. I think my objections ran along these lines: what could possibly be the point? Why pick one month in which to write, why not just write as much as you can as often as you can? Isn't it impossible to write a full-length novel in 30 days? Oh, it's 50,000 words? Is that all? I've written 100,000 words of my novel and I'm still not finished. Yeah, I was an arse. I thought of the novel as a very important art form, one which was ill-served by rush jobs and have-a-go amateurs dicking about at a keyboard for 30 days. I believe Jason got very annoyed with me back then. He was under the impression I had missed the point entirely. I had, but I was too much of an arse to realise it then. I was writing every day and well on my way towards publishing a best-selling novel, I just needed to write the ending. Well, the ending and my award acceptance speech. I spent months privately writing that speech. I worried what to do about the movie rights. I had it all figured out. The trouble was, the only reason I had managed to get that far is because I was too dumb to realise just how bad I was at writing. The reason why my novel didn't get its ending, and still doesn't have one, is because I learned enough about storytelling along the way that to realise how much the finale I planned sucked. Then it was just a matter of figuring out why: my whole plot was horrible. Throw-out-this-bathwater-and-don't-worry-about-the-baby horrible. So then the entire project had to go on the back-burner whilst I figured out how to fix it. I did, by the way. It was a wonderful moment, a spectacular realisation I had about two years ago. I'd been looking at the whole thing the wrong way. I had thought I was writing a book about three friends on an adventure, during which one of them, my main character, fell in love. Although the woman he fell for was crucial to the plot, most of the narrative's attention was focused on the relationship between the three friends. The story was about their interaction with each other, their jokes, their reactions and actions in response to the story’s problems. This was their adventure, the girl was just along for the ride. What this says about me as a sixteen-year-old I can’t rightly say. I realised that the story I had been trying to tell was the wrong one for the characters and plot. I thought it was the story of three friends, but it wasn’t, this was the story of two people — my main character and the woman — forced together by circumstance despite mutual animosity and, in the face of a terrible threat, coming to an uneasy alliance. I needed to be writing Ratatouille and I was writing The Road To El Dorado. Well, the burst of inspiration I received from figuring this out was equal to the burst of speed you would get if you attached get engines to your car. Suddenly, I needed to restructure my whole book. Almost everything would need to be rewritten; whole chunks would have to be cut out; whole new chunks would have to be written in. My mind was burning with the fire of creative ecstasy once more. But, like the car with jet engines, getting moving was just the start of my troubles. Before I had had quite a polished draft of a fundamentally broken book on my hands. Now I had to write the messy first draft of a structurally sound book. Those are remarkably different tasks. The first draft you write is always crap, but then you go back, you fix, you perfect it, you make it sing. In time you forget about that first draft altogether, you just read and re-read the awesome second draft over and over, looking for ways to make it even better, then congratulate yourself for being such a good writer when you don’t find any. But now I was back at sucking again. After years of tinkering and editing prose that I’d already written years ago (and which by now I was perfectly happy with, if only it belonged in the damn book), now I was confronted with a blank page. I’d forgotten what a blank page even looked like. And I tried to write something just as good as what was there before, something just as polished and singing, only this time paying attention to character motivation and not screwing up the plot… and it was far more than I could fit in my head in one go. And I tried to write anyway and… it just sucked. I had forgotten the first rule of writing fiction, passed down to me by the late great Stephen J Cannell, whose amazing lecture [http://www.writerswrite.com/screenwriting/lecture.htm] on writing and the three act structure was what first inspired my to pursue this project and all subsequent projects. Here’s a good chunk of its awesomeness: Stephen
J. Cannell's Rule Number One: Every great writer who's ever lived has, on occasion, written garbage (in my case it happens all the time). It's okay to write garbage. You're a good critic, you'll fix it later. Shakespeare wrote garbage, Hemingway wrote garbage, Faulkner wrote garbage. It is okay. Every writer has bad days, or a day when he or she isn't connecting with the material. A day when, unknown to us, the story we are writing or the characters we created have been improperly designed. When this happens, writing becomes a struggle. That doesn't mean you've lost your muse or that you're a creative burnout. It just means that you have a problem in your story structure or with character motivation. Something is dishonest that seemed okay when you set it up. Rewriting is part of the process. Most writers plot with their heads and write with their hearts. Sometimes that causes unintended dishonesty. This is exactly what had happened to my book. I had plotted with my head, written with my heart and created unintentional dishonesty by focusing on the main character’s friends when the story I was telling wasn’t their story. It was the girl’s story, she was every bit as much a main character as my hero. But when I went back to fix this mistake I must have subconsciously reasoned that since this was the non-garbage version, everything about it had to be brilliant. I had stopped giving myself permission to be bad. I understood then that Give Yourself Permission to be Bad means you should write the best prose you can write then and there and not worry if it’s not absolutely perfect (but you should make sure it’s as close to perfect as possible). In my heart I knew that I was allowed to be bad but I didn’t want to be bad anymore, I felt I’d grown enough as a writer by that point in my life that I shouldn’t be writing anything truly bad anymore. So what did I do? I came to the conclusion that I was simply not connecting with the material on any level and stopped writing the book. I stopped calling myself a writer because now I felt like a liar telling people that. Having hung so much of my identity on that word, a short identity crisis followed. Our hero becomes sad, eats an entire tub of ice-cream in one evening. End of Act Two. Cut to today. I’m in a unique position in my life, I’m working a job with regular 9 to 5 hours. No more working from 12 to 9 Wednesdays and Thursdays, then working a half day on Friday, then getting Saturday off, then working on Sunday and getting Monday off. No more working the kind of job where the only thing you want to do after you finish your shift is go home and scream into a pillow for four hours. Getting up at the same time every morning and going to bed at the same time every day means I can create a regular work schedule for my creative projects that I can actually stick to. So every morning I’ve been getting up at 4:30 am and drawing for two hours before it’s time to get ready for work, then drawing for at least four hours each night after work before bed. And I can do this every day because my time before work and my time after work is always of the same duration. Finally being able to stick to a schedule has opened up a whole new world of productivity for me. I used to be the kind of artist who would attack a project furiously until I was utterly exhausted, then collapse and not touch it for a month. There is something freeing about a good old creative frenzy but unless you work towards a target and sticking to a schedule, as boring as work-y as those things may seem, you will only experience short-term benefits. My schedule allowed me to produce comics on time every month and to even work ahead of my update schedule so that I can build up a buffer so that eventually I can start updating more frequently (because, let’s face it, a comic that only updates once a month is no comic at all). And mid-October arrived, and David saw what he had been able to create simply by limiting himself to five hours’ sleep a night and he saw that it was good. October’s update was ready on time. I also had the comic for November, December and January either finished or nearly finished. Things were looking great. I was happy with the comics I was making and I was happy with myself. For some time now I’ve thought of myself as being someone who is quite good at cartoons but bad at being a cartoonist, bad at working to a schedule and keeping my update promises. Now I felt like I could call myself a cartoonist again. So then, naturally, I wanted to be able to call myself a writer again as well. I found my gaze turning back to NaNoWriMo. I checked the website to see how much time you had and how much you needed to do. I pulled out a calculator and worked out it was 1,667 words per day. Well, that wasn’t so much different from making four pages of a comic in less than two months, was it? I was already drawing for six hours a day. If I wrote for six hours every day I only needed to write 277 words an hour. That was about a paragraph or two. This actually seemed possible. Six months ago it absolutely wouldn’t have been. Not only did it seem possible but it also seemed like a good idea. Something in the back of my mind told me that working to such a tight deadline for just one month would be good for me, that it would deliver a much-needed kick to my backside. Ruefully I remembered my initial derision. Not at first, oh no, only when I read a couple of posts on the Forums over at the NaNoWriMo website: IVIilitarus writes: I know the spirit of NaNoWriMo is writing a novel. A major part of that is never going back and deleting. If you hate it, make the font white or strikethrough. Or make it a dream sequence, but don't go back. I saw the Adopt an Angel section and thought it insane that you would never delete a single sentence (still do). This may be because a lot of people are struggling with reaching word counts and any word should be kept, but I don't see the point of disliking editing if you are ahead of schedule. This is my first year in NaNoWriMo and I write a comfortable 2000 words per day for an expected novel of just over 60000 words by the end of the month. When I say I write 2000 words per day, I mean I have 2000 words up to my standard, written, re-written and edited and ready to hand out to people and say, "This is actually pretty good." I iron out all spelling, grammar errors and make structure and syntax worth reading. That's my definition of 'write', not just put down lots of sentences. So the real question is, what's wrong with editing when you are ahead of schedule and just want to write to a high standard? I wouldn't be proud if I came out with a pile of trash that's very long. If I left all of the mistakes and bad sentences I wrote in, I'd probably be unable to read anything, much less edit it. Any thoughts? Arguments? Agreements? Someone called originalgradk responds with the following: I
agree, I think the Nano Model if you can call it that is well overdue
for revision. For instance 50k novellas based on the decent novels
by Orwell et all, OR proper Novel lengths of 100,000+ (which for
the first time I am aiming for!!). I think that the emphasis on
using fluff to expand texts is bad methodology. It is almost page
filling rather than Novel Writing. This sounds all too familiar. Did you notice the way originalgradk capitalised the word ‘novel’ (and the words ‘literary’ and ‘talent’ for that matter), the way he dismissed writing an unedited first draft as page-filling fluff, the snide little ‘if you can call it that’? Notice how he deems a 50,000 word piece to be a ‘novella’ and a ‘proper’ novel to be twice that length. This is a man (I assume it’s a man based on his picture) who, like my younger self, believes the Novel as a very important Art Form, one which was ill-served by rush jobs and have-a-go amateurs dicking about at a keyboard for 30 days. And all I will say about the first poster is that he or she probably doesn’t have a day job, at least not full time. The challenge, really, is not to write 50k in 30 days — anyone can do that. The challenge is doing everything else; getting to work on time, getting that spreadsheet just right, showering on a regular basis, grocery shopping often enough that you never run out of milk, doing the washing up. Here’s what I did for my NaNoWriMo novel: I decided to write as much as I could every day. If a day came when I missed my word goal I would calculate how many words I needed to write per day to finish on time and adjust my target accordingly. I strove to write at least 1,667 every day, even on the days when I was ahead. I always wrote in full sentences and complete thoughts. Every sentence and every scene had to cohere with the rest of the story – characters in my novel did not run down a corridor and then find themselves at the start of the corridor because the writer changed his mind and didn’t want to lose his word count. At no point did I change my font colour to white or leave in deleted words. I found it very difficult to work a full time job and meet my daily word count goals. If I had written twice as many words or skipped back every time I finished a page to edit and tidy up what was already there, I would have found it impossible. In attempting to write something bigger or better I would have ended up writing nothing. Boiled down, the NaNoWriMo mantra is “quantity not quality”. Yes, you have to write no fewer than 50,000 words. No, they don’t have to be good. In fact, they will be absolutely crap. But the person who writes a polished and neatly revised 2,000 words is writing crap as well. The man who spells Novel with a capital ‘N’ is writing 100,000 words of crap. The trouble is, whilst it's all very well to think of the novel as a very important and beautiful art form, it isn't a good idea to think of your own novel as such. If you believe it, you're an arse. If you don't believe it you will be paralysed. If you believe your novel is Art, you will be too busy sitting at your computer hugging yourself and making self-satisfied little noises with every sentence you write to actually finish your book, and even if you did finish it would probably be unreadable. I have read many books and the absolute worst ones have been by authors self-consciously aspiring to create Art. You know the kind I mean, the kind full of pointless misery, the kind that use far too many metaphors, the kind with no third act because a cyclical narrative is that much more real. In these novels everyone is trapped in Manchester in the 1960s. Half-way through the main character will turn into a salmon or realise his latent homosexuality. Maybe the author will use constipation as a metaphor for the Russian revolution, which itself represents the relationship between the protagonist and her mother, which in turn represents the drudgery of 1960s Manchester. On the other hand, if you expect all novels to be true works of art, if you think they should all stand shoulder to shoulder with the greats, but do not believe that you yourself are creating something worthy of a place on the shelf next to those geniuses and demi-gods, you will work that little bit harder to write something that is worthy of the form and exhaust yourself groping for the best words in the best order, struggling to find a metaphor to describe the flight of the swallow swooping past the protagonist’s window when in a first draft you really should be noting that you want a swallow to be outside, forgetting about and moving on to the next part of your story. Writing a Novel is a tiresome and stuffy affair. Writing a novel is a daunting task. Writing a NaNoWriMo novel is easy. Anyone can do that without cheating. The tight time constraint means that the only way you can comfortably get through it is by writing crap. But rather than reading back what you’ve written and saying ‘this is crap’ you have to press on and write more crap. For someone who found himself unable to write a single word of a book he was truly passionate about finishing, the thought of leaving a single out-of-place word in the manuscript was unthinkable. The idea of knowingly writing something awful filled me with horror. But what the hell I thought. If nothing else this will be good practice in writing consistently and in a disciplined way. I won’t reach 50,000 words in time (I knew this from the start, it was my first time after all and I knew the going would be too rough for the likes of me) but I would learn a valuable lesson. October 31st arrives. It’s my birthday. I’m no longer the age when you wonder “Am I an adult now that I’m 20/21/22 etc,” I am categorically an adult. We eat Chinese food and watch Tin-tin and it is awesome. I fall asleep on Monday night and on Tuesday morning I awake a novelist. I stumble to my keyboard at 4:30 in the morning and start work on my crap novel. I even picked a page at random from How Not to Write a Novel and used it as my writing prompt for that scene. I did what IVIilitarus could not bring him or herself to do, I set out to write a very long pile of trash. The biggest pile of trash the world has ever seen. I deliberately wrote it bad dialogue and bad speech tags. I avoided using the word ‘said’ if it meant I could use something more descriptive like “He snorted” or “she whined” and, for good measure, I threw in some extra adverbial description so the sentence became “he snorted, angrily” or “she whined, plaintively”. It was delicious. The writer who couldn’t bare to let a bad sentence go uncorrected was now deliberately creating the worst sentences he could manage. Years and years of mental discipline and strict self-editing were thrown out the window and I felt something I hadn’t felt in too many years. The sheer joy that comes with writing bad fiction. Okay, so when I was a teenager I didn’t know I was writing bad fiction, but the voice of my less-experienced internal editor was a lot quieter back then as well. And self-editing as you go takes up a surprisingly large amount of mental energy. I don’t think I had ever switched off my editor altogether before. What I felt was a sense of lightness and freedom. It was like running naked in the outdoors (I would imagine). I finally understood what Stephen J. Cannell really meant by Give Yourself Permission to be Bad, after all those years. It didn’t meant that you should write the best prose you can, it means you should just write any old prose and not worry about if it’s the best. Trying to write something as close to perfect as you can manage, it turns out, is a good way to write nothing at all. Deliberately writing crap had set me free. I reached my word target for the first day, then the second, then the third. More than that, I was creating again. Not a single word of this book had been written in advance. I had only been planning it for a couple of weeks at the end of October. There was no way I was going to get out of this without some big plot holes or some shoddy character motivation. Who cares? I took to obnoxiously describing everything in the room: individual sticks of furniture, condensation on the side of a cola can, the weather outside even thought it never changed. Did it bother me? I was already the man who had written “he snorted, angrily” and left it in for the sheer delight of leaving it in. I didn’t go back and colour it white, I left it in clear black text for anyone to see. I would have happily written it in huge black letters across the cliffs of Dover. By allowing myself to do this, something magical happened. I began to make decisions. I wrote the start of scenes when I had no earthly idea how they would end. One of two things happened. Either I groped around blindly for something like a plot thread and stumbled out of the scene or in the moment I saw fully-formed pictures of characters and events. They blossomed into view not weeks in advance of the act of writing but then and there on the spot as I charged blindly in. Characters began to take on a life of their own. After a while I realised that I had stopped deliberately writing bad prose, I was just writing regular prose. There were even a few sentences I could have sworn fell into the category of ‘not bad’. Plot twists found their way in, things I couldn’t have predicted if I had spent ten years planning my book out in advance. Was it still bad? It was terrible. If you read this thing it would make your teeth ache. My book begins with the main character playing video games, for no reason at all. Then his girlfriend walks into a room and they argue about the cultural significance of bling-bling, written with the insight that only a middle-class white man living in suburban England can provide. The protagonist’s daily routine is described, to the joy of no-one. The main character argues with his girlfriend some more. The main character de-ices his car, a process rendered in loving detail. At the 25,000 word mark you will realise with a kind of sick shock that this book is actually about gangsters. So I wasn’t just freeing myself up to develop character and plot, I was also freeing myself up to write the worst kind of stodgy filler you can imagine –– if anyone read this it would be like biting into a chocolate éclair and finding it to be filled with mashed potato. But here’s something interesting about the filler. I have a copy of the Creative Writing Coursebook, a series of essays written by the lecturers and boffins at the University of East Anglia, where I understand they run a really cracking creative writing master’s course. Each chunk is devoted to a different aspect of writing and the first is given over to people who don’t see themselves as creative writers at all or to people who have written as children or young adults but who have yet to ‘find their voice’. In order to get into the habit of writing like a writer they prescribe a series of writing exercises. Most of these consist of describing something, a feeling, a person or an everyday object. These always made me roll my eyes and skip ahead to the chapters on characterisation and plotting. In the run-up to November, in a bid to psyche myself up, I came back to the Coursebook, re-read it from the start and came across these exercises again. What I didn’t pay any attention to before was the word count. These weren’t just suggestions to inspire readers, this was an evening’s homework for a student at East Anglia. Describe a shower curtain for a thousand words. Spend 500 words describing your best friend. Make a list of emotions and describe three of them for 300 words. If you’ve ever read a Proper Novel, you will read about two words of description establishing that, yes, the shower curtain does exist. But then sometimes, if the scene requires it, there will be one extra word — just one — that paints a beautiful picture of the way the curtain moves and hints at the way the main character feels. Just one! I used to think that kind of beauty came about by professional writers being able to pluck that one perfect word out of the air but maybe, just maybe, they come about by a writer spraying out 500 or 1000 words about the Goddamn shower curtain and then cutting and cutting until one remains. I may have written thousands of words of fluff describing a man making himself toast for breakfast but perhaps when I come back to that page in 2012 and attack with a nice big red pen, when I let my editor back in from the cold, perhaps then the two of us can find one word that perfectly encapsulates the hero’s grief at discovering he’s run out of marmalade. One day I sinned. Instead of writing new words and went back to the start and tinkered with what I’d already written. I only cut out a little bit and I actually added in extra bits, so overall the word count still increased. Seeing how little the count had increased soon put a stop to that. Due to that one mistake I fell behind for a couple of days. But I stuck to my schedule, I plugged away. There were some days when I fell behind, other days when I sprinted ahead and ended up writing 3000 words at 11:30 at night. A couple of days before the end of November I hit 50,000 words, printed out my winner’s certificate and performed my happy dance. What was my prize for winning? The first 50,000 words of the first draft of a novel. Not yet finished. Not even half-way through. Horribly unpolished. But it exists. It’s real. Even at my most productive I never managed 50,000 in a single month. To know that I can pull that off and hold down a day job is tremendously encouraging. And that’s all my NaNoWriMo novel is, an unfinished first draft. Somewhere on the forums, I can’t find it now, someone wrote something that really inspired me: “A first draft is just a really detailed plot outline with dialogue.” It is just an outline. It tells you who the characters are and where they need to stand. It might give you that one perfect word to describe dwindling marmalade supplies or what bling signifies for middle class white people. But it’s not set in stone, it can, it should, it will change. That’s why the guy going back to polish up his 2000 words is wasting his time, every bit as much as if I was when I did the same thing. Because he’ll end up with a very well-written 50,000 words which will then have to be thrown away when he gets to 100,000 and realises who is protagonist really is. Then the polished nature of that first draft will make it all the harder for him to chop it up and start over. So this is what NaNoWriMo teaches us: setting yourself targets and working to a schedule every day is a good way to surprise yourself with how much you can get done. Making something bad is a good exercise in becoming better. It’s better to try to making a lot of something rubbish than to spend the same amount of time and effort trying to make a little bit of something perfect. Even if you’re not a writer or a creative person of any kind, everybody is good at something. But days will come when you don’t feel like you’ve very good at the thing you’re supposed to be good at. Give yourself permission to be bad. Never quit. Never, ever say to yourself “I suck,” unless it is immediately followed by the words “Woo-hoo! I suck!” Because it is far better to do something that sucks than to not do anything at all. Word count of blog post: 5,117 Number of words cut: Not a single frigging one. The Sewer Pipe Posted 07:35 (GMT) 15th August 2011 by David J. Bishop
Nobody likes call centres. No-one. Companies don’t like to admit it, but call centres are not the best way to deal with customers. Far better to deal with each enquiry personally, and to train staff members to deal with a much broader range of problems, but that would be too hard to manage and too expensive. But they really suck for all involved. Customers hate them. By the time they’ve spent 10 minutes navigating the subdivisions and arbitrary choices of an automated menu that offers them the choice between sales, renewals and change of address when all they want to do is enquire, cancel or complain and then spent another 25 minutes waiting on hold, they’re already annoyed. Then they get to speak to someone in technical faults who tells them there isn’t a complaints department because all our customers are valued and we want them to have the best Customer Experience and resolve all Difficulties Helpfully. What they mean is that every department in a call centre is the complaints department. Managers hate them. It’s the only cost-effective way of dealing with the huge number of customers the company has taken on – too many, really, to handle well – and the last thing the bosses want to do is reinvest some of their profits in giving their customers a better time. Whenever they do, the customers don’t notice and whenever they don’t the customers don’t consistently leave. But it leaves the managers on the floor of the office with the actually impossible task of predicting and planning out how a typical conversation with two humans should go, then scoring, assessing and disciplining their staff based on how it really went, when any conversation with two unique human beings is always going to be unique and innately unpredictable. Staff hate them. It’s a production line in which each worker is given one tiny screw to attach to the car, except without the linearity. Instead, imagine a production line where the car arrived randomly at any point in its construction. The person whose job it is to attach that one screw HAS to try and screw it on, even if the car doesn’t have an engine or wheels, then the whole car has to be passed to the engine department in a process that takes about half an hour, 10 minutes of which is spent navigating the horrible menu and realising there is no engine department. You can either wait patiently to see if you’re heading in the right direction or you can just launch the increasingly indignant car across the room and move on, hoping you haven’t just crushed another worker. The nice thing to do would be to wait, except that each second you waste subtracts a point from some invisible scoreboard. Okay, my metaphors are falling apart even as they crash into each other. The point is that you are being hired to have what is essentially the same conversation over and over and, despite what I said about each one being as unique and special as a little snowflake, 99% are essentially identical. You end up repeating the same phrases again and again until, like the world’s most over-rehearsed play. In time the words ring hollow and dull as you deliver them in a lifeless monotone and, worse still, you begin to correctly anticipate what people are going to say just before they say it. That’s always going to frustrate people. The only moments of respite from the tedium come when somebody breaks off from the normal conversation pattern to call you a cocksucker, at which point – in an open affront to human dignity itself – you are not allowed to hang up. They’re not angry at you, they hate call centres and they need someone to take it out on, even when they know in their heart that everybody hates call centres. Nobody wants to be there, nobody wants this conversation to take place. Occasionally you’ll get deluded people who think that by going off on a 10-minute rant about this or that policy they’ll make a difference, as if the CEO is downloading thousands of hours of calls onto his Galaxy S II and listening to them all in bed. Sometimes, as if acknowledging this, they say “Tell your managers that I think their procedure stinks!” Even if I could, you think, they wouldn’t care. Maybe the man calling you a cocksucker can tell that you have no interest in his problem and, let’s face it, unless you’re the kind of slug-creature that finds terms and conditions jolly fascinating, you don’t. Meanwhile, managers are assessing your performance based on how closely you stuck to the script and not based on how much you helped someone, which means that every conversation has to be steered down the same track using the same stock phrases even if that’s to the detriment of all involved. If that shows a profound lack of imagination on the part of the managers, think on this: these are people who have thrived in a call centre. They weren’t the best or the brightest – those people left or were pushed – they just arrived on the scene and thought “Yes, this is where I should spend the next fifteen years of my life.” A lack of imagination is really a kind of superpower when someone has just called you a cocksucker. I mention this because at the end of January I lost my call centre job. I was unemployed in the middle of a recession, trying to save up enough money to move house and take my first overseas holiday in four years, flat broke, in desperate need of work and bitterly depressed. So, yeah, not the kind of thing you really share with the audience of your comedy website. I couldn’t tell this story because at the time, it had no happy ending. So I stayed quiet. The best and worst thing about being unemployed is the free time. Finally I had more time than ever before to draw – and I couldn’t. At least, not all the time. It’s the hierarchy of needs. I had to make finding a new job my full time job; creativity is something you indulge in when you know where your next paycheque is coming from. But, in spite of my desperation, I vowed I was never going to return to the world of call centres a fourth time. At first I got into it because I had no qualifications. Then, after I got my qualification, I got back into it because it was the only work I could get and I had experience. It was soul-destroying. I decided that I would rather go hungry than go back. I said, and tried to believe it, that I was better than that. I was going to find myself a graduate level job in a recession or die trying. And I was still going on my holiday. And I was still going to move house. My girlfriend had got a job in the Midlands. I needed to move house by the summer. Our holiday was already booked for the start of July. All I had under my belt were three call centre jobs, six months’ waiting tables and a degree in bedtime stories. I applied for a hundred jobs. I even went to some interviews. Twice I was told, by the same company, that I had come in second out of all the candidates. They sent me my silver medal in the post. I was able to trade it in for a luxury yacht and a pet unicorn. Thanks, guys. One job came along that I was perfect for. The job description was me. They invited me to an assessment day. Four hours on the train, four hours back. We did team-building exercises. I helped build a bridge out of paper and tape. I decided which of the plane crash victims would get to be in the lifeboat. I had a short interview. There were ten of us that day, whittled down from 204 applicants. They gave us a maths test. I knew then that I had absolutely no chance of getting the job. They called me back for a second interview. I was terrified the whole time, jittering and stammering my way through the questions. I can’t remember what I said. I just remember wanting the job so much, wanting to commit years of my life to staying there despite knowing next-to-nothing about what I would actually be doing. I was the blind date with the engagement ring in his pocket, and I probably came across as being that creepy. They told me I was one of the worst at the maths test. Not THE worst, they hasten to add, just one of them. Bottom three, I imagine. They give me the maths test to take again. I’ve already taken it before so, they reason, I’m bound to get a better score the second time round. That’s all I have to do – get a better score than last time. I take the test again, the Duck Tales theme playing constantly in my head for some reason, then the results come back: I got the exact same score. That’s it, then. I’ve blown it. The spluttering interview was bad enough, this is just the final nail in the coffin. A week goes by. I hear nothing. Of course I hear nothing. I get a call. There’s good news and bad news. Oh God, I think. Here it comes. The good news is, you’ve got the job. Wait, what? The bad news is, we want you to start next week. And, just like that, one big problem gives way to a million little ones. I need to cancel all my utilities, notify my insurance provider, change my address for countless services, organise a moving date, call the company that manages my property on behalf of my landlord. The best thing to happen to me since I graduated and I’m navigating automated menus and talking to call centres. My first week of work is spent in a hotel, the second on the floor of the flat I first looked at last weekend. I return to Leeds each weekend to pack and clean and defrost my freezer. Two men come and pile everything I own into one van. It’s a bigger van than last year, which makes me smile proudly to myself. My big green armchair gets stuck in the doorway. It takes half an hour of twisting, heaving and swearing in Polish for them to unstick it. I check the place whilst they wait in the van. There’s only time for a cursory glance, not enough to say goodbye to the little flat that has been my home for over a year and, by extension, the city that has been my home for fifteen years. On the cross-country drive to my new place we listen to the same three tracks of Polish rap metal looping on the van’s broken CD player. Weeks later I finally get an internet connection, just before I go on my holiday to Austria. The day we leave marks the end of my first month at the best job I have ever had. It’s a small company, only four in one office. We help hundreds of people, always in different ways. Our job is to make as little work as possible for our customers. Every conversation is completely different, every task is something I’ve never done before. I have learnt two programming languages in four weeks. My girlfriend and I have the best holiday we’ve ever had, then return home to the best flat we have ever had – and the first one we have rented together. Practically overnight everything about my life has changed. I’ve gone from being sad and unemployed in Leeds to being happy and fulfilled in the Midlands. It took a lot of hard work on my part but that doesn’t quite make the transition feel real – it still feels like I woke up to find my situation transformed by pixies, that narrative makes more sense at this point. Now, working for a business where they do things right, I see my call centre days in a new light. That really wasn’t the best way to do things. I’m so glad I can finally tell this story, because it has the happiest ending. That scene in The Shawshank Redemption where the guy crawls through that pipe full of raw sewage: I understand what that feels like. And I now I understand why he keeps going. So, in short, the update was late. Sorry, guys. I’ve been super busy. Lol! Watchmen Posted 09:12 (GMT) 24th May 2011 by David J. Bishop
If you feel I'm dead wrong about any of this, please feel free to post something in my otherwise quiet forum, send me an e-mail (fourthfloorcomics@yahoo.co.uk), contact me via Twitter or scribble your comments on a sheet of paper, tape it to a brick and hurl it through my living room window. I promise to post on the site all antithetical comments underneath the original rant and I will do my best to answer each and every one. Tangled Posted 15:17 (GMT) 11th April 2011 by David J. Bishop
In the meantime, please enjoy this uneditted, very rushed rant in which I muse about Tangled. Apologies for the punctuation - I originally wrote this in Word and pasted it over and lost all my italics. No time to alter it now! If you spend as much time on the internet as I do you probably heard people complain about the confusing and misleading marketing that preceded the film’s release. Yeah, the trailers made it look like a different film – and that film was Treasure Planet, and nobody wants that. A lot of people took this as evidence that Disney, after giving us the critically acclaimed fairytale masterpiece that is The Princess and the Frog, had decided to go back to making bad films that nobody wants to see. But those people should have a little more faith. Remember in 2006 when Disney and Pixar ate each other? Now, we should treat Disney films as Pixar films because many of the same creative people like John Lasseter have had a hand in their development. That means that from now on we get good Disney films agains and, interestingly, ones that in some respects feel like Pixar films. The Princess and the Frog, for example, has its music and its soundtrack composed by Randy Newman – you know, the guy that did the Toy Story and Monsters Inc. music. And it had the kind of tight plotting and complex character motivations we’ve come to expect from Pixar films like Up. So even though it had musical numbers sung by the characters, which no Pixar film up until now has had (except for when that Woody puppet plays the guitar, which doesn’t count), these weren’t huge show-stopping numbers like ‘Be Our Guest’, crammed to the brim with spectacle but in no way advancing the story, these songs were plot-relevant. In fact, the songs in The Princess and the Frog actually move the plot along quicker! Have you seen that episode of Futurama where Zoidberg sends Hermes to a health spar that turns out to be forced labour camp and then Hermes reorganizes it so that all the work is being done by one Australian man? That’s the kind of heavy-lifting the songs in Princess and the Frog do. That doesn’t make them bad songs by any means, it just means the job they’re doing is different to the job done by ‘Be Our Guest’. All of Prince Naveen’s backstory, for example, is sung – in the space of about one verse. By slipping in much-needed exposition or character motivation into the songs, the film-makers establish in the space of few minutes what would otherwise take several scenes and the storytelling is therefore much more efficient. This means they can tell a much more rich and complex story than you would expect to see in a Disney film. There are twists and turns, characters’ motivations change as they develop and the movie never feels bogged down. So it was with Tangled’s marketing! Yes, if you watch the trailer for Tangled and then Tangled itself you could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into the wrong film. But if you think of this as Pixar-flavoured Disney it all makes sense again. The fact is, Pixar have always made weirdly misleading trailers for their films. Do you remember the teaser trailer for Monster, Inc.? I sure as Hell do. Sometimes I still wake up screaming. They had Mike going through the door with Sulley, even though everyone knows Mike isn’t a scarer. And why is the door locked? That’s not how they work. Then they get into an argument and Sulley start’s being really sarcastic and then Mike plays the race card and, to put it lightly, that exchange does not reflect the kind of dynamic they have in the film proper. What’s that all about? Well, those trailers get made donkey’s years before the film is finished and they act more as mission statements than as accurate portrayals of a film’s content – all they tell you about the films is “We are Pixar! We are making a film about monsters now!” and that’s it. That’s how we end up with a teaser trailer for Ratatouille in which Remy never once mentions wanting to be a chef. Tangled was the same, it’s just that this time somebody took that weird concept animation and spliced it together with actual footage from the finished film. So already before I even watched Tangled I didn’t know whether to expect a Disney film or a Pixar film and – thanks to the marketing – I didn’t even expect a good film. I didn’t know what to expect at all, to be honest. Is it good? Yes. Is it a Disney movie? Absolutely. Forget about the technology they used to make this film. The script, the story, the pacing, the songs, the character design – these are all classic Disney like no Disney film has been since… since they stopped making Disney films like you remember from your childhood. This is it; this is the film they should have made instead of that awful Chicken Little thing. I’m not saying this is universal – as always, your mileage may vary. For me, everything I love about Disney films is here in spades. That’s why it’s my favourite. It looks like a Disney film. The character design is purely the Disney house style and of the highest quality for feature animation. Since I became a student of character design, especially as it relates to animation, I’ve become something of a fan of Glen Keane’s work. It would take too long to tell you who this guy is or what he’s done. Suffice to say he designed Beast and Ariel and for a long while Tangled was his baby. Even though he didn’t end up directing the film, he originally conceived its unique aesthetic and designed its protagonist. Rapunzel is a masterpiece of character design. To most people that may well sound like faint praise, but the art of character design is really more difficult than it appears, as I am learning. Good character design is really the difference between a good animated film and a great animated film and to really appreciate it you have to look at examples of its absence, like in most Dreamworks films. Whatever the other merits of their films – and Dreamworks have made some good films – for the most part their human characters look slavishly realistic or just downright ugly. Look at all the human characters in Shrek. Observe a complete absence of character design. You’ve got Fiona who looks they tried their best to make a human actress in a CG universe, you’ve got the villain Farquaad who has a big chin and is short but otherwise is made with the same slapdash attention to detail as Fiona and then virtually every other character. All those people in the crowd scenes, Robin Hood and his Merry Men, the guards – they all look like clones of each other. And don’t get me started on the waxy corpse-men who populate Monsters vs. Aliens with their super-deformed proportions but their ghoulishly-detailed flesh complete with pores and moles. Blech! No, Tangled is how you do it right. This is what it’s supposed to look like when animated characters step into the three-dimensional world. What else do I like? It’s funny. Damn funny. Tangled is easily the funniest film of 2010. A lot of people will tell you the film is beautiful – and don’t get me wrong, it’s gorgeous – but I know from experience how hard it is to make something funny (and how easy it is to miss the mark) so I know that Tangled’s strength as a comedy is probably its greatest achievement. That brings me neatly back to Rapunzel again. Rapunzel is a wonderful comic character in a way that her princess predecessors were not. In fact, she is unique amongst Disney protagonists. She is a princess, she’s full of the kind of hope and cheerful optimism we’ve come to expect of animated heroines, the kind of attitude parodied in such films as Enchanted, yet she is by no means a boilerplate character. What separates Rapunzel from other Disney princesses is that she’s not 100% capable 100% of the time. She has flaws. Sometimes she is goofy, sometimes she is silly, sometimes she is borderline manic depressive. At times she is a bit of ditz, she can even be manipulative. Moreover, she is terribly self-conscious of her shortcomings. To see her react to any given situation is at once funny, sweet and thoroughly charming. This is where she differs from other Disney heroines. Disney heroines are not funny. The likes of Snow White and Cinderella hardly have any personality at all and sort of drift through life reacting to things and being rendered unconscious. But they’re still very good at coping with what their stories throw at them. Snow White, finding herself alone and afraid in a forest immediately befriends dozens of adorable woodland creatures, cleans a house and then cooks its occupants dinner before having even met them and discovering that – DUN DUN DUN – they’re not human! And upon that discovery she just blithely accepts it. I wish I could cope that well when I met strangers. So suffice to say, Snow White is blandly perfect in every circumstance. To find anything close to a flawed heroine we have to look to the head-strong rebellious Ariel. But even she is thoroughly capable and doesn’t possess any crippling neuroses. Characters like Ariel and Aladdin have impossible dreams and then overcome the odds to achieve them. If that means sword-fighting a dozen guards that’s fine, if that means making a pact with the sea-witch then that’s fine too. This is all fine for the kind of story they’re in – God knows we all love to see capable characters kick some ass in the face of adversity. But I also love unlikely heroes who maybe don’t know what they’re doing, like in Shaun of the Dead. Tangled feels more like the latter. It’s still very much a classic Disney story but it avoids cliché at every turn by casting Rapunzel as the protagonist. Rapunzel doesn’t have an impossible dream, she has very modest goals and, really, there is nothing stopping her from achieving those goals but her own psychological hang-ups and her fears. That makes her incredibly compelling. She doesn’t want to change species, she doesn’t want to prove her worth, she doesn’t want to rise out of poverty or embark on an adventure – Rapunzel’s goal is simple and much more relatable. She’s trapped in a tower and she thinks that one day it might be nice to see some part of the outside world. That’s it. The first song is a really funny sequence depicting Rapunzel’s daily routine as she tries to find ways to pass the time. The message of the song is not “I want so much more”, it’s “This is my life, I wonder when it will get better”. That’s subtly different. And the song itself is upbeat and lively and the editing of the sequence is fast-paced. What I love about the musical sequences in Tangled is that they’re dense with information. The lyrics are loaded with meaning and subtle jokes and often accompanied by quickly-edited animated sequences which sometimes contradict the lyrics. In this case, Rapunzel’s song becomes funnier and funnier as Rapunzel finds increasingly absurd ways to fill the hours – and that in itself becomes increasingly sad as we see how desperate Rapunzel is to escape her boredom. Even though the lyrics remain optimistic, we start to see that Rapunzel is more dissatisfied with her situation than she is willing to admit to herself. The songs in Tangled aren’t like the songs in Princess and the Frog, they don’t move the plot forward but at the same time they establish character and they underline the characters’ problems. That’s what we see here, that Rapunzel is an inventive and eccentric character fighting against boredom and restriction, a character whose sheer creativity and buoyancy breed a deep-seated dissatisfaction within her. In some respects she’s a tragic figure, because we can see what’s missing in her life so clearly and yet her own lack of confidence and self-esteem hold her back at every turn. Belle wouldn’t stand for that. Belle would just up and leave. Whatever she encounters out in the world, whether she succeeds or fails, she’ll be okay. Belle absolutely has her shit together. No matter what happens she is capable, she can deal with it. Tiana’s so capable she’s come close to getting what she wants before the plot even gets going. Rapunzel is a different breed altogether. Her obstacles are not physical or societal – her obstacles are all internal. She doesn’t always have the best handle on every situation, she doesn’t always have the upper hand. Yet she has amazing potential and in many respects that makes her a better role model than her ultra-capable predecessors. I think her defining characteristic is her inexhaustible optimism and her belief in the honest of others, which we then see paired with the cynical opportunism of Flynn the thief, a man who explicitly tells her that she can’t trust him, a man who feels that everyone is essentially out for themselves. As the two come to an uneasy alliance, the meat of the film’s tension comes in seeing the extent to which Rapunzel will be disappointed by the real world – and we know from the start that she will be disappointed – and the extent to which Flynn is full of shit. And the exciting part is that, regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of optimism and pessimism, you will be surprised! In that respect, this is a coming of age film the likes of which neither Disney nor Pixar have ever delivered before. Regarding the character of Flynn himself, I’ll just say that I thought Beauty and the Beast had had the last word in deconstructing performative masculinity with Gaston but Flynn shows just how wrong I was. And all the other characters you encounter in some way reflect that central conversation. Although that said the film shows a distinct lack of dimunuitive wise-cracking comic relief sidekicks. Considering this is a Disney comedy, surprisingly most of the laughs come from the interactions between Rapunzel and Flynn rather than the talking clocks or singing crabs. Really, that’s what’s most impressive about this film. It’s a film with three-dimensional, unique characters, a story that arises out of those characters’ motivations and a strong theme tying it all together. How many films genuinely deliver that, let alone animated films? I for one am glad that Disney and Pixar ate each other. Apologies For Having Mellowed Posted 12:11 (GMT) 28th January 2011 by David J. Bishop
So, allow me to present my new rant! It's about Icelandic Literature and racists. Because I wrote it, it's over two thousand words long. So, you know, read the first thousand words, get yourself a sandwich, fly a kite, go to the bathroom, then come back and read the next thousand. I could edit it all down and give you exactly half of what I'm trying to say, and end up souding like an idiot, but I'll just give you the full picture instead. Especially when discussing a sensitive topic like racism or a complicated topic like literature, you really need to tread carefully and use the best words in the best order to avoid sounding like a racist or an imbecile. In a rant about both of the former I needed to sound like neither of the latter. So read it, enjoy it, apologies for the epic length. While you do that I'm going to actively seek out some of the things that make me angry so I can write about them. Laters, dudes. Ice Fail Posted 16:13 (GMT) 18th January 2011 by David J. Bishop
The reason why I posted the comic on the 17th of January instead of the 15th is because I've been experiencing a few logistical problems. Well, what else is new? The fact is I have exactly 99 problems, of which I used to be able to say a broken arm was not one. Unfortunately, as of last Sunday I can no longer make that claim. Here's what happened - and I must give you the brief version because the act of typing is sending hot shooting pains up my forearm. I was walking to work. Yes, I work on a Sunday. I wouldn't really mind except that the train services only run one per hour on a Sunday morning. Normally, prudent soul that I am, I endeavour to catch the train before the one I really need so that I can still be on time if I miss it. Not so the Sunday train. If I don't get this train, the next one won't arrive until it's already too late and I can't get the one before because there is no one before. This is my first, last and only chance to get to work. And it's a little cold out. We'd had some snow earlier that week and that was followed by some rain which sort-of melted the snow. That was followed by the kind of cold that stings your earlobes and eats its way through even the coziest scarf. So the rainwater and the half-melted snow froze into this mini glacier that covered nearly every inch of tarmac lying between my house and my train. So I was not, in fact, walking to work. I lied before. I was skating. I had managed to go the entire route without any mishaps until I came to a steep slope leading down to another path that slopes uphill towards my train. On a good day it's a five minute journey. That's fine because my train isn't leaving for another 15 minutes. I'm doing great. Or I would be, if it was a good day. But this slope. It's so steep. And the ice is so thick. There aren't any un-slippery gaps in the frosty covering onto which a sure-footed fellow might gracefully hop. And I'm about as sure-footed on ice as Bambi, with about the same level of common sense. I would like to say I hesitated at the top of that slope, I would like to say I didn't just keep fast-walking towards the train station. I'd like to but that would be another lie. So, I stride confidently onto the path and instantly I start to slide. I stop walking, I stand still right where I am but by now 'standing still' is just a state of mind. I'm still travelling forwards despite not moving, like a cuddly toy moving on a conveyor belt, with my arms out at my side and what I imagine is an expression of panic tinged with deep, sickening foreboding. I start to imagine that this will be a perfectly acceptable way to traverse the slope until I realise that my feet are travelling faster than my torso, that they are accelerating at a constant rate. As grim as this realisation is, it is matched only by the twin realisation that I can't do a damn thing about the situation. So my feet shoot off down the ice on some private adventure of their own, held back only by their stubborn attachment to my reluctant body. I'm sure if they could they would have slid all the way down to the bottom - as it is they're left nowhere to go but up and it isn't long before my own feet at flying up into the air, leaving no-one to do the job of connecting my physical being with the ground below but my ass. So I fall, hard. The sheer hardness of what is supposed to be water but which feels firmer and more unforgiving than solid rock hits me. Next the coldness, then the wetness. All three hit me, one after the other, without mercy, like ages 13, 14 and 15. As I went down I did that thing where you put your hand out behind you in an attempt to break your fall but it seems more likely that I broke my hand. I managed to scramble onto my feet by gripping the fence to the side of the path. Once fully upright I start to shuffle towards the bottom of the slope with a little more caution, but it isn't long before my feet are at it again, sliding out from under me. This time I stop myself by grabbing the fence but that doesn't stop my stupid feet. Again, they fly off and up and now I'm left holding myself up by my arms. Now I'm not the skinniest of men anymore. I was never that strong, either. In fact, my upper body strongly resembles a pear with two cocktail sticks wedged into it. So when the weedy arms are suddenly given the task of keeping the chubby torso off the ground while the feet and legs are on their little holiday - well, they weren't up to the job. So then I'm back on my ass. So I'm hurry to get to work but it seems like I'm making the majority of my progress sliding down this slope on my bottom. Suddenly I've become this guy. Look at the expression of despair mixed with confusion, regret and being really cold. That's me now. Yes, I visit Failblog from time to time. It always cheers me up to know that somewhere there are people stupider than me, mostly 17-year-olds trying to parkour but instead slamming their foreheads against the roof of a shed harder than you could have thought possible. It's essentially one of those clip shows of people falling down in their home videos ("Looks like Dad is really too big for the tire swing!") combined with that section of the newspaper where they make fun of people's unfortunate writing choices. Failblog is one of those guilty pleasures for me, not in the same way that another person might consider Britney Spears a guilty pleasure, more in the way that I feel guilty because I don't know if laughing at people concussing themselves makes me a bad person or not. But now there's a whole new angle - I'm the Failblog guy, I'm the guy who can't negotiate an icy path. I epic fail at walking to work. So now I just feel confused, like if I stumbled onto the set of Frasier. So when I fell down the third time, what choice did I have? I shouted "Dot org!" at the top of my voice and burst out laughing. It's okay, there was no-one around. I didn't see another soul during my mad journey. It's a complete mystery as to why. But I made it. I got to the bottom of the slope. I check my watch - 10 minutes into the train comes. Okay, I can do this. Now I just need to make my way up the path to the station. The equally icy path. Leading uphill. Well, no turning back now. Literally, there isn't. The only way back is the way I came - again an uphill struggle - or up another even steeper icy path. And I've got a train to catch. So I start my climbing. I get about 2 metres up the hill before I start to slide down back the way I came. I manage to stay upright as I slide smoothly to the spot I started from. Fine, be that way, gravity and friction. I start again. This time I get a little further before I start to slide backwards, but having learned from my previous mistake I stop my slide by falling forwards onto my face - and that stops me. So I progress in that fashion, walking a few metres, falling forwards, sliding a little way and then starting again. I tried walking off to the side of the path but the grass there had been flattened by people doing the same thing the day before and now it had iced over and become perfectly smooth. And to the side of that: thick prickly bushes. So I was stuck on this nightmare path with no way out except forward. I lost count of the number of times I fell down. I think about 8 in total, it's hard to say. Panting and gasping, I got to the top of the slope. I had managed the obviously impossible through only willpower and the stubborn refusal to acknowledge pain. My wrist was starting to feel a little tingly. I remember dimly wondering if I needed to go to a hospital as I approached the station. The train was just about to leave as I ran down to the platform and jumped on, my right arm hanging uselessly by my side. But I made it! I climbed up a sheer icy slope and made it onto my train in time despite - as I would later discover - having broken my Goddamn arm at the elbow. By the time I got to work the pain in my wrist had spread further up my arm. It didn't hurt in any serious way, it just felt weird. No, the pain would come later. I asked my boss if it would be okay if I nipped into the hospital really quick to see if they could patch me up and then send me back to work. I didn't have to wait long in the Accident and Emergency department, only an hour and a half. Three x-rays later and another 90 minute wait and I am told that my arm is broken, that the bone responsible for the lifting and the rotating of my hand will be out of action for the next six weeks and would I like some more pain killers. By this point the answer was an emphatic yes please. My arm, for the first week at least, was painful enough to hurt despite the drugs. It's a little better now but still out of action. I've got it in a sling but there's no cast. I can't do anything with it but it's only a little uncomfortable most of the time. The worst part is trying to get to sleep and keeping it at a right angle all night. Okay, but seriously. I know what I did was stupid but you have to admit it was pretty hard-core to arrive on time for work despite the impassable ice and a bloody broken arm. That is dedication right there. Allow me to present (with apologies to Google Maps) the portion of my route to work in which there were no gaps in the ice, where it was skaters only:
And now here it is with the path I took marked out in red and the portions that were uphill and downhill highlighted. I'm walking right to left towards the train station:
For the purposes of scale, those tiny specks to the left are cars. Those white boxes are warehouses. But these satellite pictures were taken in the heady summer of 2009 and don't convey the sheer amount of cold and falling down. So, again courtesy of the Google, here's a picture to rectify that:
Oh nooooooos Mr Polar Bear! In other news, they sent me back my Xbox in the post. And it was actually my Xbox. All my save games remain intact and the Xbox is the same as before, except without the weird checkerboard pattern and the turning itself off. Maybe they should ship my arm to Germany to be fixed or replaced within four days. I had an amazing Christmas with all my family, which seems to grow in size each year to include new members. I hope you did too and I hope you're all still in one piece. Merry Christmas Posted 06:29 (GMT) 24th December 2010 by David J. Bishop
I Can Tell You You've Got 3 Choices Posted 12:36 (GMT) 15th December 2010 by David J. Bishop
I hope you're all having a great December and gearing up for the big day later this month. I'm starting to feel warm and toasty inside myself, or that might just be because I've been drinking cough syrup right out of the bottle. We have a few things to go through. First, there is a new strip today. I comes exactly a month after the last strip. There will be another strip in exactly another month's time and so on until I can update more frequently. I'll post on my Twitter feed as soon as something's up but you can bet it will be around the middle of the week in the middle of the month every month. Why such a slow pace? Well, I don't think I've ever updated this comic every month of a single year it's been running. That's kinda sad, isn' it? And it's been running now for, what, five years? There have times when I have updated three times a week. Three times a week! I'm lucky if I can sit down to draw three times a week these days. There have been other times - too many by anyone's count - when months have passed without any comics. People never remember the frenzies, they always remember the gaps. So this time I'm trying something bold. I'm going to set an updated schedule I know I can adhere to and slowly plod along with a consistent but painfully slow update schedule. Instead of losing my shit and putting stuff up as soon as it's done I'm going to build up a buffer - that way if the shit ever hits the fan again at least I won't disappear off the face of the earth next time my appendix explodes or I move house or I lose another job. More important than frequency, I think, is consistency. Let's try for at least one comic every month of 2011 and see how things go. I'm trying to be responsible about this stuff for once. Computer Problems Speaking of strips, I have now reposted last month's strip. It is a source of great shame to me that I posted something I wasn't 100% happy with. My policy has always been to post something late or not at all rather than something sub-standard, but I was going to be without my beloved computer for an indefinite period of time and I had an absolute deadline. So, falling back on habits I had not indulged since my university days, I stayed up most of all night Monday that week finishing the inks for the comic chugging red bull and eating fajitas, then coloured it all of Tuesday in a flurry of activity before the ambulance finally came to take my computer to the hospital. I posted the strip, dashed off a post and packed up the computer without even waiting to see if the site had updated successfully. That's how close to the mark I came. Of course after the computer was in another city being repaired and there was nothing I could do I checked the site on someon'es phone and observed all the spelling mistakes and goofs, like forgetting to colour Shivani's belt or drawing the jug weird. At least I had ample time to meditate on my failure. Anyway, when the computer returned it had been fixed. Better than fixed, actually. Improved. It's running quieter than it did when I first got it. It remains my loyal manservant, it still carries me breakfast in bed as it were, but now instead of announcing its arrival up to the stairs to my chamber with a series of loud grating coughs, now it just silently appears by my bed, tray in hand. It's unassming to the pont of invisibility. I turn it on and nothing happens, which is what happened when it was broken. So I am frightened. But then, if there are no other sounds, I can detect the tiniest of hums - this is how I know my computer is turned on. When I say "if there are no sounds" I mean any sound as loud as the steady rhythm of my own breathing, the murmer of wind in the trees outside, the blanket of silence brought on by softly falling snow or the sound of human thought. So, my computer runs very quietly now. It's starting to creep me out a little. Xbox Problems So my computer is back in action and just as things get settled my Xbox gets the red ring of death. Tragic for me, I know, but I think this could actually be good for the strip. One second my girlfriend and I are playing Lego Batman and generally having a blast, the next the image has frozen up and everything has a nightmarish checkerboard pattern on it. And then I see around the start button three red lights, like the burning eyes of some tricloptic demon of punishment. The first thing we do is reboot - same thing happens again on the dashboard. The second thing we do is check Wikipedia. I always thought the red ring of death was when all four red lights came on, so maybe three isn't so bad. You know, four = critical hardware failure, three = not-so-critical hardware failure. Turns out I was wrong, three is the ring. Four red lights just means you're out of icecream or something innocuous. Although it's not really a ring when only three lights show, is it? It's more like the three-quarter ring of death. Plus I didn't actually die, so there's another inaccuracy. At any rate, here's where the story gets weird. I've just finished submitting my repair request, having found myself to still be within warranty for these kinds of issues by two months - not really knowing what else to do and feeling for all the world like someone who has lost a bet with God I open Twitter and tweet about my loss. I didn't know what else to do! I wrote the following: Three flashing red lights. RIP Xbox... I'm particularly proud of the ellipsis, there. I'm just trailing off, it's almost like my Xbox's soul is trailing off into the wind - like in Kung Fu Panda. It's whistful. No more than a second passes, then suddenly someone calling themselves XboxSupport sends me a message: Sad to see this. Try this guide: http://xbx.lv/9k2t5s And let us know if it helps. =) ^EM That link, by the way, is to a page that doesn't work. But what the hell? I didn't add any tags or links or anything to my message, it was just a statement to say my Xbox has popped its clogs - next thing I know Xbox Support themselves are in there like a shot to tell me they're sorry for my loss. Like they care, or like anyone gives a damn about my Twitter posts. It's doubly unnerving because nobody ever replies to my Twitter posts or passes comment on them at all. As far as I know I'm the only one who reads the damn things. It's like pushing a letter into a bottle and throwing the bottle into a bottomless pit as far as I know. Now I get the impression that the Xbox support group have been waiting within that pit for the slightest mention of their technology malfunctioning so they can pounce on it and offer their sympathies in person. They've clearly been stalking me all this time, waiting for my Xbox to break. I also got a message from some guy called Tim - again, someone I do not know - who said: RED LIGHTS!!! >>> Gag! Having been down this road several times, I can tell you you’ve got 3 choices. But then he never told me what the choices were and it seemed pretty obvious that mailing it back to the company to get it fixed free of charge was the best and indeed the only option. So that's not creepy, just funny. I can imagine Tim helping people out in a similar way. He could be sitting next to a guy in a bar and the guy says, "My wife just left me." Tim just yells at the top of his voice: "DIVORCE!!! Man, that's rough. I've been through two divorces and I tell you what, it ain't fun. Now the way I see it you've got 3 choices." Then he walks off. No More Computer for a While Posted 15:36 (GMT) 16th November 2010 by David J. Bishop
In the meantime, please enjoy my thoughts on the Twilight phenomenon: Even though it’s cliché right now to jump on the bandwagon and make fun of the breathtakingly epic Twilight Saga, its dishwater-dull protagonists and its hordes of squealing fans it still needs to be said: Twilight is ridiculous nonsense and if you like it you like ridiculous nonsense. That’s fine by me, I have a place in my heart for all kinds of stuff most people find bizarre and repulsive (I own Lady in the Water on DVD) but don’t try to pretend that it’s well-written or resonant or empirically worthwhile. It’s bad. You might love its badness, you might cherish it as a guilty pleasure – that’s fine. But we all need to recognise how awful it is. I think it’s the baseball-playing vampires that tip it over the edge. Nothing can prepare you for the mind-shattering horror of vampires playing baseball. Up until that point the film is a fairly plodding and mediocre supernatural drama. Then everyone dresses up in cute little baseball uniforms and plays ball, swinging the bats with super speed, racing through the woods to catch the ball and running around the little white bases. And it’s at once cute and funny and pathetic, like an incontinent puppy. Having spiralled so rapidly into self-parody, it could only be marginally sillier if they sang the song from the baseball scene in High School Musical 2 as they ran. Marginally. “Since when did vampires like baseball?” Bella asks. A better question would be “Is this the best thing you can think to do with your super powers? Pitch very fast? Get a home run? Really, Edward?” Edward doesn’t have a satisfactory answer, either. I suppose you could argue that they’re essentially human creatures and therefore they can enjoy any pastime normal folk could participate in. They could watch Gilmore Girls in their pyjamas, they could play Hungry Hungry Hippos or they could just play hour after hour of Minesweeper with the lights off. Yet each of these things activities seems equally unsuitable. It could be because they’re supposed to be many lifetimes old and from all over the world and are therefore no more likely to enjoy playing baseball than George Washington or Queen Elizabeth II. Another thing: heart-throbbingly gorgeous though he may be, Edward Cullen is not a vampire by any measure of anything being anything, which is to say that he is a vampire in the same way that I am an Ewok. Let’s look at the facts: 1. He doesn’t
drink human blood If he did any of these things he would be a vampire. But he doesn’t and therefore isn’t. He’s just fast and strong and his big pretty eyes change colour and he’s telepathic and his skin goes all glittery and he’s like so totally dreamy. Well that’s fine, Edward. That qualifies you to be an X-man. It doesn’t mean you’re a vampire. If you use that word to describe yourself I’m afraid you’ll water down its definition. Right now, that word means something specific, as specific as the difference between vampire bats and fruit bats. If Edward Cullen is a vampire then is Wolverine a vampire as well? Is Cyclops? How about Jean Grey? At least she actually died. I Take It Back Posted 07:29 (GMT) 11th November 2010 by David J. Bishop
It's a friendly little companion. Faithful like a puppy but reliable like a butler. It's a puppy butler. It therefore came as no surprise that when it started to malfunction it did so in the politest, most stoic manner possible. I would turn it on and the fan started to make a horrible buzzing sound, like the last thing a Spitfire says before it explodes. "BLAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGLLLLLLLLLLE!" my computer would say. To which I would reply, "Computer? Are you okay?" "It's nothing, uh, just a cough. Just ignore me. See? All better. Ahem." About a week ago it started promptly turning itself off after start-up, which the internet tells me is down to some horrbile hardware failure. No error messages, no blue screens o' doom - it just politely and wordlessly turns itself off. I try to turn it back on again but after a few seconds its shuts off again without warning. "Terribly sorry, sir," computer says, "not right now." After the fifth attempt it finally powers up and resumes its speedy and helpful servitude as if nothing had ever been the matter, only last night it did so without displaying anything on the screen - a trick my laptop learnt right before its brain melted. Now this last detail, this is making me start to think something could be wrong with it. Sadly, I haven't managed to back up anything I've done in the past year since puppy butler and I first became acquainted. I managed to transfer all of the data from my laptop that I rescued right before it curled up its toes onto the new tower but since then my computer and the portable hard drive have started a feud, refusing to speak to each other. That leaves me with one and only one copy of 2010's comic output + one very expensive paperweight. I'm calling the wizards (and I'm almost certain they are actual wizards) who put this little puppy together today to see what the matter is and how soon it can be fixed, then I suppose I'll have to take it back to the shop. I felt less nervous in hospital waiting to hear if I had cancer (I totally didn't but you know how they like to scare you in hospital). I said something about updating soon, right? Right. Sure, I see no reason why not. UPDATE: Seems to be a problem with the power supply. Taking it into the shop on Wednesday, should get it back in a couple of weeks. November updates now seem unlikely but we'll see. Sneak Preview Posted 06:49 (GMT) 10th November 2010 by David J. Bishop
Given that I am a cartoonist, there really should be more comic strips around here. I can fix that. Given that I am bad at being a cartoonist, it may take a while. Keep an eye on the Twitter feed: I'm going to try and update that thing more often and it's the first place I go to tell people a new strip is up.
The current update frequency appears to be one strip every 3 months. Let's see if I can't get it down to 2 months. Stay tuned! It's time I went to work. 21 Awesome Years Posted 22:33 (GMT) 27th July 2010 by David J. Bishop
Secondly, birthdays. Birthdays aren't really about yourself, they're more about the other people in your life. They come together, they work hard to throw you a party, make you a cake, take you to dinner and give you presents. It's a chance for them to look back on the years they've spent with you and reflect on how much worse they would have been if you'd never been born. Or maybe they're just going to get you drunk and draw a dick on your face. The point is - the point is - you the birthday person are a secondary character in this pageant. You don't really need to do anything except receive praise and gifts with gracious thanks (no matter what you're given), pretend to be surprised when people jump out from behind your furniture and otherwise stay out of the way. A birthday is something that goes on around you, it's not something you're necessarily the focus of. Par example: Marilyn Monroe singing 'Happy Birthday' to the American president. Everyone knows she did that. Everyone knows how it went. I'm damned if I know which president it was. I mention this, of course, because today is once again my brother's birthday and we have a yearly tradition of depicting him as saving lives and breaking hearts every Goddamn day. Now some of you may doubt that my brother rides around on a bike fighting aliens and delivering babies - for those of you who think that I have nothing but disdain, you blasphemers - but the reality of the situation is ultimately irrelevant. Whether real or not, portraying my brother as impossibly awesome on my website (i.e. the one with my name all over it), showboating more and more each time, sometimes taking as long as three months to finish a single comic page and basically using what is ostensibly a celebration of my brother as an excuse to showcase my own skills... well, it presents a contradiction. The first person to point this out to me was, of course, Matthew himself. Have you seen the episode of Futurama where Bender makes Nibbler a birthday cake? It's kind of like that, in a way. Are these epic comics about my brother more about my awesomeness than his? Well, let's look at the facts. My brother is taller than me, younger than me, prettier than me, smarter than me and more charismatic. I know I'm not the world's best cartoonist but whatever talent I do possess is the only talent I have at anything. I have never mastered a foreign language, I've never been able to act, I can't play any musical instruments. I can't even juggle. My brother has done all of these things and more. It is not just that he is better at acting than I am at drawing, it's that he is excellent in every area that I am inadequate. Breaking hearts? Whilst I gain weight and lose hair, he still has thick wavy hair and a muscly physique. By the time I was his age I had more grey hairs than I could count. Him? Not a one. How about saving lives, then? Oh, did I not mention he's training to be a doctor? He is actually going to be saving lives. Every. Goddamn. Day. Honestly, if the UFO thing turned out to be true would you even be surprised at this point? Am I jealous? Of course. Am I bitter? Not in the slightest. I have my talent at cartoons to keep the top of my head warm. Who needs hair? And Matthew deserves every moment of success and victory he gets. He's been my best friend for 21 years and he is one of those genuinely great guys that people want to get to know. Me, I get one day of the year to make a fuss and make fun of how much cooler he is. It goes some way to redressing the balance. This year finds the character of Matthew in some kind of cross between Victorian England and modern-day Vienna, and our hero has been on the road doing his thing for some time now. It's got to the point where he is doing so many awesome things he can barely keep track of them all. And you know what? 100% accurate. Don't you dare contradict me, Matthew. Today isn't about you. The Updates Keep Coming Posted 22:58 (GMT) 2nd July 2010 by David J. Bishop Whoop! Another comic is up. I hope everyone likes this new drawing technique I'm rolling out. This week I would like to show you something amazing. This is what my friends gave me for a birthday present. I finally got around to taking a picture:
The original strip is here. I am so lucky. Resident Evil 5: I Hope You Like Negotiating Inventory Screens Posted 14:20 (GMT) 26th June 2010 by David J. Bishop
The Strip Part two of the coffee monkey saga, then. As is often the case, the first of these two comics was written ages ago - specifically in the summer of 2009 whilst in a coffee shop where they really did get my order wrong - and then the second part came to me whilst I was drawing the first. It's complete coincidence that the misfortune that befalls the hapless barista is almost exactly the same as that which befell me last month. I wasn't pouring coffee but someone did make a complaint about me which was both completely untrue and entirely made out of spite - sadly it led to me losing the job. People always say you should write from personal experience. I always thought it was nonsense but maybe there's something to it in one way at least: if your writing doesn't reflect your experiences then your experiences may come to reflect your writing. Next time: coffee monkey wins the lottery. Oh, I almost forgot. This comic was drawn entirely freehand. When I first started back in 2005 I used templates to keep the characters consistent. At some point since then I have learnt to draw like a big boy. I think it looks better - I hope you do too. Resident Evil 5 Well this will teach me to... buy games. I've never played any of the previous Evils, resident as they may be, but I picked this one up because I heard it had great co-op. And co-op is the best way to enjoy the Xbox experience, but it's also very rare. Most of the time I'm stuck playing Gears of War over and over again, and recently Left 4 Dead. So I really had to pick this up just so I would be able to play it with my ladyfriend. I wasn't familiar with Resident Evil but I knew what to expect - zombies, guns. This would be similar enough to Left 4 Dead for me to get my head around. Yeah, it's not. For a start it's not a shooter. Yes you have a gun, you have a number of guns in fact, but when you try to aim the camera doesn't switch to first person view or peer over your shoulder. No, a tiny red laser sight appears out of your third person character and you have to guide him as to where to shoot. And this is made incredibly difficult by the split screen in co-op. The screen isn't split as such, you just get two tiny screens adjacent to one another on your TV like it's Ocean's Eleven and your screen takes up about a quarter of the screen's total area, half of which is just devoted to black space. And let's not forget that Chris Redfield's meaty body takes up a generous portion of the view. And the enemies are very far away. So aiming is about as easy as directing your own mother to shoot the zombies. You're squinting past a guy at something far away that exists in a tiny box. I need to press my nose to the screen just to stand a fighting chance. And there are no crowds of undead racing towards you, just the odd zombie who will move towards you incredibly slowly but admittedly with a kind of deliberate menace, swinging a club or a butcher knife or something. It's no easier than Left 4 Dead though, because these guys take about five shots just to go down and then another six or seven just to stay down - and that's just the basic easy ones - so it's like killing ten Left 4 Dead zombies, just a lot less satisfying and a lot more irritating. And the pistol you use doesn't have unlimited ammo so you will run out of ammo. As annoying as that sounds, the only thing worse than running out of ammo is having ammo because there's this inventory screen that contains every physical object you will ever touch in this game from your bullets to your health sprays to the weapons themselves. I'm surprised my money doesn't take up a slot. It's like torture. The vast majority or playtime is spent fiddling with this damn thing, swapping things around, trying to decide if you need an incendiary grenade more than you need to heal. The inventory is a complete ball ache but if you have enough dedication and patience you can kind of trick it into working how you'd expect it to. Example: you have to select ammunition, open a drop-down menu, scroll down to 'Combine' and then select your gun in order to reload. And you have to do this every time you find a new object to pick up because it only has nine slots and the four guns you'll need and their ammo take up 8 of those slots. So if you want to lob a grenade or heal ever you'd better hope you run out of spare bullets fast. So besides inventory management, most of the game consists of moving from one end of the map to the next, opening doors to identical empty rooms, smashing boxes and barrels open to collect their goodies, collecting keys, inventory management, upgrading your weapons with the Gil - sorry - gold that you find, inventory management and I suppose surviving the occasional random encounter with the undead. Also there's some inventory management. So it's an RPG! It's just an RPG viewed through the lens of an incredibly cumbersome shooting game in which you can't hit the broad side of a barn. The cut scenes are the worst. I thought we were past this, guys. Cut scenes are for moving the story forward by having your character do something they can't do in the game. They are not there to just show the characters doing the same stuff I just did. I could do that. Just let me do it, game. Sometimes the game recognises this and let's you do stuff. There was a cut scene in which a truck hurtled towards me and my companion down a narrow bridge. No way to escape or retreat. Then the game dropped me in it without warning. Suddenly the truck really was coming towards us - in real time no less - and we had about 3 seconds to do something about it. But we didn't know what to do and the game hadn't told us. So we died and did it again. And died again. Then there was the scene with the bikes. Zombies on bikes were riding all over the place in this cut scene and I was just waiting for the game to plonk me down into the action again without any warning. But it never happened. Chris and his girlfriend Sheva just went to town on these guys, shooting them down whilst me and my girlfriend sat and watched them do it. Honestly, it looked like fun. I don't blame those two for not sharing. It's like pie - the only thing better than eating a pie is watching someone else eat one right in front of you and not letting you have any. Right? By the way, zombies can't ride around on bikes. This is bullshit. They're zombies for Heaven's sake. They're supposed to have reduced cognitive abilities. I don't care if they run or shuffle, if they're infected or undead, the definitive characteristic of a zombie is it's mindless. I could just about accept zombies wielding knives and clubs as they shamble around but I categorically do not accept zombies riding bikes, driving cars, throwing complicated explosive devices or operating gatling guns. That's like a vampire that doesn't drink human blood and can walk in the sun. You've defeated the whole point. Left 4 Dead Posted 16:24 (GMT) 11th June 2010 by David J. Bishop
The Strip I always promised that I would never let my limitations as an artist hold me back from writing whatever comic I wanted to because if I limit myself to just the jokes that are easy to draw I'll never get better and you’d miss out on the jokes. So sometimes the strip falls behind on its update schedule while the art 'catches up' with the writing. Today's strip is a perfect example of that. I couldn't draw it – any of it. I had to painstakingly teach myself how every step of the way. I think I've grown as an artist as a result, so next time I need to draw a strip like this it won’t take so long. David pushes his art, David grows as an artist, everybody wins. The only downside is that I look like a jackass for not updating the comic in the meantime. Well I did move house and then… other stuff. I'll put up some of the artwork on my Deviantart account in a little while. Left 4 Dead The visual storytelling in this game is perfect. There is no script and yet Left 4 Dead tells a beautiful and rich story of a post-apocalyptic America simply using the environment. And it’s really scary as a result. You walk into an abandoned apartment. The kitchen floor is strewn with food, the fridge door is open, a frying pan sits empty on the hob, there is a small heap of clothing on the floor of the living room, newspapers and magazines are on the table, the television is still turned on but showing only static fuzz. The hallway outside is littered with dead bodies, about half a dozen. Downstairs a woman is lying face-down on her bed; she has been dead for days. Each one of these details is like a dot in an impressionist painting, giving subtle clues about what the people in these apartments were doing when the world ended - and whether they had time to cook some food and pack their belongings before they died. We’re, what, two minutes into the game? The infected themselves tell a story of their own. They don’t exist to run with single-minded stupidity at the camera as soon as you appear, like the Locusts in Gears of War. Some will run at you, others will just stand there ignoring you. Some sit in the middle of the floor, their heads bowed, almost thoughtful. Some stand slumped against the wall in attitudes of despair. Some just fight each other. Some puke their zombie guts out. Not only is it far more creepy and scary than if they just ran at you, it gives you some insight into what it’s like being infected (it doesn't look like fun) and creates the impression of a deeper world that exists independent of your place in it. Then there’s the graffiti on the walls. Easily ignored, often funny or nightmarish or heartbreaking – sometimes all at once. For example: “NO ZOMBIE IS SAFE FROM CHICAGO TED” and CLAUDE
HUGGINS Brrrrr! Then there is the Witch, who just sits and weeps. It’s a sound as unearthly and monstrous as it is human and relatable. And you will hear that sound for a long time before you actually encounter the source – great racking sobs. She also tells a story of sorts, since you really have to question how much of her higher brain functions have been lost since she was infected if she’s still able to cry. You feel sorry for at the same time as being terrified by her. You could cut the pathos with a knife, right up until the moment she stops boo-hooing and tears you in half. I think the Witch and Bioshock’s Little Sister are two of the greatest video game characters of all time. Speaking of great characters, I couldn’t mention Left 4 Dead without giving special mention to Zoey, who is that rare animal in video games: a female character who is neither a love interest for any of the male characters nor a cleavage-wielding Lara Croft action girl. Zoey is one the survivors, she just happens to have lady parts. She is heroic but never aggressively independent, she is often scared but never shrill, she is likeable whilst never really asking that you like her and attractive but never sexualised. This is the way female characters in video games should be. I would just like to say how disappointed I am that a Google Image search for reference pictures yielded so few screenshots of her and so much badly-made pornographic fan art, especially the ones that... make use of the Smoker’s tongue. Yeah, it’s gross. Shame on you guys. Not only have you missed the point entirely but also I threw up a little bit inside my mouth. I can never unsee that. I apologise on behalf of all men everywhere for my gender’s tendency to ruin everything cool by getting a boner. For double points: a picture of Zoey making out with the Witch. That sound you hear is something wonderful inside me dying. Would You Kindly Click These Links? Posted 19:02 (GMT) 14th April 2010 by David J. Bishop
The Strip One of the advantages to making a blog post a week after an update is you can comment on the reaction to the comic in the same breath as drawing attention to it. A lot of people have been getting back to me asking me to explain the punchline. Listen, if you don't get it just wait for the next one. You'll get that one. I can't explain anything - as soon as I do it stops being funny. And if I write a comic that needs an explanation it just means I failed as a writer. A lot of people will scratch their heads over some non-existent joke they imagine is hidden in the last panel and which they simply can't perceive - to these people I say you're overthinking my work. Everything I want you to know is there on the page. If anything seems like nonsense to you it's probably supposed to be nonsense. I still want to thank everyone who fed back to me on this one, though - it inspired me to write a storyline that I'm really happy with. You'll know when it happens. Patricia Snook - Ace Photographer Patricia is someone whose website you're going to want to check out for the following reasons: 1) It's a wealth of classy photos and detailed reference pictures, most of which are pretty girly. As such it's an invaluable resource for anyone creating art about/for women or for anyone who happens to be a woman. Or a man whose really into designer women's clothing. At first I didn't use any reference pictures because I thought of it as cheating but now I spend hours at a time slavishly researching designer clothes, pictures of different hairstyles, handbags - anything I know nothing about. Therefore this picture of pastel cream designer high-heeled shoes? My heart skipped a beat, I don't care how gay that makes me sound. 2) She's very good at what she does and deserves recognition for her art. I remember when I first started my site and had no readership. I was just sending comics out into the ether to be read by precisely no-one. Now I have the opposite problem - thousands of people coming to the site and I'm updating fortnightly. Let's show our support for artists toiling in obscurity by checking out the awesome stuff they make. 3) I really want to show off how numerous and loyal my readers are, as will be demonstrated by the huge spike in traffic on Patricia's Google Analytics account. I know you'll all support me in this goal, click this link and browse several pages deep into the site because when I ask my fans to do me a favour they always surprise me with their generous response. I know this time will be no exception. 4) Somewhere on Patricia's website is a photograph of me as I appear in real life, the only publicly visible image of my face available on the internet. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Maybe after you see it you'll understand why I use my cartoon picture so much. DeviantART I have a DeviantART account now. I mean, I've had one this whole time but now I'm actually using it. I'm going to throw up some behind-the-scenes stuff, step-by-step tutorial things that show how I make the strip and I suppose any other stuff I draw that has no place on the site proper. Check it out, I'm updating it every other day right now. I also have a Twitter account. And I've had this one for ages too - I was doing it before it was cool. When the site updates hear about it first! Also hear whatever pops into my head at any given time. Song lyrics! Observations about life! Excruciatingly detailed reports of what I'm doing at that moment! It's enthralling. Hey, I just wrote a Twitter post about this very blog entry! There's a lot to digest here. Go away and look at those other websites. I'll see you bright and early next Wednesday with another new strip. Books, Beds and Beamish Boys Who Are Actually Nudist Blondes Posted 20:23 (GMT) 2nd April 2010 by David J. Bishop
Parish Notices So there's a new strip up in case you haven't noticed. It has, after all, been a week. I remember (way back when I was a good cartoonist) I used to update on Wednesdays. So the next strip should be up on Wednesday and then every fortnight after that while I try to build up a buffer. It's hard to believe I used to update twice a week. Maybe I can update with greater frequency after I finish moving house. I didn't mention this when the Ke$ha (urgh) comic went up because I was too busy explaining my long absence, wringing my hands, flagellating myself (that's the one with the whips, right?) et cetera ad nauseum but the strip might look a little different now. It's not something I want to make a big deal out of but, yeah, one of the things I've been doing while I was away is becoming a better artist. I bought this book by this guy, Tom Bancroft. He's got a history in animation, did a lot of work for Disney. It all started when I was listening to the hilarious Webcomics Weekly podcast and they answered a question submitted by this guy, Rob Lundy. Rob put this tutorial on his site (which is now gone) about drawing a cartoon head and he made a reference to giving the character appeal. Appeal is this quality cartoon characters need to possess, apparently. I had no idea what Rob was talking about. But he has a history in animation, too. It must be something animators learn, the secret knowledge passed down by their cartoon masters who sit cross-legged beneath cherry trees stroking their beards. It turns out that creating appealing characters is the goal of this thing called "character design", something I had never until that moment given any thought to. I just sort of drew my characters. I never thought about what I was doing. So I picked up a copy of Creating Characters With Personality to see what I was missing. And it was like having the top of my head unscrewed - the light rushing in, my eyes unfocusing, a flicker of a grin playing over my lips. It's hard to explain in a way that doesn't make me sound like a pretentious douche. There are my cartoons as they appear in my head when I'm imagining how the comic's going to look and then there's how they look on the page. There's a pretty big gap between those two. The image starts off in my brain looking perfect, travels down my arm into the pen and then onto the page, where it arrives with significant signal loss. I always thought that there was some kind of crap in my arm that was causing interference, like the clogged remains of some greasy meal I ate at a Burger King in 1998. Turns out I just needed this book. I need to sit down and think about things like shapes, references, lines, curves, anatomy, style, design. The gap is narrowing now - thanks to Tom Bancroft. Let's see what happens. Beds Did I mention I'm moving house? I went bed shopping today. Those sales people are sharks. They're cunning creatures who will do and say anything - anything - to get you to spend money that very instant on the nearest thing to you. I'm in a perfectly nice bed shop in town, I think it was called Kingmakers or Snoozemasters or something but I'm mindful that there's another one about five metres away on the other side of the car park. The woman opposite me in the purple uniform is singing the praises of springy beech wood slats and foam mattresses. With a slightly hungry look in her eyes she tells me her daughter has a bed just like it so, you know, she's treating me to the same deal she would give a loved one, her own young no less. I tell her beech wood is great, it's by far my favourite kind of springy wood, but I'm just going to head over the road to Slumbertime Dreamfactory or whatever the hell it's called and make a quick comparison. She winces, like I've physically wounded her, and makes a deep "Ooof!" sound. The kind people make when they get kicked in the stomach. "Oh, you don't want to go there," she says. "The cheapest bed they have is £600," (that would be about nine hundred of your Earth dollars) "and they charge you extra for the slats." Yeah and this one time? She went round the back of their store? She totally saw the manager - she shits me not - giving Satan a blowjob. "Satan," I say, "as in the Devil?" It sounds stupid coming out of my mouth even as I say it but I have to be sure I've got this right. "Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, Prince of Hell." She blinks. "I'm just going to have a look and come back in five minutes," I say. "Okay, as you wish. But you'll be sorry," she says. She stretches out that last word, starts widening her eyes and walking backwards out of the light as she says it. So over the car park in the other bed shop I ask the salesman about how much their beds cost. And do you know what? They're exactly the same price. No bloody difference at all. "So..." remembering the woman's warning I look for the catch, "...do I get slats for that?" "Of course! You get slats, you get the mattress, you get a 10 year warranty on the bed. You want pillows?" "Not really." "I'll throw in some pillows, free of charge." He even goes out of his way to show me a bunch of beds that are even nicer for the same money. These beds are the same price, just a lot comfier. His name tag says his name is Mark, he's the store manager. As I'm lying on the comfiest double bed I've ever seen in my life I glance at his mouth for traces of demonic seed. Nothing. So I guess the lady in the other store was lying the whole time. "Well of course she was lying," my brother says, "they're paid on commission." "I don't mind them bombarding me with numbers and packages and quoting how many thousand megacoils there are per mattress, but slandering their competitors? That's low." Mark laughs "I'm just here to help you I don't want to lie you. If I thought you should buy that bed over there I would just tell you. Don't though, it's not very good." There is something he says that strikes me as odd, though. "My daughter has this exact bed, you know." I smile. I suppose there are some lies I can tolerate. Alice in Wonderland Not a very good film. The new one, the Tim Burton affair. Alice returns to Wonderland after her childhood adventures there to find that Wonderland is very much a changed place. For a start Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are there because this is a Tim Burton film and he doesn't cast anyone else in anything he does. Christopher Lee, too. I want to know when it was that Christopher Lee became Tim Burton's pet actor. Does he just keep him in a little cage in his house and lets him out to make a cameo in every single Tim Burton film ever made. But everyone just accepts it because it's a Burton movie, like they accept the stripes on everything. "I'm going to make a Sweeney Todd film!" Mr Burton cries. "Okay," says the wary public, memories of The Corpse Bride still fresh in their minds, "what are you going to do to put your own creative mark on this musical?" "I'm going to make it stripy." In fact "I'm going to make it stripy" is probably the pitch he uses for every project he touches. It's his frigging modus operandi. So I did not have high hopes over what Tim Burton could bring to an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, besides abundant stripes. Well for a start it's not an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland at all - which is just as well because that would be dull and un-filmable - but rather a much more action-packed effects-fuelled joyride through Wonderland - which they rename Smunderland or something to make it sound more like a fantasy setting - which is set a full decade after the original stories. Why then is it called Alice in Wonderland? I mean, I'm willing to accept that she is Alice and that in the film she is largely in Wonderland (or Sunderland or whatever they call it) but that title was taken. How about Return to Wonderland or Alice in Wonderland 2: This Time it's Stripy. This is just confusing, like Final Destination 4 A.K.A. The Final Destination. Secondly, why does Alice have to be so sexualised in this film? She's always growing out of her dress or shrinking herself out of it or ending up naked for no reason. It's hard to escape the idea that Tim Burton finds all this powerfully erotic. You know what it actually feels like? Fan service. And what's the plot? Something about a magic suit of armour which Alice has to put on and a Jabberwock that must be slain with a magic sword she must procure to fulfil an ancient prophecy. And I can only assume that after the evil has been defeated Alice will take her place on the throne of Wonderland like Conan the fucking Barbarian. Probably wearing about as much clothing too given her track record. So point A is the start of the film which has Alice falling down a rabbit hole and point B is Alice totally cutting the Jabberwocky's shit right the fuck off, and the film gets from point A to point B by visiting as many Lewis Carroll characters as possible along the way. We've got the Dodo, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat (voiced perfectly by Stephen Fry actually), that caterpillar guy, the March Hare, the Queen of Hearts, the Dormouse - the whole gang are there. It's like they're running down a checklist of all their favourite characters in an effort to catch them all like Pokémon so they can be shoe-horned into a battle they don't really have any reason to fight... again, like Pokémon. But this is a battle against the forces of evil! Except I'm pretty sure the Cheshire Cat is evil. At least, I always thought he was in the damned animated film. Nightmarishly evil, like he would just start cutting you without any provocation and never stop. He seems to crop up a lot on people's lists of favourite Disney villains, at least. And, you know, he's purple. That's never a good sign. But here the Cheshire Cat is a good guy, chiefly because Tim Burton really loves the character. So all his favourite characters band together and become, like, super best friends and they totally defeat evil forever and it's awesome. But wait, there's more! You ever read the poem 'Jabberwocky'? They actually have a vorpal sword. And a Jubjub bird which flies around doing the bidding of the bad guys. And a Bandersnatch, which looks kind of like a really fat leopard except it too is evil. I guess he works for the Jabberwock or something? I don't know. But I think Tim Burton loves this character too because he totally become a good guy as well - just so Alice can have an epic mount for the final battle. And is it frumious? I tell you, it's the most frumious thing I ever saw. Yeah, no. It's imbecilic. This is the efforts of someone who really liked that there were made up creatures in this one poem called 'Jabberwocky' written by this guy who was apparently the J.R.R. Tolkien of mad Victorian mathematicians and decided to write an entire film around them. We get a completely arbitrary scene where Johnny Depp recites the damn poem (or rather bits of it) out of context and out of the right order (and if you've read my rant about it you too will have flashbacks to The Libertine). Then he says to Alice "It's about you." Is it? Is it, Hatter? So why is the line "Beware the Jabberwock my son"? And why does the whole poem refer to a "he", clearly the father's son, seeking out the manxome foe? Why does the father cry "Come to my arms my beamish boy"? It's about Alice, is it? She's the beamish boy? Is anyone else not buying this? This shit ain't canon. This is favouritism. This is one guy gushing self-indulgently about how awesome he thinks Alice in Wonderland is, using the characters like playthings and making them act out scenarios that this guy would love to see them in regardless of whether their characters would do it or whether this makes any sense in the context of the original work. There is absolutely nothing in that poem to suggest the vorpal sword is an epic sword of magic destiny which only the chosen one can wield. Also, the "frabjous day" evidently just means "fabulous and joyous" instead of a prophecised day of reckoning upon which jabberwockies must be killed. It doesn't make any sense. If you read the poem it's obvious that the day has become frabjous precisely because the boy has slain the jabberwock, not the other way around. This whole scenario reads like fan fiction. That's what this is. This is Tim Burton's Wonderland fanfic. It explains the fan service, it explains the weird Alice/Hatter shipping and it explains the arbitrary grouping together of characters to fit a purpose completely divorced from anything the original author intended. And I don't like it. That said, whilst I don't particularly like the story I have to admit from a purely design point of view the film is a triumph. The special effects, the settings and the characters are all gorgeous and there are some really strong performances here. I liked how Anne Hathaway's White Queen character glided through a kitschy world of vague insincerity. I liked how the Red Queen spoke and behaved in a bratty petulant lisp, even if it was just a shameless rip-off of Queen Elizabeth I from Blackadder II. In fact all the characters had one interesting quirk about them, from the Mad Hatter's bizarre and thoroughly off-putting habit of slipping into a Scottish accent to the March Hare's annoying tendency to throw things at the other characters. It's interesting how annoying it is, though! But that's as far as it ever goes, a string of one-dimension characters who all have a single tic each in lieu of any real motivation or backstory, a tic which ultimately feels so tacked-on that it may well have been drawn at random from a hat. Worse still the girl playing Alice couldn't act to save her life, poor thing. Finally I would like to announce a permanent ban on the use of prophecy in any story ever again until the end of time. It's lazy, it's arbitrary and it's frigging insulting. This film highlights exactly why. Alice arrives in Wonderland and is told straight away - like she's being stopped at customs to be given this information - that... a) there is a crazy monster and b) she and she alone can kill the wretched thing. Alice says something along the lines of "Why me?" to which the only answer is "Because the prophecy says so." This is the same answer given in every story where the writer wants a character to do something but there is no earthly reason why that character would do such a thing - in this case lop a monster's head off with a satisfying snicker-snack sound. So the author breaks the fourth wall and tells the character: "Listen, it's like this. I have you killing a monster on page 78 of the script so we both know you do it." "But," the character replies, "what's my motivation for doing that?" "Because it's in the script." "Yes, but I don't want to do that. I'm never going to do that." "You are, it's in the script and everything." There, that's your prophecy. Someone looked into the future and saw them do it so they have to do it. It is dictated by the plot! You are the chosen one (i.e. the protagonist)! The ancients said that you must place the sacred MacGuffin on the set of the final battle scene to end the film! Only then will the magical camera crew be banished from the set of destiny and the dread god Bur-ton will sleep once more. It's pointless. Cut it out. All of you, forever! It has been foretold you will start writing real plots for your stories. That's a good enough reason, right? Dollars Don't Belong in Names Posted 22:12 (GMT) 15th March 2010 by David J. Bishop
It's all slurred speech and half-formed thoughts that only appear to hang together into coherent English if you're in the habit of not listening to individual words that make up a sentence. Hence "Tick tock, on the clock" - added I'm sure to clarify that we're not talking about some other item that might tick, such as a clockwork automaton or an old-fashioned bomb. Furthermore "boys", we are given to believe, are "blowing up our phones", which stops me dead in my tracks and creates vivid mental images of bundles of cartoon dynamite, furtive sniggering, plungers sinking into detonators and Ke£$%ha returning to her bedside table to find it littered with bits of smoking Nokia. The less said about Mick Jagger the better. So she wakes up feeling like P Diddy, does she? And we can all have hours of fun trying to guess what P Diddy feels like, something the internet has been doing to death no doubt whilst I have been away from my drawing table saving babies' lives and solving crimes. I care little for such trifles. My main concern is how one is supposed to go about brushing one's teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. I think when the first thing you do before leaving the house is pour a large quantity of spirits into your mouth, it's unlikely that you will get far. Ke-dollar-ha's reasoning behind her pouring the booze into her rap-hole is that when she's leaving for the night she ain't comin' back. Let's not mince words here: K3sha doesn't intend to return home that night. She's getting drunk now, specifically numbing the inside of her mouth in fact, to that end. She will arrive at a venue with no money, no means of getting a taxi home when she gets a little worse for wear - she's not going to spontaneously go home with someone if that takes her drunken fancy, it's literally her only option as soon as the evening begins. She's made a premeditated decision that she's going to wake up somewhere other than her own bed the next morning and she deliberately got herself "a little bit tiiiiiiiipssssshy" so as to heighten the experience (i.e. not remember any of it). The music video only serves to strengthen this narrative by showing Ke$$$ha waking up in a bath in someone else's house, using their toothbrush, brushing past photos of people she clearly doesn't recognise and generally looking non-plussed. She has no idea where she is or how she got there. Well, that's something every girl wants to experience upon waking up, right? That's something we should encourage. Let's write a little song about it. She stumbles downstairs to find a suburban household. The children react as if Santa Claus just walked into the room and, sure enough, she later gives them a bike for no reason, like a liqoured up white trash Babushka. Suburban housewife lady just drops her stack of pancakes in surprise clearly wondering more than Ke$ha what the hell she's doing in her house. Ke$ha just shrugs and honestly I don't know if she's saying "I have no idea where I am" or "Sorry lady, I probably fucked your husband." At the risk of sounding like a stuffy old housewife letting her pancakes crash to the floor, I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that something is wrong with this image. Ke$-HA cannot sing worth a damn and her whole shitck seems to be built around unironically appropriating elements of urban hip-hop culture (references to "po-pos" and "swagga" etc.) and repackaging them to sell to overenthusiastic teenage white girls living in the suburbs and shooting a music video in which she shows enough skin so that the stupid white men who apparently rule the world will give her a free pass. This is nothing new - so far so Pussy Cat Dolls. Where Ke$ha differs so drastically is that whilst her music industry peers seem determined to present themselves as cool, sassy and in charge - demanding that you loosen their buttonz or iniviting you to put a ring on it - Ke$ha herself just comes across as a loser. She wakes up hungover in a bath, immediately gets drunk, stumbles to a party where there is plenty of beer, jumps up and down, falls into people, gets very sweaty, is mindful that people are trying to touch her junk and then falls asleep in another bath like a homeless person curling up on park bench. Who thought this was a good idea? Who thought this was remotely cool? It's not just irresponsible in the usual sense, it's more sort of scary and dangerous and nihilistically bleak. I don't know what P Diddy feels like when he wakes up. If Miss Kesha is telling the truth and her lifestyle is anything like the grim picture she paints then I can only assume that P Diddy wakes up not knowing why he is sore in places. This Was a Triumph Posted 19:54 (GMT) 12th March 2010 by David J. Bishop
How've you been? Well, it's been a crazy 5 months and 20 days on this end. I'm supposed to write funny things here but the story of my life for those past 171 days has been a little sad. That's not the sort of thing you write on a comedy site. But I owe you some kind of God-damn explanation for my behaviour. But that explanation involves a complete run-down of who I am, what I value and how I choose to run my life. It's a story of me hitting rock bottom and pulling myself out by my bootstraps. Whilst I'm not very proud of the situation I found myself, I'm incredibly proud with what I did from that point, the choices I made and the things I achieved even if one of those choices was to stop updating the site and achieve 0 updates. So here goes. Where The Hell I've Been All This Time This story actually begins further back than even last September when the machinery of my life ground to a halt and one last comic dropped off the conveyor belt. I suppose the story begins when I put the first strip up, blew through my 30 strip buffer running a thrice weekly update schedule and settled down into a long, uncomfortable hiatus. I was young and I was deeply embarrassed by how unfunny and badly drawn those first comics were. I wanted them getting out of the way as soon as possible, so ashamed was to have them on the homepage. I never actually considered whether it was a good idea to launch a comic strip at the time. I didn't imagine it would mean late nights or hard work or guilt or responsibility. I was a teenager then and responsibility was something I thought meant being sensible and not drinking too much. That's only part of it. Stuff like that is only responsibility for your own life as it relates to you. But in October 2008 I fell in love with someone in a way that I've never done before, someone incredible. I had always imagined that as crossing the finishing line but it's actually only the start of your problems - but what wonderful problems they are! - since now you have a huge burden of responsibility to get your shit together, not for your own sake anymore and not even because another person is in any way financially dependent on you but because it upsets that person to see you not having your shit together. I realised that I was no longer just responsible for my own happiness, that it was within my power to make my girlfriend unhappy just as much as it was within my power to make her happy, not directly but indirectly through how I ran my life. Here's where the story really begins. May 2009. And here's how I ran my life: I was late, I was disorganised, I was feckless and lazy. I didn't keep a budget so by the time I finished my university course I was deeply in debt, in possession of a big pile of nega-thousands, and looking for a job for the first time in three years. I couldn't find one. I hadn't been listening to the news at all but I was told by responsible adults I knew that there had been some kind of economic downturn (...?) and that this could affect my chances of getting a job. It did. I didn't get one. In your face hopes! Take that, plans! So I had no choice but to move back in with my parents and sign on for unemployment benefits. Not my finest hour. This was when my parents turned around and asked me if I had a business plan. This webcomic I was doing, was that making me any money? If not, when would it make money? How much? How many readers did I have? How many of them would be willing to buy a t-shirt with one of my humorous catchphrases on it? They were seriously considering that my new full time job could be cartoonist, and I realised how much this - four years (on and off) of work - had all just been a hobby. Luckily, we didn't have to find out how well Life on the Fourth Floor would pay the bills since I was able to get a minimum wage job as a waiter in the back end of nowhere. Well, I made good money there - not by being paid for what my time was worth but by putting in insane hours and seeing my friends never. It was hard work - straightforward but hard - and this lazy man-child felt the sting of sweat on his brow for the first time in a long time. It took sacrifice and never having a weekend off but within six months of starting this job I was able to pay off the entireity of my debt. I'm so sorry I didn't update the comic during those months. I really didn't have the time and I had until May before the bank would start charging me interest on my overdraft. These were desperate times - my friends missed me, my girlfriend missed seeing me on weekends, my family missed me. I needed to prioritise in the harshest way. I wasn't able to attend any gatherings because people always arranged them for Saturdays. I did an everage of four and a half hours of uninterrupted exercise a day. I lost about 2 stone in weight. I always liken my relationship with you guys to a couple. So I was seeing someone else for six months, a little someone called Minimum Wage Work following a brief affair with her younger sister Unemployment and received the odd sexual favour from their friend Debt. I suppose it would be incredibly trite, then, to say I was thinking of you the whole time. I did have a lot of time to think, though. Not just time to think about the awful mess I'd found/got myself in but to time to write and think about writing. I always carried a notebook in my apron pocket as I cleared plates and wiped tables. I filled it with countless comic strips and storyline ideas. I got to observe people in their natural environment, up close. I got to reassess my assumptions and make new ones. I learned a lot about writing from those six months spent not writing at all. That notpad in my pocket was my armour - it was my reminder that I was a writer who waits tables and not a waiter who writes. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being a waiter or earning minimum wage. I loved my job, I decided that if I was to be a waiter I was to be the best damn waiter in the world and find manifold little ways to make people a little happier. And everyone there worked damn hard and deserved better - but employers don't pay what you deserve, they pay what they can get away with paying. It's not like we could hav complained to the waiter's union. So I took a break from the strip - from us - to claw myself up from being an unemployed graduate with scary debt to a lean working man with a good credit rating who apologises to no-one. I'm not going to lie to you: this was a dark period in my life. For all I knew I was never going to escape. It upset my girlfriend to see me squander my time and energy to earn the absolute bear minimum a company can pay. It upset my parents to think that I might be living with them for goodness knows how much longer. It upset me when I realised how I had let them down more that myself. It was humbling to realise how much people expected of me, how much they thought I could achieve and it was heart-breaking to realise I was falling short. I started to look for another job - I made it my full time job to escape my current full time job. So again, no comic. I applied everywhere and finally got an interview for a tech support job. Good pay, good hours, no weekends. Helping people. I started in Febuary. It's been a little over a month now and I'm all settled in. The story doesn't end there, of course. Now I have another task ahead of me: I need to find myself a home. Yesterday I applied to rent a flat near where I work. I had to pay a hefty administration charge just for the privilege of getting my foot in the door - now whether I pass the credit checks and references or not I've lost the money either way. I'm told this is normal and unavoidable. It still hurt. Still! I've gone from having a huge unmovable debt to being able to rent a place of my own within 10 months! And all it took was to lose touch with all my friends and let the dust gather on Life on the Fourth Floor. Now I realise why most webcartoonists wait until they're 24 to start their first comic. You can't start a business on no money and you can't consistently update a creative project when life gets in the way, as it has so often done in these in-between years. Not having a life but getting one, building one up from nothing using only abstract things that lurk within your soul. So the process began in May. It's goal? Become the sort of 24-year-old cartoonist who can earn money worknig a day job and draw comics during the weekends he finally has back. It took time. Too much time. It was a full time job. Actually it was 5 full-time jobs: 1. Finish degree 2. Look for job to pay off debt 3. Look for job so as not to be unemployed 4. Work as a waiter 5. Look for a job that isn't work as a waiter 6. Look for flat I'm still waiting to find out if this flat is going to be my home or if men in suits have essentially mugged me. In the meantime, enjoy a new strip. I'd like to say there will be more on the way, soon. There are certainly hundreds of scripts in the pipeline waiting to become finished pages. I'd like to say there'll be a regular update schedule from now on - but I'm through disappointing you. I need to take some responsibilty. I need to acknowledge that people expect things of me. They expect great things. I can feel sick and scared by those responsibilities and run away and play video games or I can meet those expectations head-on. I'll leave it up to you to guess which of those I'm going to do: I promise you nothing. "Don't we get to be happy, Cathy? At some point down the line. Don't we get to relax without some new tsuris to push me yet further from you?" Wong Lo Kat Posted 01:48 (GMT) 23rd September 2009 by David J. Bishop
Parish Notices I haven't updated the website in over a month, which is a source of much humiliation and pain for me, to say nothing of the guilt. Oh the guilt! I spend a lot of odd hours during my working day writing comic strips, though. There are certainly more strips to come and hopefully at a faster rate. This would all be a lot quicker if I had one of them fancy Cintiq thingies but what's more imporant right now is paying off my bank and paying my rent. Responsible adult things that a responsible working adult does. Basically, I'm trying to work hit my stride both update-wise and waiter-wise, simultaneously. I've made an Excel spreadsheet that lists how many waking hours there are in the day, how many of those I will spend at work and from what's left over how much time I'll have to draw. Of course I don't spend those hours drawing, I spend them recovering from having worked or preparing myself for when I will be working or spending time with loved ones. The people I love, it turns out, are really needy. Sometimes I miss being a creepy hermit with no social skills whatsoever (i.e. David aged 12-16). I don't really know what to do right now, how to deal with this situation - whether it will get better over time or worse. I'm seriously toying with the idea of starting up a second comic with a really pared-down art style so that I can have something updating daily and keep Life on the Fourth Floor ticking over like the good little time-consuming sitcom it is when I have the time - about once a month it seems. If not a comic then some kind of Youtube animation thing with little drawings I made in it - or rants with pictures put in. I need to get myself out there as a writer and a cartoonist if I'm to have any hope of escaping the life of being a waiter. If you have any thoughts on the matter, I would love to hear from you. E-mails, forum, whatever. You know, weigh in, guy. Now onto more fun matters. Wong Lo Kat The comic is based on true events. I didn't buy 84 cans like Bob, but I did decide it might be a good idea to crack open a can of Chinese soft drink. It would be unfair to say that Wong Lo Kat tastes like cats. It actually tastes like really bad medicine that someone has tried to sweeten with everything but sugar. It's deeply unpleasant. That'll teach me to try to broaden my cultural horizons. My Chinese friend says it's nice warm. I refuse to believe that warm goblin piss is somehow nicer than cold. Anyway, I kept the can for the sake of reference. Allow me to quote some of its text: "Made from select herbal ingredients using advanced scientific technique based on traditional recipe, suits all ages." Gee, it's cutting edge science and ancient tradition all in one? Why did I buy this in the first place? Healthcare Reform Hey, we have free healthcare for everyone in this country. Yes, it's socialist. You know what socialist means? Sharing. Instead of some system by which 5% of the populace control 95% of the country's money. The NHS is great. The fixed my hernia right up, and whipped out my appendix. And these operations occured when I was at my poorest, when I could have least afforded any other kind of treatment. It's a really great system, actually. Instead of paying money to an insurance company (and everyone hates insurance companies), you just pay that money to the government and then everyone gets treated. What happens to your insurance if nothing ever happens to you? Do you get your money back? No. Yet if I don't get hospitalised at least someone else can be filling that bed, someone who needs it. And nobody walks the halls killing old people, either. I don't know where you guys heard that. Affordable healthcare does not equal pensioner murders. If America is really the land of the free, surely the people should have the freedom not to die from easily-treatable illnesses? Regina Spektor I'm going through a crazy Regina Spektor binge. I had heard of her but not heard any of her music until about two weeks ago - which is a shame since Spektor is everything I look for in a musician, now I need to make up for years of not listening to her music. Listen to 'Us', 'Dance Anthem of the 80's', 'Hero' and 'Folding Chair' and think to yourself: those songs were all written and performed by the same person. Not only is incredible that one person can consistently produce so many excellent things, they are so different from one another that it's actually hard to believe you're listening to the same artist. Most mainstream artists - like U2 - tend to make the same song over and over. Especially U2. At least Blackberry loves them, because I'm getting really sick of their nonsense. The Violet Water Beast What can I say about the Violet Water Beast? Sometimes creative people are friends. Sometimes they meet through their work, swap notes at conventions or at Universities and become fast friends via their art. Sometimes they start off as friends because of some strange psychological kinship they possess and sort of become artists by responding to one another's creativity, they inspire each other to do whatever they end up doing. My good friend Khelden Iituem is one of the latter. Yes, we both write, we both draw, we both have websites. But we were friends first. Iituem is his pen name, by the way. I'm not going to blow his mystique by outing him as a Brian or a John when he clearly wants people to call him Khelden. We spent a large chunk of our time as young men strolling around talking to each other about whatever project we had been cooking up last, bouncing ideas off each other, creating whole universes repleat with gods and heroes and strange creatures. Those were some good times, some of the best times (wait, wasn't I a creepy hermit then?). We've cultivated a kind of weird rivalry as well, based upon one man trying to constantly out-do the other in his life achievements. Now we are both men, our creative lives have split off into different directions. I am spending my time writing comic strips about how women and men are different, Khelden has become a kind of cross between Charles Dickens and J. R. R. Tolkien writing serialised speculative fiction. This isn't particularly surprising, with a name like Iituem what other genre was he going to be writing? The part I don't get is, at what point did my best writer friend become a better writer than me? Whilst I struggle to produce a cartoon in the space of a month, Khelden is knocking out a thousand words or two every two or three days like frigging clockwork. That puts me to shame already, then you read the story itself. The story - or should I say novel? - is called The Goatskin Usgar. It's set in an immersive fantasy world with an impressive level of authenticity and cleverness in its construction, full of maginificent little detials which never put you in a moments doubt that this is an entirely real, living, breathing world you are reading about. The characters are well-observed and subtly characterised. The story is compelling and rattles along at a terrific pace. Go back to the first part of the story, catch up, and you will see how the 35 (and growing) chapters come together to form something truly impressive in its breadth and scale. Everyone who likes good literature, especially those who crave science fiction and fantasy, deserves to read this. This is actually one of the hardest things I've ever had to write. The truth is I'm more than a little jealous of him - we've come from the same place, we've gone through many of the same experiences, lived the same number of years and yet that time has gone towards making me into a waiter and making Khelden into some kind of genius storyteller. You may think it's easy for me to praise the man. Sure, he may be my friend. Sure, I might be doing him a favour directing your attention to his site but that hasn't stopped me from refraining from doing so until now. That's because I'm not offering any free rides here. I'm trying to set myself up as a voice of integrity that you can trust. If I tell you something sucks, I want you to be able to believe me. When I tell you (500) Days of Summer is the funniest film I've seen all year I want that to mean something. The harsh truth is that I refuse to stick my neck out and recommend something to you unless I believe it is worth your time. So when I tell you that Khelden Iituem is one of our generation's greatest fantasy writers, I want you to know I'm not saying that because he's my friend. In fact, that just makes it twice as hard to say. Maybe it's the silly pen name. Pimp Juice Finally, pimp juice. I think this song is adorable. It's absolutely, unapologetically ridiculous. Gravy Train Posted 23:58 (GMT) 31st July 2009 by David J. Bishop
I didn't make a big deal out of the fact that I've been unemployed for the past two months or so. For a start I didn't want to bum you guys out with my financial woes and more to the point I didn't want to fob you off with cheap excuses for not updating. I just finished a shift that went from 10:30 this morning to 9:30 tonight and ironically I have more time to work on the comic than I did before - because before my full time job was to apply to as many jobs as possible and thus the shifts were infinity long. I've managed to get a job working as a waiter at a carvery. People get themselves roast meat and potatoes with gravy, I clear away the plates and fetch them dessert. It's actually ideal for me because it allows me to get plenty of exercise working to help people. I've never had a job where the effort-to-client-happiness formula was so apparent. I used to collect credit card debt. People called in confused, I explained where their money went and the fifty petty ways this action complied with corporate policy, they went away angry. In this job people come in hungry, they leave full. I bring them pudding. You set pudding down, child's face lights up. It sounds stupid, but I feel good about having done that. It's a simple equation. I like it. I run round being as friendly and helpful as possible, the customers leave all clean plates and big smiles. It's like I'm working in Father Christmas's workshop and every day is Christmas. If Santa served Christmas dinner. I guess it doesn't really work as a simile. It's my second day. Maybe Christmas every day for a year would drive you crazy. Me? I'm just happy to be earning money. And I earnt about £12 in tips today! Just for being friendly and doing my job! The only downside is that after spending 11 hours surrounded by hot starch I come home smelling of gravy. I don't mind. That £12 puts me closer to buying my own webspace by a considerable margin. It's all gravy now. You know, if you guys wanted to throw anything into the tip jar... Matthew: 20 Years of Awesome Posted 06:20 (GMT) 27th July 2009 by David J. Bishop
As is the yearly tradition, I am required to reflect upon the real-life Matthew's excellence and supernatural might as it exists separate from the strip. I have already suggested that Matthew is a kind of cornerstone for the site itself. Did you know I started the strip four days before his birthday so I could wish him many happy returns on the internet? That makes Life on the Fourth Floor a kind of birthday present. I bet you didn't know that the representations of Matthew's awesomeness are based on real life events. He can lift a car over his head. He has been known to make the wind change direction by cocking his eyebrow and to sing the song that makes rocks dance. I once saw him bring a dead mouse back to life with his bare hands. It was humbling. Today he is twenty, no longer a child but undoubtedly a man. A man who is awesome. Many happy returns, brother. Thank you for saving our planet all those times. Four Years of Four Floors Posted 18:02 (GMT) 23rd July 2009 by David J. Bishop
They finally called my name, I stood up before a large hall full of my peers and their families, and my own family, dressed in black and green robes and accepted my degree. In the end I shook hands and did a little bow as well. Apparently I looked happy. Then it was all over, that one day symbolising the culmination of a three year course. I have an upper second class bachelors in English now. What have I learned? I've learned a lot about writing, mostly about ways of thinking, a great deal about storytelling. Really I've learnt why people tell stories - and why I tell stories. For me it's a kind of therapy, although the goal of therapy is to collect the conflicting parts of the psyche and fuse them into an individuated whole, whereas I separate the different parts out as much as I can, give them different hats and make them have arguments for the purposes of entertainment. I make the comic so I can be happy, not really because I'm entertaining you but more because it's something I have to do, as a fish needs to swim or a pigeon needs to crap on a car. Then there have been the moments when I haven't been able to work on the comic, not because of lack of time but because of lack of juice - creative juice sapped by having to write such things as dissertations or exam papers. It's been rewarding and deeply fulfilling to spend three years working on a course that has not just stimulated my intellect but also my imagination, but this comes at a price. Especially towards the end, my higher responsibility to my degree has prevented me from spending as much time drawing as I would have liked. Life on the Fourth Floor has never been far from my thoughts, and I have certainly managed to script enough comics in the past three years to keep my busy for another ten years of updates. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Today Life on the Fourth Floor is four years old. It's an incredibly exciting milestone, since it coincides with so many other changes in my life. For the first year of the comic my gap year was a thorn in my side, since I had to work hard to earn enough money for university. For the next three years updates were constantly hampered by my workload. Now that obstacle is cleared, now I am free to take my life in whatever direction I choose to. The best time to start a webcomic would really be today, now that I'm old and wise enough to do it properly, and unburdened enough to create an update schedule I can stick to. But I started early. The updates may have been sporadic, even intermitent, but I've managed 168 comic strips each of which I am exceptionally proud. In addition to a degree, we've been through two hospital operations, a recession, three birthdays, countless changes to the visual and verbal style of the comic itself and along the way most of my hair has fallen out. All that was a freebie. That was a bonus. Now the real work begins. I've had a ceremony and I've been given a piece of paper - it's a rite of passage, a sort of symbol acted out and to me represents this: I am not what I was before. I am no longer a student. Today I am something else: I am a cartoonist! Anything else I do with my life from this day forward will be in service to that truth - any money I earn will be money that allows me to keep running this site, any skills I learn will be skills I need to make this comic better, any investments I make will be in books and shirts and web hosting. Now it's time to get serious and make this comic strip into something remarkable. No longer a hobby, no longer something to feel guilty about not working on but a job. The job I've wanted to do since I myself was four years old. I hope you'll stick around to watch the transformations take place. Now all that remains is to repeat the same sentiments as before. Please stay tuned, something is about to happen. I'm Sorry, I Really Wanted to Like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Posted 23:11 (GMT) 11th July 2009 by David J. Bishop
Maybe not that certain. Maybe I need to rewatch that piece of crap. But surely creating an imaginative action sequence with giant automatons kicking ten kinds of robotic shit out of each other is a kind of art form in its own right? I mean, robots! That turn into vehicles, by the way. Isn't that cool? Somehow, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is not cool, in the same way that getting kicked in the back when distracted is not cool. I initially quite liked the title, because I've never really cared for this tradition of calling sequels the same title as the last film but shoving a number on the end. Spider-man, Spider-man 2, Spider-man 3. Because I have said in the past that a title should answer the question of "What is this film about?" and the film is not about "Spider-man 3", in fact that doesn't make any sense. I quite liked it in Blackadder, because each sequel was really a reimagining of their original premise in another period of history, in which case it was quite literally about Blackadder II (as in Blackadder the Second), dealing with the exploits of the original Blackadder's descendant. And the final chapter Blackadder Goes Forth struck me as particularly clever. You never see this naming convention in books or plays. The sequel to Joseph Heller's masterpiece Catch-22 is not Catch-22 2 or something retarded like Catch-23 - it's called Closing Time. Because there's absolutely no reason to give a sequel the same title as the previous work - or any kind of hideous subtitle that somehow incorporates that number like Escape 2 Africa or 2 Fast 2 Furious. So the fact that the sequel to Transformers was not called Transformers 2 initially struck me as a classy move. Then I found out what the title meant. I just assumed that 'the fallen' was an adjectival noun, like 'the bold and the beautiful' or 'the good, the bad and the ugly'. No, the title refers to some guy who is literally called The Fallen. That's his name. Well, fuck me hard. Incidentally, he (spoiler alert) never does get his revenge, so the title actually refers to the hypothetical revenge, never realised, of a robot literally named The Fallen. And, sadly, it only gets more bone-headed and confusing from there. The story concerns Shia Lebeouf's character Sam Witwicky getting an alien computer stuck in his head Chuck-style and then he flips out and draws these strange alien glyphs everywhere and then some more stuff happens which I can only assume follows on from what came before. I can't just sit here and list everything that was wrong with the film. I did that with My Best Friend's Girl and my brain began to dribble out of my ears. Instead I will pick a single moment - from another film - and reflect upon its relative merit in light of Revenge of the Fallen. There is a scene in Independence Day when the American military comes up with a plan to defeat the alien threat and then there follows a montage of various people from around the world getting wind of this daring stratagem. There is a shot of some beret-clad Frenchmen wearing stripy shirts, smoking little cigarettes and wearing onions round their necks discussing the Americans' plan, then there's a shot of some British soldiers receiving the message. One soldier says "The Americans have a plan," to which the other replies "It's about bloody time." Because without America the entire civilized world would just sit on its hands looking glum. Yes, there is no French resistance, there is no British blitz - everyone has just been patiently waiting for the states to save their arse like in WW2 - thank God they did. That moment always rankled me. Well, compared to the kind of aggressive patriotism exhibited in this film, that little moment of xenophobia feels like caring multiculturalism. For example, as we are told during the first 10 minutes of this masterpiece in a heavy-handed chunk of 'tell don't show' exposition delivered entirely in voice-over, as if we're watching a PowerPoint presentation delivered by Optimus Prime (which sounds really cool but it's really just annoying), the American military has teamed up with the Autobots to track down Decepticons. (It's very important that we learn this information because it proves vitally important later on and isn't just an awkwardly-inserted action sequence which should have been cut from the picture in any kind of sane world). And as a result the American government speaks to these alien robots on behalf of the entire fucking planet. It's like the film is bellowing into your face "YEAH! AMERICA!" Then later we see a robot attacking a bridge. I say 'attacking', it really just climbs onto the bridge and snaps off the little American flag. "OH NOS THE STARS AND STRIPES! AMERICA!" Sam Witwicky's parents visit France for their holiday, which is represented by: 1. Eating some snails, which are apparently disgusting (and undoubtedly no match for a cheese burger) 2. Being annoyed by a mime artist, who gets right up in their grill while they're trying to eat Then some Parisian architecture gets destroyed, but not in a way that makes us care. "YEAH, FUCK YOU FRANCE AND YOUR SO-CALLED 'DELICIOUS' FRENCH CUISINE! AMERICA!" Weirdly enough Shia Lebeouf's surname is actually French for 'the beef' and his father spent time as a mime artist, so maybe this wasn't a snippet of venomous anti-French sentiment but really just an elaborate effort on Michael Bay's part to make Shia Lebeouf cry. Yet we can't ignore the fact that the last quarter of the film is concerned entirely with running around Egypt destroying as much of its ancient architecture as possible, but as before we aren't encouraged to care. At one point the Jordanian military flies in to help fight the evil robots but their aircraft gets destroyed and all the soldiers die. The only reaction from the other characters is an expression of mild disappointment, as if they've been inconvenienced quite badly by those foreigners dying. So again, the film doesn't want us to care. We're supposed to weep bitterly when an American aircraft carrier is destroyed or when a robot snaps off a flag but when an Egyptian pyramid gets destroyed we're supposed to cheer? Quite a large amount of death and destruction and brutal violence is depicted, the equivalent of about 90 terrorist attacks, only it's shot in the most detached manner imaginable. We can't have a moment's reflection, we can't have a shot of people screaming before their lives are snuffed out, we're just not supposed to care. At all. This must be how psychopaths see the world. Furthermore, there is a comic relief character, a Mexican named Leo, who serves no purpose in the film whatsoever except to be as annoying as possible and to be humiliated and harmed in as many ways as the 12A rating will allow. He is so painfully irritating and so grotesquely unsympathetic he makes Jar Jar Binks look like Han Solo. And he's Mexican. Meanwhile if any of the white characters experience so much as a moment's peril we are supposed to be on the edge of our seats. I'm not saying, I'm just saying. Oh shit, I almost forgot Mudflap and Skids, two goofy robots who are unable to shut up, do nothing but get in the way and prove to be utterly useless at every turn. They have ears that stick out. One of them has a gold tooth. And they say the most stereotypically 'street' things imaginable like "I'ma pop a cap in yo' ass." I half expected one of them to say "n***a please" at some point in the film. Casual racism aside, what else does this film have to offer? Tasteless, unfunny moments of 'comedy'? I suppose we covered that, although I'd kick myself if I didn't mention that there is a shot of giant robot testicles in this film. Hmmm... how about story elements and subplots that don't make any sense? Mild spoiler here, there is a character called Alice who is a student at Sam's college. Unlike the Mexican guy, she is white and therefore has a purpose in the film. Alas, she is also a girl so her purpose is to show as much skin as possible and throw herself at Sam with all her might. At first I thought Sam possessed some supernatural ability to attract women so far out of his league he shouldn't physically be able to stand in the same room as them but it turns out she's actually an evil robot spy whose job is to... ruin Sam's relationship with his girlfriend by trying to have sex with him. Yes, apparently the, ahem, ins and outs of Sam's love-life are of the utmost importance to the extra-terrestrial sentient machines. My brother saw the film with me and he was under the impression that Alice was there to steal the alien glyphs, which the Decepticons want to get their hands on... for some reason. Certainly, they go to a lot of trouble to get these glyphs, going as far as probing Sam's brain via his nose just to project the glyphs onto the adjacent wall. If they could do that all along it begs the question of why they sent a sexy fembot to get the glyphs instead of the probe. Furthermore, if Alice's mission is to get these glyphs she doesn't need to seduce Sam at all because he keeps writing the glyphs down on every available surface, right in front of her. Like, two or three times. No need for probes, no need for alien robot seduction. Just copy them down. Since she shows no interest in the glyphs I can only conclude that her primary mission is to break Sam and his girlfriend up. She's certainly there at the college before Sam realises his brain is full of glyphs, before he even arrives, so for this to make any sense at all it would have to indicate an incredible amount of foresight on the part of the Decepticons. More foresight than, say, the writer or director showed when they sat down to film this part of the movie. Sadly, the prize for most thoughtlessly nonsensical character has to go not to Alice but to Jetfire, an old man robot. He has a long beard and a cane. How does that even work? Machines can age now? Age like humans age? They need canes? Really? I don't know why I'm expecting this to make any sense, when we already have a robot double in mass whilst raping a satellite (really), then shooting another robot out of his ass which lands on the Earth as a cycloptic robot cat skeleton. Then the cat robot vomits a load of ball bearings into a vent. Then each ball turns into a little bug robot. Then all the little robots combine into a bigger robot, which is two-dimensional for some reason. It's like one of those Russian dolls, except that each doll is slightly larger than it should be and the doll it came out of isn't hollow. Doesn't conservation of energy mean anything to these robots? If they can just duplicate themselves like that, if they can just double in mass inexplicably, why don't they multiply into a frigging army of machines and take over the planet? Screw this espionage shit, just increase your ranks until you outnumber human beings one million to one. To further flout basic concepts of space and mass, at one point an object breaks into a million pieces, some of those pieces are gathered up and carried miles away and then reform into a whole object again. It's not even smaller, it just grows somehow. It still has some fragments of itself clinging to it. So apparently you can break something apart, lose half the pieces and then reassemble it exactly as it was before it broke. Let's make a list of things that can turn into robots in these films. Things that come out of robots turn into robots. Things that come out of those robots can turn into robots. Those robots can turn into a robot. Large robots can combine into a giant robot. Bits that break off the large robots can turn into little robots. Household appliances such as toasters, hoovers and waste disposal units - even vending machines - can randomly just turn into robots. "YEAH! TAKE THAT, LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS! AMERICA!" And each of these robots can turn into other robots, cars, planes, trucks, cranes, mobile phones and, yes, even human beings. Why take the form of anything as conspicuous as a hydraulic mining excavator or an Audi R8 if you can just break yourself apart and turn into a load of harmless mobile phones? Why bother with any of that nonsense if you can assume human form? How would anyone ever know? Then, once you've seamlessly integrated yourself into the human populace kill them all since they seem so good at ruining your evil schemes. Just slaughter them all. Disguised as their parents. Another great idea: if you're disguised as a human and then the other humans find out you're a Decepticon, turn into something else so they don't kill you. Turn into one of the humans, so they turn on each other and don't know who to kill. Turn into a human and then kill him and take his place, like the T-1000. Or turn into a tank and run them all over - none of the other robots worry about things like energy and mass, why should you? Don't just stumble around in robot form. There's no point adopting a disguise at all if you just discard it at when you need it most. And don't bother with your old disguise - they already know you're not a real human. Just give up the charade and tear their heads off. You'd think a species that has a computer for a brain would be a little more logical, wouldn't you? In addition to hot girl robots and old man robots and Optimus Prime we have a whole load of generic decepticons who all look exactly the same. Optimus is red and blue so you can pick him out fairly well. Everyone else is grey and interchangeable. So, during the hours of robots fighting other robots, it becomes impossible to tell who you're supposed to be rooting for, who's killing whom, whether they're good or evil or what they were before they transformed. Even if you figure out what's happening there's not much plot, so you don't know why it happened in the first place or what was achieved. Add to that the fact that all of the robots' character designs save that of Optimus Prime and Megatron consist of triangular shards of metal forming themselves into the shape of eyebrows and lips around free-floating eyes. Also the Decepticons all have sharp little teeth. Not metal teeth either, tooth enamel. What are they eating with these teeth? While we're asking questions, why do the Decepticons spend half their time speaking English and the other half speaking their own special alien language which requires subtitles? Why do they refer to Megan Fox as 'the female' but they have a good enough understanding of the nuances of human society to: 1. Pose convincingly as humans and discuss the intricacies of human relationships 2. Grow beards 3. Possess testicles 4. Call a dog "slobberpuss" 5. Threaten to pop a cap in someone's ass Not only does the tone of the robots' conversation shift erratically from otherworldly to inappropriately colloquial, the tone of the film shifts just as violently from deadly serious to obnoxiously zany and irreverent. And there's nothing in between, no happy medium. We're either grimly defiant in the face of annihilation, masturbating to the stars and stripes wafting in the breeze while patriotic bugle music plays in the background or we're guffawing as cartoonish Mexicans get taser-shocks to the neck and goofy jug-eared robots exchange the kind of undignified jibes that would make a Saturday morning Disney spin-off cartoon character cringe. So the film doesn't make any sense on a script level either, and thus the viewer must endure such assaults on the active mind as this little nugget of wisdom, said of the Autobots by a soldier: "If we were made in God's image, who made them?" Who indeed, sir? Who indeed? That's probably the most asinine observation you could make about a transforming space robot. How about this one? At the end of the film Sam comes up with a plan to save the day. He does it after a particular piece of alien technology does something unexpected. He had no idea it would do what it did before he touched it and now that it's done it he has no idea what to do about it. He doesn't know how this technology works but he comes up with a plan nonetheless, a plan which amounts to "take this one thing and rub it on another thing in the hope that magic happens". He has no way of knowing if that plan will work, and considering the sheer stupidity of the plan I would say the odds are that it will not. The dialogue proceeds as follows: Sam: It’ll work, I know it will. Megan Fox: How do you know? Sam: Because I believe it. That's not just really bad dialogue, it doesn't make logical sense. What he meant is this: Sam: It’ll work, I know it will. Megan Fox: How do you know? Sam: Okay, I don't actually know. But I have a hunch. An unjustifiable hunch. Let's do this. There is a kind of disease infecting American thought, and I have found this only in America I'm afraid, which can be summarised as the equation of knowledge with belief when in fact they are two different things. It crops up a lot in arguments made by creationists against the Darwinian model of evolution, as in the phrase "I used to believe that God made evolution. Now I know God made us in 7 days." Belief is not knowledge, in fact belief is what you end up with when you don't have enough evidence to know anything, in which case saying you know is at best an assertion and as worst an outright lie. It's a little thing called Plato's image of the divided line. Bear in mind as you read this that it was written about 300 years before Jesus was even born and that Plato's words have formed the foundation of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy, both Christian and non-Christian alike. And I quote:
Taking all this one board, we can draw that line and order things as Plato tells us.
Basically, Plato arrives at a working definition of knowledge as justified true belief. The more evidence you have, the more you can justify your opinion. The less justification you have, the less you can be sure that your belief is true. Sam Witwicky has absolutely no justification for believing what he decides to believe, no evidence visible or intelligible, not an image, not an object, not a thought. He says "I know" but really his precious 'belief' is on the other end of the scale in Conjectureville. Sure, it turns out to be true. But it's not justified so it's not knowledge. Do you hear what I'm saying? The dialogue in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn't just bad, it flies in the face of all conventional wisdom of the past 2300 years. Family Guy? More Like Torturously Unfunny Guy. Posted 10:26 (GMT) 29th May 2009 by David J. Bishop
In other news I'm noticing that Family Guy isn't remotely funny anymore. I mean, it's not as if when it was at its best every single joke was a hit but they packed so many gags in there it didn't really matter if you didn't like one, the next joke was coming in about three seconds. No single element was by any means the best but what was there was energetic and well-edited. Now... uh. Now it just seems like there's one joke per episode, which is stretched out and broadcast and underlined and repeated and then explained until anything about it which might have been entertaining, let alone humorous, has died. That's right - explained. They actually explain jokes. Not even good jokes, either. The kind of weak-ass jokes you told as a child. You see the stupid sight gag and then Peter Griffin turns to the camera and says "You see, all the chicken wanted to do was get to the other side." That's not meta, that's not trying and then passing it off as self-referential. In fact, the words 'not trying' really sum up the entirety of Family Guy's output now. If an episode only has one joke, what fills in the rest of the space? Protracted musical numbers, protracted silence, racist comments and cut-aways. All those stupid cut-aways. They were tolerable when they picked up on plot points, back when episodes had such things as plot points and, indeed, plots. Now they're just strings of badly-written skits set up by a character saying "Like the time I..." only it's never remotely like what's happening. Someone will say "This is worse than a chicken on the moon eating toothpaste with George Washington." And the audience can just sit there and wonder why a tooth-paste-eating lunar chicken is worse than what was happening before they cut away. These ideas are exactly as moronic as that. Then the chicken just sits there glumly eating toothpaste, turns to the camera and says, "What were you expecting, comedy?" It's finally happened. The show has finally become a parody of itself. I swear to God they write the cut-aways by throwing a dart at a board covered with films and TV shows from the last twenty years and then throw another dart at a board covered with names of animals or everyday situations. The result - Two and Half Men and an ostrich, Jaffa from Aladdin getting an eye test, Alan Rickman's answering machine. They actually did all of those things! The only way you could justify that kind of painful amalgamation of tropes is if it was building up to a wickedly funny punch line... but then no punch comes. Apparently our minds are supposed to be so blown away by the idea of Alan Rickman having an answering machine that they don't need to write a punch line. Or animate anything - we're just content to watch an answering machine and hear a bad impression of Alan Rickman come out of it for about five minutes. FIVE MINUTES! That's just one example. Everything goes on exactly too long to no real resolution. Everything! Whereas before Family Guy specialised in frenetic pacing and quick cuts, now they specialise in looooooooooooooooooooooong awkward silences. Don't misapprehend me, awkward silences can be really funny - in live action comedy. Because you get to see the performer react to the silence, you get to see small nuances in their face that really sell the joke. In Family Guy they just... stand there. It's literally a static image. They actually animate less during those moments because if you stare at the screen you can see they're not blinking their eyes anymore. And then you catch yourself staring at unblinking eyes and thinking, what the hell am I doing? Am I amusing myself by staring at a picture of the show I'm supposed to be watching? Where's the animation? Where are the jokes? That's depressing though, isn't it? They didn't have enough badly-written jokes about The A-team to fill their half hour time slot so they had to play for time. How about cutting away to Conway Twitty for three minutes? Yeah, that ought to eat up some time. Not even animated Conway Twitty at this point. No, just footage of Conway Twitty singing. Let's say hypothetically that cutting away to Conway Twitty is hilarious - which it isn't - even if that's the case how does the idea of Conway become funnier by playing the entirety of the performance? Yeah, they're killing time. The writers must have lost their frigging minds. And some of these randomly-selected pop culture references aren't references at all but pains-taking re-enactments. For example, they had one character sing 'Somewhere That's Green' from Little Shop of Horrors. It's a funny song from a musical close to my heart. I don't see how animating that part of the film shot for shot with one of your characters adds anything or takes anything away. The lyrics weren't rewritten for parody. Nothing about the sequence was different apart from the characters. It feels a lot less like satire and a lot more like plagiarism now. We get to the end of the sequence and there's no punch-line, nothing that presents any kind of pay-off for what was nothing more than a drawn-out musical number. In one episode we get to see Stewie Griffin re-enact the skateboard scene from Back to the Future. It was a great scene in the film and so it's an entertaining moment in the episode by virtue of being exactly the same. Really, though, how hard would it have been to undercut the moment of triumph by writing in a... thing... what's it called?... oh yeah, a joke. You know, to be funny! Speaking of drawn-out musical numbers, Family Guy seems to have a real hard-on for them as of late. I'm not saying these songs aren't well constructed - they're just not funny in any way. They possess no innate funniness and whatever potential funniness might arise is inexplicably ignored. What the hell, man? You're a comedy show. Someone throw a pie! Long awkward silences and long song-and-dance routines do not hilarity make. Maybe if you spent less time singing and more time trying to write jokes you might actually have a funny show again. And by 'jokes' I don't mean 'discomfitingly un-ironic racial slurs'. If you keep repeating over and over again that the Jews killed Jesus and then make no attempt to highlight why that doesn't make any sense it goes a long way towards convincing me that you actually think it's true - certainly, it allows someone who believes that to watch your show and assume you agree. It's irresponsible. As it happens the Jews didn't kill Jesus. It was the Romans. There are scenes in the Bible where people conspire to bring about Jesus' death and yes they are Jewish but that's because EVERYONE IN THE STORY IS JEWISH APART FROM THE ROMANS! Including Jesus! Why are Jesus' disciples not Jewish but the bad guys are? You can't take all the villains in the story and decide they represent the entire race. That's fucking racist. If I have to hear one more person say the Jews killed Jesus I'm going to beat them to death with the nearest heavy object. So thanks, Family Guy, for propagating hatred. Urgh, and some of the sequences are just insulting to the audience. And I don't mean insulting like "Do they expect us to be entertained by this?", I mean insulting like "Oh, you like Family Guy do you? Then take this, loser!" Peter Griffin singing 'Surfin' Bird' again and again and again and again and again and again? Is the joke there that... it's annoying? That's not a joke, not by any stretch of the imagination. It's just annoying. Almost aggressively so, as if the writers actually hate their audience and are finding ways to overtly express their contempt. At what point does a television show officially start adding to the sum of human misery rather than the sum of human happiness? Thank You For Telling Me I'm Right, I Love Hearing It Always Posted 23:33 (GMT) 20th May 2009 by David J. Bishop
Here, I'll cut you guys a deal. If you send them more often I'll check my inbox more often. And... update more often. I almost forgot. In light of one reader's comments, I would like to respond that I never thought Maid Marion was - ahem - foxy. That's more than a little gross. It's probably just a coincidence but it feels like even Kris Straub, who is the nearest internet comics has to a comedic genius, has weighed in on the issue with his latest strip. As always, I spend umpteen paragraphs ranting about the intricacies of fur fetishes just to have the brunt of my argument summarised perfectly by a more succint artist. It's happened before and it will happen again. In other news, I've just got home after finishing the last exam of my academic career. I have another assessment tomorrow but not an exam in the traditional sense. So... this is my first drunken news post! Woot! Okay, I sleep now. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... P.S. The second draft seems a lot drunker to me than the first. I think that last shot of jager might be taking affect as we speak. Ooooh. Weird. I'm drunkening before by very eyes! Brain cells... shutting down. I finally get Ctrl+Alt+Delete! It's actually pretty clever once you subdue rational thought. Shit, I should stop typing things. I'm going to sound like a crazy person. Man's Inhumanity Unto Dog Posted 14:41 (GMT) 15th May 2009 by David J. Bishop
Short version: I'm finishing a three year university course. This is the last push before I'm finished forever. Pretty exciting. What does this mean for you, the reader? Well, after I finish full-time education I can finally get a job. After I get a job I understand they will give me money. After I get money I can invest a little somethin' somethin' back into this site. That means advertising, web hosting - professionalism. In the meantime I have to put up with exams which last longer than three hours, unemployment and God-awful advertisements all over my website. The ones with naked women in them are nauseating enough as it is but the one I found today really takes the biscuit. It takes the dog biscuit. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the adventures of Raine Dog. You can just read through those archives and come back. There's only 23 installments - it's the work of about half an hour to get up to speed. And I guarantee that it will be the scariest half hour of your life. It's been a few hours since I hit the site and I still can't get the taste of it out of my mouth. I don't even know how much I should tell you, whether to describe the horror I have seen or let you find out for yourselves. No, I should warn you. Okay, so Raine Dog is about a dog living in a city. Actually, it's a series of flash-backs to when Raine was a puppy tied together with a piss-weak framing narrative. No, scrap that. It's a furry comic. At least, I think it is. I mean, this is a dog walking around on its hind legs, wearing clothes, buying coffee and speaking English. To be fair, I only know about the cult of 'furry' because of how often it is referenced. I have no first-hand experience of these people. I feel like an explorer in a science fiction show making contact with some bizarre alien race just by talking about this. Here's how little I know. I don't know how the word 'furry' was chosen to represent this sub-culture, I don't know why anyone would consider it a genre in its own right or why people who consider themselves fans of that culture would congregate within such a tight-nit community. It just baffles me. I don't know the difference between 'furry stuff' and 'anthropomorphic animals'. Imagining animals with human qualities is a perfectly valid form of art. I loved Bolt, for example, and as a child I devoured the complete works of Dick King-Smith, best known for The Sheep Pig. The vast majority of those books were about talking animals. Then there's the Wind in the Willows, which I absolutely adored as a child in pretty much every adaptation in which it appeared. The animated film, the live action version (to a lesser extent) - I had a beautifully drawn picture book of it and an awesome pop-up book. Again, animals dressed in clothing, walking around and talking like human beings. Nothin' wrong with that. As far as I'm concerned Ratty, Mole, Badger and Mr Toad are characters every child should know and love. And let's not forget Beatrix Potter. Sumptuously illustrated children's books, all about anthropomorphic animals. The first book I remember reading as a baby - about two years old, my first childhood memory in fact - is The Tale of Peter Rabbit. And my favourite film judging by how many times I must have watched the damn thing must have been Disney's Robin Hood. Again - Sherwood forest was populated entirely by walking, talking animals. And don't think anthropomorphic animals are just for children. Not only are all those examples enjoyed by adults just as much as they are by children, there's a long literary tradition of anthropomorphic animals. Just look at Aesop's Fables and Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale. Chanticleer is essentially a humanoid cockerel. I don't know what separates this excellent, beloved art from what people call furry. I do know there is a difference, though. Every time I see something which identifies itself as 'furry' I'm not sure why but I hate it. Every time I see the word crop up it's always attached to the weirdest shit. The convention of making animals behave like people is a widely-recognised and almost universally beloved trope. Taking that one thing and basing an entire fandom around it is just... odd. How did this schism take place? It's like if a rabid fanbase formed around the use of simile. It's just one of many tools at an artist's disposal, it's not something to be held up as something separate in its own right. The Nun's Priest's Tale sits right there between The Monk's Tale and The Second Nun's Tale without anyone batting an eyelid. Don't separate it out, don't hold it up to the light as being something different, something to be sought to the exclusion of other things. Why? Because there's nothing about anthropomorphic animals in fiction that makes them in any way superior to humans. If I had made Michael, Jack and Charlotte cats would it have made any difference? No-one can say that House is a witty and thoughtful medical drama with engaging character studies but that it would be vastly improved if Greg House were a talking rabbit. You know... House Bunny. Anyone? No-one can say that! That's not to say there's no value in anthropomorphising animals! Robin Hood, for instance, is very funny to me because it uses the animal kingdom as a kind of visual short-hand to explore a number of clichés and archetypes. The crafty Robin Hood becomes a fox! The hulking Little John is a bear! Friar Tuck a badger! The slow-witted guards Rhinos! The short matronly woman a chicken! This is good stuff! Not only does it invoke the imagery of Medieval literature itself - like Chaucer or Marie de France - but it presents old characters and motifs in new and funny ways. King John as a lion with no mane? That's pretty wry stuff right there. Human animals, then, are perfect for creating caricature, for creating comedy, for holding the satirical mirror up to humanity and having a gentle chuckle. Why do I hate furry stuff? It's never funny. It always takes itself very seriously. No jokes here, folks. Oh, there might be observational jokes about day-to-day human life but there will never be jokes about the ostrich man sticking his head in the ground, nothing to justify making the characters animals in the first place. Worse still, it's usually shoe-horned into a gritty story about sex and/or violence. The horrific adult themes just don't fit at all with the subject matter. It's like the miscarriage story-line in Ctrl+Alt+Del - there exists a huge gulf between tone and subject matter, or between subject matter and visual style. 100% of the time the 'furry' characters could be replaced by human beings with no ill affect. 90% of the time it would be an improvement. I feel your pain - people are hard to draw. I mostly drew animals right up until I was about 15. There's a steep learning curve. But if you have to tell a story about people in the future cutting each other's throats with barbed wire for God's sake don't use animals to tell that story. No-one wants to see a koala garroting a ring-tailed lemur. Half the time there's no physical difference between the characters besides their faces. They all have perfect human proportions for their bodies. Remember how Lady Kluck was short and fat with wings for hands? She looked like a chicken. Sure, she wasn't chicken-sized but she was short. The owl character is shorter than the crocodile. Even if the proportions are skewed, it follows its own internal logic. Every furry comic I see has identical proportions, identical bodies - the only difference is the face and even then it's usually the same cookie-cutter anime snout that everyone learns to draw. Are they a dog? Throw in a tiny anime mouth. Are they a cat? Throw in some whiskers. Are they a lizard? Uh... fuck, colour the snout green. Are they a bird? Shit, don't draw birds. The style people are adopting and the story they are telling makes me think they'd be better off learning how to draw members of their own species. At gunpoint, perhaps. That's my grief with furry comics in general. Then I read Raine Dog. I don't know what to say and, not knowing what criteria furries use to define this stuff, I don't know where it fits. Okay, so there is a dog walking around wearing clothes and speaking English. But she actually looks like a dog, within the visual language of the comic. She's not just a dog's head sewn onto a human body. This looks promising! Then things get weird. Sex and violence weird. The first thing I noticed about the world of the comic is that Raine Dog lives in a world populated by dogs and humans. That struck me as weird. Normally these stories take place within a kind of alternate reality in which Robin Hood could feasibly have been a fox without anyone saying "Holy shit, a talking fox!" whenever he walks into a room. Sometimes, the more I think about it, you can get humanoid animals in a science fiction setting. I suppose that makes sense - genetic engineering and all that. So what kept me reading Raine Dog for 23 strips is curiosity as to how walking, talking dogs come about in an otherwise human world. It turns out I wasted my time. Raine is just a regular dog. Apparently she learns to read the same way you or I would learn to read, by being read to and picking it up. Which suggests that dogs have the same capacity for intelligence as humans, they're just squandering their potential fetching sticks and licking their testicles. Am I being needlessly pedantic? I mean, I didn't pick apart Mrs Tiggywinkle, did I? Well, actually I'm not. The whole premise of Raine Dog is, in a nutshell, "Holy shit, a talking dog!" Just look through those archives. It's all about the stigma of being a dog in a world of humans, with flashbacks telling the story of how Raine made the transition from household pet to individuated citizen. We're supposed to want to know how she learnt to read, how she learnt to speak etc. Except we never find out how she learnt to speak or how she magically grew opposable thumbs or learnt to stand on her hind legs. You can't provoke these questions and then gloss over them - but even when a question is answered the answer is ridiculous. Actually no. Genetic engineering creating a race of dog-men is ridiculous. Dogs learning to walk and talk by themselves is just bone-headedly dumb. It gets worse. The dramatic tension, as I have already alluded to, is derived from Raine's status as a second-class citizen, another person's property. She walks into a coffee shop, wearing a coat and glasses and orders a 16 ounce chai. Pretty normal so far, right? We all know dogs who do that. But wait! Then the barista says, "Here you go, girl," and Raine thinks to herself "Girl," and sighs. You know, like if a white man calls a black man "Boy". It's like racism! Yes, this isn't just a story about a blue dog, this is a story about civil rights and segregation and equality! How awesome is that? Because what could possibly be wrong with comparing ethnic minorities to dogs? Right? How about this? Or this? Indescribably baffling. Listen, Dana Claire Simpson. I know what you're doing. I'm not an idiot. You're writing a comic about prejudice using this pseudo-fable of a talking dog as your jumping off point. But there's an inherent danger in what you're doing here that I don't think you have seen. Dogs holding up signs saying 'Pets are people' is twisted. Because pets aren't people. And saying they are undermines the point you're trying to make. Pets will never be people. Dogs can't learn to speak or to read. As lovable as they might be, they will never be as smart as human beings. Another sign being held up says 'Animal rights'. Are you... are you satirizing animal rights? I mean, surely this demonstrates how stupid it is to campaign for animal rights when dogs can't hold up little signs and really can't perceive whether they have rights or not. Canines don't have a sense of social justice. Listen, animals should have some rights, I don't think anyone is promoting animal cruelty here, but they shouldn't have all the rights people have. I don't think animals should have the right to vote, for example. That would be stupid. Am I being unfair here? I don't think so. I think the precise reason why racism and slavery are so appalling is because the victims are fellow human beings. That we can mistreat our own kind, our own brothers and sisters, is the most appalling part of it all. If the slaves really had been less than human in some way it would have been easier to justify. Slavery is abhorrent to me simply because there is no justification - and yet it happened anyway. The subjugation of dogs, on the other hand, is fine by me. Because they're just dogs. What I'm trying to say is that you can't elevate animals to the level of humans without denigrating humans to the level of animals. When you say cattle = people you're essentially saying people = cattle. Animals have no creativity, no imagination, no self-awareness, no connection to the abstract. Everything that makes humanity incredible is that which separates us from animals. To say we are no more than animals is shallow and nihilistic - and sort of depressing if you think about it. To say that animals are capable of all that humans can achieve is patently false, as evidenced by the complete lack of doggy sonnets. Comparing down-trodden ethnic minorities to dogs is just racist, dude. You may notice the other talking animal stories don't tackle these hard-hitting issues. There is an incredibly good reason for this. Hang tight, I haven't reached the worst part yet. How about an implied sexual attraction between the household pet and the sweet-faced young boy who plays with her? Are you feeling nauseous yet? How about now? Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. Sexual attraction. Between a child. And his dog. What. The. Fuck. Raine Dog's tagline as a webcomic is 'Question Everything'. I have done so. I'm just being polite. I've questioned how a dog learns to speak, I've questioned how a dog walks on its hind legs and picks things up without thumbs. I've even questioned what comparing the quest for doggy rights to the civil rights movement says about race and humanity - now I'm questioning WHAT THE DEUCE WERE YOU THINKING YOU UTTER TIT? Here's how I know Raine Dog is a furry comic. Because of indescribably squick content like a cute little boy and a puppy dog making out. Stunned and sick to my God-damn stomach, I stumbled over to the author's home page. Apparently I'm not the only person who found this comic offensive. Here's what the crazy lady wrote on her home page:
Yes.
That's such a relief.
Well, you fucked it up. The positive response make me think you've got a lot of people in your audience who want to make out with their pets. I wonder how hard it is to cultivate that audience within the furry community.
I believe it was Steve Martin said "Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke." Congratulations, you've mastered the second part. You're an anti-comic.
Oh, what is the world coming to when you can't explore the attraction between a human child and a dog without causing controversry? I don't think this is an advocation of bestiality, it's an experiment in mapping the outer limits of taste. But I bet it would be popular with zoophiles nonetheless. It's not your fault, Dana - people show up to my website to masturbate too. Only none of my hits are from trans-species paedophiles.
I don't have my doubts! I would like to live in a world in which the vast majority of people (and dogs) don't want to see boys and dogs ever make out in a comic strip! I don't know if this dude is pursuing a personal vendetta against the cartoonist. All I can speak to is my own experience. Whilst I'd be lying if I said I liked your work, I don't know you from Adam and I have no desire to 'take you down a peg', I'm just crawling out of my skin over here.
What you are doing is pretty bad, though.
What the hell? I certainly don't think that and yet I still find your comic unbelievably gross. And this argument is flawed. Oliver Twist wasn't advocating selling children but by representing the mistreatment of children Dickens was condemning the practice, giving a voice to the voiceless. Whose plight are you telling us about? What social change do you want to bring about? What purpose does this wretched work have beyond 'Hey, wouldn't it be weird if dogs could talk?' Just because something happens in a comic strip it doesn't mean the author agrees. I raved about how much I loved Spider-man 3, for example, before I made this strip. But I felt comfortable letting my character feel that way because that was a) In line with his character and b) In line with actual human experience. A lot of people hated Spider-man 3 and I wanted to acknowledge that. A lot of people don't make out with dogs. Very few, in fact. Too many though, by anyone's calculation. Unless you're being completely off the wall and abstract, if main characters the reader is supposed to relate to and sympathise with are pulling weird shit like this you the author are essentially being Dr. Manhattan and saying "Without condoning or condemning. I understand." Only this is something no-one will ever understand. You're not being a voice in the wilderness, you're being loathsome. Incidentally, I might point at this point that if Oliver Twist had been a dog nobody would have cared - selling dogs is perfectly acceptable.
Yes, it's lamentable that no-one reads books anymore. Question: did you read the books? Do you know that Dickens was very much against child cruelty? If Raine Dog fits into the same framework, would that make it a vehement polemic against boys and dogs Frenching? I think that's a battle no-one needs to fight. Dog breath stinks. On the other hand, Family Guy is just a cartoon - but it's a funny cartoon, one that religioulsy eschews common sense in order to go for the joke. Unlike Dickens, they're not making a statement, they're just trying to provoke a singular response. Brian doesn't fit into the world of the show, since no other dogs can talk. It very much fits into the character of the show to have a character who doesn't quite fit, like the talking baby or the frequent non-sequitirs. Whenever it is noted at all, the fact that Brian is at once an urbane 'man' and a household pet is played for laughs. The audience is allowed to forget he is a dog, then we see him being scared by the vacuum cleaner. Your comic is humourless. Ponderous, even. And as such it fails completely.
Well, that makes it okay then! AS LONG AS THEY JUST KISSED!
I'm a reader. I have decided! You didn't succeed. It wasn't worthwhile. Furthermore, leaving out the tension between an adolescent (really?) boy and his opposite-sex sentient animal is a dimension that you are well within your rights to leave unexplored. I don't care how important you think it is. In a nutshell, the cartoonist's attitude is that this comic is not the product of her own secret lust for pooches but in fact a work of Art, exploring new ideas, deconstructing what it is to be human and free! And if you find her methods disgusting you just don't get it. You don't get the results she's trying to achieve. Well, let me put it this way - the ends don't justify the means. I have anaylsed the subtext of her work and all the conclusions I have arrived at are quite miserable. If dogs are equal to humans we're all racists and if they are not then a walking talking dog only illustrates how futile our human society is - an illusion constructed to help us forget that we are nothing but beasts at heart. The dogs want the same rights as humans, but in the real world they don't deserve them. So is she saying the same is true of the civil rights movement? Or suffrage? Is she suggesting that people who strive for equality in our society don't deserve it, that they are in some way intrinsically inferior? Are we supposed to be on the dog's side, in which case we sympathise with her wanting to kiss the boy? Well, no that would represent some kind of endorsement, and the cartoonist has made it clear that's not happening. So we're condemning what she's doing, Raine is supposed to be an unsympathetic, wretched figure stumbling on her hind legs through a world which deservedly hates her. What is that saying about equality and segregation? Look, you can't have it both ways. Either you're just drawing the first thing that comes into your head, blowing raspberries as you scrawl nonsense over a page or you're an Artist using a visual medium to convey a messsage. How deeply did you think about the abstract ideals your comic tocuhes upon? What conclusions are you trying to draw? What's the message behind all this - or is there no message, just a random, pointless collection of occurences in a dark world devoid of meaning? Is this supposed to be Oliver Twist, or is it King Lear? Either this is an accident or it is an honest attempt at simulating a meaningful work delivered so ham-fistedly that the message is lost, or the message is one of nihilistic emptiness. Or it really is a full-throated endorsement of zoophilia. So which are you, an idiot, a hack, a nihilist or a furvert? What is the upshoot of all this? Raine is neutered. Or should I say castrated? I mean, that's probably what would happen in the real world but then, in the real world dogs don't kiss people. I think I'd probably get my dog fixed if it started first-basing it with my children. Am I supposed to feel sorry for the dog? Does the character work at all as a human being now she's been castrated? I mean, if I'm standing in line at the coffee shop how many of the people queuing in front of me have had their genitals surgically removed without their consent? This is just sick and wrong on so many levels. This whole thing. Fuck Raine Dog, fuck furries and fuck the stupid ad on my site. I'm going to go get a job and leave Keenspot in the dust. I didn't sign up for dog porn. P.S. I just thought of a work of literature that actually fits the 'furry' genre perfectly! The Island of Doctor Moreau. Kind of Like The Lion King in That Respect Posted 18:39 (GMT) 27th April 2009 by David J. Bishop
I performed a kind of search and rescue operation on my data, backing up as much as I could before it finally gave out. When it powered down for the last time, coughing and spluttering all the while, I half-expected it to crumble to dust before my eyes. I will be the first to admit that I am an obsessive person. The things I love I love whole-heartedly and the things I spend my time on tend to consume my time in whole mouthfuls. When I enter this kind of state everything else in the world doesn't vanish but it sort of dims, becomes less relevant, and I give my mind over to whatever new distraction has come my way. This is how I was able to watch every episode of 30 Rock in the space of about three days. Many of these obsessions - podcasts, DVDs, games, comics, books - many of them found life in this laptop and because I spent three years with this machine in this trance state some of that relentless affection must have rubbed off. When the time came for my laptop to break it didn't just feel like a part of my life had gone forever it felt like my entire life had gone forever. For years I had eaten my meals, held conversations, undertaken epic adventures and ignited my imagination in the gentle glow of this laptop's screen. Sometimes instead of reading a book in bed I read webcomics on my laptop, which is to say I even slept with this thing. And now it's dead. But it lives on in its sucessor. This story, like all good stories, ends happily. With a great deal of help from my family I have acquired a brand new PC. It is a beautiful thing to behind. It's black and monolithic and covered in shiny details with a clear side and glowy blue lights. It reminds me a lot of my new wacom tablet in that respect. I don't know how to describe this shiny detailing. My brother called it 'bling' which I understand is the sound jewellery makes when it glints in the light. He said my PC had been 'pimped'. It's certainly very fast, with lots more room, and lots more graphics thingies which allow me to play games on it. I've also hooked up my flatscreen TV to it so that it might serve as television and monitor. As a result everything I do from my computer is now more beautiful and big than it was before. It made drawing this new strip a revelation in speed and efficiency. I believe you might describe it as a sweet rig. It's got all the information my old computer had but now it can do so much more with it - bits of the old and bits of the new coming together into a new entity. I imagine rolling clouds might form themselves into the shape of my laptop so that it might look over its child and deliver a powerful message about its destiny... but then I would think that. I am, as we have already established, crazy. Anyways, there is a new comic up. It bears last month's date because I'm still determined to catch up. Come back soon and (hopefully) you will be rewarded with more strips. Let's see what this thing can do. Guys, Seriously, This Turned Into The Longest Post I Ever Wrote. Read Some of It and Then Go Do Something Else. Come Back Later. Posted 07:06 (GMT) 2nd April 2009 by David J. Bishop
Regardless, I drew this. I hope you like it. Oh yeah. I remember now. When I was planning the strip I decided to include two panels set in the universe of Gears of War, Sera I think they call it, considering how much I blather on about it it seemed only fitting for the comic to reflect my obsession on some way. I mean, when was the opportunity going to present itself again? Obsession is right. I pulled out all the stops for those two panels, threw everything I had in the way of creativity and time. For what? Something which will literally be read for all of five seconds? Well, how is that any different for pouring hours of work into something people only read for a couple of minutes? The alternative was two panels of clunky dialogue sort of describing what was going on in-game. Equally valid, takes a lot less drawing. But sometimes you need to take the long road and... y'know... walk it. Photoshop presents the young artist with so many opportunities to cut corners and get away with it, the artist does things the arduous way regardless out of some dogged sense of professional pride just to be told that he's doing it the quick way. What I'm trying to say is that even with my erratic and hiatus-filled schedule I have to employ manifold tricks which seem a lot like cheating. Sometimes I need remind myself that I'm a real artist. You remember that picture of Keira Knightley that used to appear in the background to some of the strips? I drew that. Pains-takingly, and when I hadn't updated in months. Just because I could. I don't cut corners because I'm lazy; I cut corners because I am just obsessive-compulsive enough to sit unshowered and unshaved in my underwear until every detail - details people will never see - has been lovingly rendered, and I need to protect myself from that. There are people who need me to be more than a hermit these days. Well, sorry about the huge pause. I haven't just been counting pixels before dawn, there have also been essays and homeworks. I have the rest of my life to draw cartoons for you, to make up for this slack behaviour, but I only have two months left before my course is finished. And then I'll need a job. Don't think of it like a newspaper, think of it as being like a TV show. Between seasons you have to wait five months or so while they make new episodes of your sitcom. Those writers and actors need to see their kids, you know what I mean? This is a simile that becomes increasingly compelling the more I think about Zero Punctuation. Hang on, this needs a subheading before I go on. Zero Punctuation A lot of people, including me, have commended and elevated this series of weekly reviews written, 'animated' and performed by a guy called Yahtzee as funny and deliciously snarky in equal measure. And it's true these videos are very funny and it's true the guy cuts through hype with the brutality and trenchant precision of a laser. Just watch this review for Mercenaries 2 or this review for Alone in the Dark and see for yourself, assuming you haven't watched all his videos and bought a Zero Punctuation t-shirt. Like I said, they're funny, aren't they? Ha-ha! Listen to the funny Englishman complain about the video games! He don't take guff from no-one. Yeah? He doesn't? Good, that's called being a good reviewer. Yahtzee is actually doing a lot more than that. Yahtzee isn't just a reviewer. Sometimes he doesn't review games at all. Yahtzee is a critic and long-time readers will know where I'm going with this. I've noticed a couple of times that one of the criticisms levelled at Yahtzee is his stubborn refusal to give a score at the end of his reviews and it seems blatantly obvious to me that he's not just doing that because assigning arbitrary mathematics to subjective experiences is fucking pointless. If I like a sandwich I'll tell you I liked it, I might even describe the way the mayonnaise tasted and the crunchiness of the salad. What I won't do is give the sandwich an 8.5. So, that's as good a reason as any not to give scores. But that's not why Yahtzee does it, at least in my opinion. When the criticism is at its most valid the point is made that as funny as the videos are they're pretty much useless as a consumer guide. If you want to know whether or not you should buy a game Yahtzee isn't very helpful - he is neither fair nor balanced in his approach to storytelling or gameplay, apparently preferring to nit-pick until the cows commute home. The Mercenaries 2 review seems like a pretty good example, actually. He says at the end that it all boils down to whether or not a game is fun - and really, that's all I care about before I make my purchase - but despite recognising the game as fun and therefore probably worth checking out the review comes across overall as overwhelmingly negative. He's always talking about the writing, or the conception, or the game design. He never compares games to other games except as a short-hand to better identify their genre to the uninitiated, choosing instead to judge them on their own terms. He'll talk about whether or not a game makes sense. Makes sense? Did Pac-man make sense? Do I need to know why I'm clearing Tetris blocks, in terms of a narrative? Shit, gamers don't care about writing. If I play a game and it has been written, as in by a writer, I am pleasantly surprised. If the writing is good I see this as the icing on the cake. But Yahtzee is operating on a different set of expectations. What I'm getting at is that Yahtzee is judging these games as works of art rather than as consumer products. Since the 18th century there has always existed an anxiety about the commodification of art - that a novel isn't just a work of art, it's also something you buy, which someone has written with the intention of selling and making money. That's why 'novel' was such a dirty word when they first cropped up - they were seen as populist and mercenary, appealing to the lowest common denominator, creating cheap sensation rather than focusing on a higher moral message. Because that's what sells. To a great extent the same anxiety exists today, which explains why a lot of people (including my own father) are convinced that J. K. Rowling must be a bad author just because she is a successful one. Then we have video games which are viewed entirely as a commodity. Their purpose, as far as consumers are concerned, is to entertain and high moral purpose is subverted where it is not avoided outright - hence games in which men are cut in half with chainsaw gus and cars are stolen. Fun! All the reviews written with this in mind, culminating with a recommendation of rent or purchase. Yahtzee side-steps all that - he is assessing these games as an emergent new art form. He takes for granted what a consumer sees as a recommendation and asks more of these things. Often the disparity between his expectations and the reality is the source of the comedy. However, we should recognise that Yahtzee's intent is ultimately noble. I'm getting the impression, looking around me here in the internet, that no-one is recognising that. No-one seems entirely sure what he's doing, only that it is funny and he is British. Let me tell you what he's doing - he's grappling with a new kind of medium for storytelling, a sort of cross between a film and a book in which you press buttons to advance the narrative instead of turn pages, in which characters develop as their actions are controlled by the audience. If this sounds tremendously exciting to you then you are beginning to grasp my point. Yahtzee is assessing this new art at a time before the language exists to do so. He is talking about A. I. and design flaws, problems which only industry insiders and hardcore nebbishes should be concerned with, in a way which is accessible to the uninitiated layman. If what he's saying sounds like a nit-pick rather than an obscure tangent that means he has succeeded. Yahtzee is not a reviewer. He is a critic, in the same way that Prof. David Lindley the Shakespeare scholar is a critic. I suppose we can't call him a literary critic, since the texts he analyses are electronic and played rather than simply read. Like I said, the language doesn't yet exist to describe what he's doing. But one day it will and Ben Croshaw will be remembered as years ahead of his time. He may not even know he's doing it but I've spent three years immersed in literary criticism, recognise it when I see it. Internet TV Anyway, I was talking about TV and the internet. Something else I hear often is Zero Punctuation being described as a webcomic when it most certainly isn't. It certainly is a series of static images strung together with words and it's definitely on the web,* but it isn't arranged on the webpage in a neat series of little panels. Then again, comics like Platinum Grit are arranged on image at a time using flash. If you put those together into a video file and threw in a voice-over instead of speech bubbles you'd end up with something structurally very similar to Zero Punctuation. So maybe the only difference between a video and a webcomic is a voice-over. Or maybe Platinum Grit is creeping into the liminal space between the two. Still, if someone looked at what I was putting out they wouldn't confuse it for a minute with what Yahtzee's producing. At the very least they feel like very different animals to me. Why then are people calling Zero Punctuation a webcomic? I have a theory, which is outlandish and needs explaining. Because they're both TV. I have long suspected this was the case but recently the subject has been dragged to the forefront of my mind by a recent episode of Webcomics Weekly in which Dave Kellet told Scott Kurtz he didn't think of PvP as a workplace comic because he perceives those characters not as co-workers but as a family. And that reminded me of a book I have on how to write sitcom (yes, I'm the kind of person who buys books on how to write sitcoms) which says something similar. It's called How to be a Sitcom Writer by Marc Blake and it's... just on the bookshelf next to me. This is what's great about being in my parents' house. Hang on, I'll find the right bit. Here we go, page 126:
In fact, the more I look through this book the more I can see how the majority of these sitcom tropes apply not only to PvP but also to all my favourite webcomics and to my own. You could take the same characters, the same situations, the same jokes and film them in a studio with hired actors - that would be the only difference, the means through which the story is told. Personally, I don't trust actors and directors not to fuck up my work so I prefer to do it all myself - that's the only difference. The difference between live action and cartoons becomes less obvious when you look at animated sitcoms like The Simpsons, and the difference between animation and webcomics becomes less obvious when you look at the PvP animated series. Or even Homestar Runner. I know it's not a webcomic but, again, I've heard it described as such. Because it's TV. It may be broken up into smaller chunks but Homestar Runner has captured perfectly the feel of Saturday morning cartoons, just as PvP has captured the feel of live-action situation comedy. Still don't believe me? Just look at Youtube. What else can you describe that as but a collection of people making their own TV. Can someone explain the difference between watching an episode of a TV show someone's put up there and any user-created content with the same production values? I know that's rare, I know quality control is non-existent on the internet, a fact which Youtube seems to emphasise somehow, but communities can pass round links to the gems we find sifting through slurry. We can have our water-cooler moments in journals and forums, we can reach more people than ever. Millions of people all sharing the same art, not based on what's on but based on what's best, the hierarchy cast off, meritocracy in full force - the air is almost revolutionary! And with more broadcasting networks providing their own free on-demand services, showcasing Youtube's greatest hits and appealing to their audiences for input the division between 'television' and 'internet' is rapidly blurring - soon it will be wholly imaginary. Even though Zero Punctuation is on-line and not on a television screen, it's nearest parallel is the TV show Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. You may have heard this before. When last I checked the comparison even crops up on ZP's Wikipedia entry. Let's be fair. Of course there are differences. For example, only part of Screenwipe is black and white animations against a yellow background. Charlie Brooker appears on the screen, filmed by men with cameras. And Charlie Brooker is providing a trenchant and funny look at the art and culture of television, not video games! And he doesn't talk as fast as Yahtzee. Um... and he doesn't have a hat. Okay, so they're both shows in which forms of entertainment are critiqued on practically the same terms, full of edgy jokes and swear-words, tortured visual metaphors, metahumour and blatantly false self-deprecating comments made by self-hating personas. But doesn't this go to show that Zero Punctuation is a television show? But people who can tell that there's something television-y about it call it a webcomic! That means, right, that the lexical fields of 'television' and 'webcomic' are overlapping. As someone who makes his own webcomic this is very exciting to me. People are talking about webcomics and (shudder) 'blogs' destroying newspapers. I don't disagree, I just don't think they're looking at the big picture. Webcomics and blogs are destroying television, too, it's just going to take longer before we see the effects. Why do you think The Daily Show is available on-line? Do you think they just like to share? It's because that ad-supported video link will one day be the only incarnation of the show. You mark my words, the expectations of genre are going to change. People will change the way the look at screens. I predict there will be fewer successes on a national scale since it's harder to be ubiquitous when people choose to pay attention to you and it takes fewer audience-members to earn yourself a decent living. What we're seeing now with this relatively small-time so-called 'community' of webcomic artists will explode and become something bigger than anyone (else) could have predicted. Me, with my locusts and honey out in the desert, I called it. *Does anyone call the internet 'the web' anymore? I thought that died around the turn of the century, round about the time people stopped Asking Jeeves. I wish I had been an internet cartoonist when the term 'webcomics' was unanimously agreed upon so I could have vetoed it. Bah. The Angry Video Game Nerd Now we're on the subject, I'd like to draw your attention to two television shows which you will never find on TV but which nonetheless are shows in every other way. The first, and last, is the Angry Video Game Nerd, certainly my least favourite out of the two and therefore I have much more to say about it. You can find it at Screw Attack, which you can find at Gametrailers. It's complicated. Anyway, the principle behind the show seems... tolerable. James Rolfe of Cinemassacre.com has created a perpetually furious, foul-mouthed, beer-drinking power nerd persona called the Angry Video Game Nerd. He reviews a game from a couple of decades ago, usually a badly-designed one, and we get to watch him try to wring some sort of entertainment out of it. There are some things about the conceit which work, at least on paper. Having watched a fair few of these videos it seems pretty clear that a lot of the games and consoles produced back in the 80s and 90s were broken ones - kids forked over their cash for games which were impossible to play because of reprehensible design choices and general sloppiness. Watching a grown man doggedly trying to play one of these is pretty funny, funnier if that man is unsympathetic, funnier still if he's taking it entirely seriously. One of my favourites is this episode where Rolfe reviews a game where it is physically impossible to get past the first screen. And a lot of what he's saying about bad design choices could be applied to modern games like Mercenaries 2 or Alone in the Dark. After all, selling a broken product is tantamount to theft and, y'know, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it and all that. These core ideas - these immortal virtues - are admirable, even noble. If you are forgiving or undiscerning there is something to be enjoyed here. Do not get me wrong. The problem, which you may already be perceiving yourself if you followed that link, is that Rolfe doesn't seem to get what makes his show fun. Sometimes he hits upon it by mistake, sometimes he doesn't. He's like the George Lucas of internet broadcasting. I can sum up exactly what makes The Angry Video Game Nerd entertaining by quoting the great Armando Iannucci:
The review of Dragon's Lair, therefore, provides some great opportunities to watch an angry nerd fail... and it is delicious. What isn't so great is the barrage of shit, piss and diarrhoea. Not just verbal references, either. We get to see Rolfe pretending to shit on things, his trousers down, his face contorted and then witness a brown substance fall onto his target from above. I know it's not real faeces - nominally my perception allows for brown goop which is not shit. But it's like the shower scene in Psycho. If you see a knife fall intercut with a woman screaming, a knife next to skin but not inside and fake blood run down the drain you will swear you saw someone being stabbed. I challenge anyone to watch the Angry Video Game Nerd shitting on something and think about chocolate pudding. It's just not necessary. We don't need to see him drinking either. Ooh! He drinks beer! That is only impressive if you are under the legal drinking age, which I will grant in America is any poor sod under the age of 21 so... let's start over and say the combination of shit, cussing and beer-drinking would appeal only to 15-year-olds. That's when I started drinking, anyway. I'm not opposed to vulgarity, not in the slightest. I don't have any notion of vulgarity. Not only have I spent all day singing the praises of Yahtzee and Charlie Brooke, I also feel that people make too big a deal about the seven words you can't say on television. I saw a review on Amazon.com which lamented Jason Robert Brown's stooping to 'vulgarity' in The Last Five Years, which is probably the best musical ever written. It's heartbreaking, surprising and funny all at once and the use of the word 'fuck' is a part of that. You'll have to buy the CD or take my word for it. Generally, I can explain exactly why swearing is funny and why is makes for good writing. Some of you will be familiar with George Orwell's six rules for writing, the first of which is "Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." Some people aren't used to seeing swear words in print, you can really subvert people's expectations with a well-placed swear-word. Better still, you can find new and inventive ways of expressing old sentiments. Everyone's heard "mother-fucker", how many people have heard "uncle-fucker"? It's just funnier. I would turn again to Yahtzee for any number of examples - one that springs to mind is the one in the Mercenaries 2 review I linked you to. You hear Yahtzee says the word "quaint" but there seemingly isn't enough room on the screen so he cuts out the middle and all you see is "QUNT". And then, like the best Zero Punctuation gags, it's gone just before your brain can do the work. That's the best way to use swearing in English - it has to be covert, almost subliminal, it has to get people to think about language, about how many letters are the difference between something you can say in front of your grandmother and something you can't. It's defamiliarisation, created by the juxtaposition of tones, the high-brow colliding with the low-brow. Both Zero Punctuation and AVGN are enjoyed by 15-year-old boys, the difference is Zero Punctuation can be enjoyed by adults as well. It's not about taste it's about intelligence in language-use. At its heart comedy is about expectation, language and surprise; that's something else I've learnt from my how-to sitcom writing guides. Basically, the structure of a gag is three beats long. The first two beats should lead you in one direction, creating expectation, and the third beat should subvert the sequence - that's what you focus on for your punch. And you create expectation through repetition. You can also surprise and entertain people by using language in unexpected ways. Don't swear if people expect you to swear or if you do don't swear in predictable ways. It's just not funny. It comes back to Orwell's rule: never use a profanity, blasphemy or other expletive which your Dad might use. Good swearing, swearing with hairs on its chest, is borne out of imagination and genuine emotion. It catches people off-guard. Good comedy and good writing both come down to using language in unexpected ways. That's why I have no problem with swear words in Zero Punctuation, because they're used in such a clever way. The Angry Video Game Nerd falls back on swearing when Rolfe seems to be lost for anything else to say or when he remembers he's supposed to be angry. Returning to the Dragon's Lair review like a dog returning to its vomit, we see him die and then go back to the first screen after everything he went through to get past it. That's satisfying because people love watching other people fail. Good so far. But then we just get the nerd sitting there staring at the screen. He slowly pauses and then drinks from a hip flask. It's funny, right, because of alcohol! Ho ho. That aside, world-weary despair in the face of futility is all right but he's clearly ad-libbing. Too many times in this obviously scripted show the words will suddenly dry up and we're left with these vanilla 'reaction shots'. Basically, Rolfe is relying more on his skill as an actor than his skill as a writer which in this case is not a good idea. So he's taken his drink. He shakes his head. "Man..." he says. So he's annoyed but laid back about it. "Fuck that shit." Oh, so he's meant to be angry? There will be moments when Rolfe will forget to be angry. He'll forget that he's created this trash-talking, beer-drinking persona and he'll just shoe-horn it in at the end. So after a fairly calm if somewhat pantomime reaction he suddenly starts swearing and pretending to be angry, just because it's the stupid premise of his show. Just dispense with the stupid persona, Rolfe! Especially when you're having to force out torturous tripe like "Man, fuck this game, man. Man, Jesus Christ I'd rather fuckin' 69 a grizzly bear while shoving King Kong up my ass." Dude, that doesn't even make sense. Why King Kong? Why up your ass? Worse still sometimes he'll review whole consoles in one sitting and there are no opportunities to see him toil in frustration. We just see glimpses and first impression of a handful of games. And some of them will be pretty decent and Rolfe will say "This is actually pretty decent." Well, you know what? If it's a good game you maybe shouldn't include it in your tour of "shitty games that suck ass". This isn't The Fair and Balanced Video Game Nerd this is the Angry video game nerd. Either be angry or reboot your fucking show as the James Rolfe plays video games and maybe he'll have a beer if he feels like it show. Cut the arbitrary special effects sequences where we see the hero cut the game in half with a lightsabre or some nonsense, cut the awkward swearing, cut the crap! The editing and pacing of this thing is tight, the core idea is sound. You have the makings of greatness here you just need a little more imagination at a script level, less hamming and gurning and fewer bells and whistles. Something stripped down, something more honest, something purer would be better. Occam's Razor, biatch. I Am Not Infected The second show is one I've only recently been turned onto by Kris Straub at Chainsawsuit. Because they actually made a chainsaw suit! Check out the first episode here. How can I describe I Am Not Infected? They've taken two genres which have recently enjoyed a new lease of life through documentary-style filming - sitcom and survival horror - and seamlessly brought them together into a single TV show. I'll go back to the 'meets' well, which is trite and hateful but better than the 'on acid' well for accessible similes. So yeah, I'll go with Diary of the Dead meets Arrested Development. Or Cloverfield meets Shawn of the Dead meets Penny Arcade. The webcomic comparisons extend even into the page navigation, which has a 'next', 'back', 'first', 'last' and an 'archives' button. It's interesting how the pacing reminds me so much of a four-panel gag comic too. I don't know how they're getting this made, I don't know where the money's coming from - all I know is that this is the best low budget horror sitcom I've ever seen with some truly incredible special effects. Unlike in the AVGN the effects, whilst by no means superior across the board, belong in the show because they serve the narrative and aren't simply arbitrary. I can't imagine it coming out of anywhere but the internet, at least not with the same reception. It is sublime and surprising. And as we've established, surprise = comedy. I don't want to alter your expectations too much and thus ruin sense of surprise you will feel when a seemingly modest Youtube-type affair achieves something so... I've said too much. Just watch it for crying out loud. Genetic Analogues This is probably my longest journal post ever but I suppose it's been a few weeks since my last entry. Okay fine it's been over a month. Don't worry about going away and coming back later to read more. Space it out over a few days, seriously. You're looking at a month's worth of ranting in one go. I've been at this for seven and a half hours now. Shit be cumulative, dawg. Anyway I would like to retract some of my previous insinuations in which I implied Tim "Cad" Buckley was a plagiarist. As we've seen just today there are demonstrable similarities between Zero Punctuation and Screenwipe - are we to believe Yahtzee is copying Charlie Brooker? He may not even have seen so much as one episode of that show. That's the sad truth of it. As much as we laud the specialness and originality of creativity the fact of the matter is that there are so many ideas to be had in this world. Sometimes inspiration will come to you and you'll realise six months in that it wasn't inspiration at all, it was a memory. You just remembered the Matrix. You've just created a Matrix rip-off. Accidentally. Worse still is parallel thinking. Two writers without any contact with one another will come out with the exact same take on a well-known phenomenon. It happens more often that anyone thinks. What is creation, then? Is it bringing something out of nothing or is it simply shaping crap into different crap, the same crap everyone experiences and which anyone can make just as well as you? It's not just writers, either. I'm sure you remember the 19th-century scientist William Perkin? He invented the colour mauve. No, really, he did. He discovered a new dye in 1856 whilst trying to make quinine out of coal tar and created what he called 'Tyrian purple' but which is better known as mauve. Then in 1869 he created a new type of red dye but a German scientist beat him to his patent by one day. Perfect example of parallel thinking. What are the odds that two men will come up with the same red dye and try to patent it in the same week? I've had some many ideas that turned out to already be other things I wasn't even aware of, or would later become things. I know no-one will ever believe me but as young boy I hit upon the idea for a book about a bespectacled boy wizard who rode a broomstick. It's pretty simple: I was a bespectacled boy, I thought wizards were awesome and I saw no reason why witches should monopolise flying brooms. This was years before the first Harry Potter book was even published. So, what happens when you don't accidentally make the Matrix but instead make something nobody reads? Well, look no further because it keeps happening to me. It's probably just me. I'll start by saying it's probably just me. I've spent the past three years on an English literature degree, I've been training myself to spot connections, similarities and possible inspirations across texts. Whole theses have been built on far more incidental similarities than the ones I'm about to draw your attention to. I'm just saying. In my world this is acceptable behaviour, I'm not trying to be a douche. Yeah, so the first one I noticed was in PvP where Brent is being followed around by this guy he doesn't know. Because I, y'know, fucking wrote them I immediately though of these two Fourth Floor strips. When I bump into readers these are the strips I get the most questions about and I will be the first to admit that they are both unfathomably weird. But weirdness and idiosyncrasy is the price you pay for originality, right? Well, it's only original until Scott Kurtz comes along and makes a toilet joke along pretty much the same lines. Great. Next came the video for 'If U Seek Amy'. The new Britney Spears song. I hadn't heard it until MSN Today helpfully sent me a link and there was something about it spelling out a swear word so I followed it up. It took me hours to realise she was saying "F.U.C.K. me." Anyway, even though 'Amy' in this context means nothing in its own right, it's just a sound, 'Amy' still seems to appear at the end of the video. At least, we can only assume. God knows what's going on. Why are photojournalists taking photos of a pie? Bugger me if I know. Any way, Britney suddenly has pink top, a blonde wig and a white skirt. She is perky, preppy with undertones of sexual promiscuity and insincerity. I'm not saying it's my Amy. The fact is that Britney herself went into inspiring Amy, so really I am in her debt more than she is in mine. I think it's more likely that if you create that kind of character she's going to always be blonde because that is the way of it and thereafter names like 'Amy' just jump out at you. Plus, if you're wearing a pink garment and looking preppy what else are you going to match it with? You have to wear white. It's just weird, all those elements coming together into a weird approximation of my cartoon character, like hitting upon the same red dye. We have matching pastiches. Lastly, there's this Shortpacked strip in which Robin hits her head (or has hit her head, we never see it) and hallucinates an encounter with Jesus. Kinda like in these two strips I drew last year. Even though Dave Willis's Jesus looks completely different to mine - he's gone for a more stereotypical white Jesus which in this day and age is a little racist if you ask me - but they both use colloquial speech, they both stand on the same side of the panel, they both explain that the character has suffered head trauma and that this is just a dream and they're not really Jesus. There's that glowing white light coming from the background. None of these elements is original in its own right. At all. I think I stole the white background from that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard 'dies' and in 'heaven' Q tells him he's God. You know, that one. And I am painfully aware that having the Lamb of Hosts appear in your strip is a webcomic cliché. So I tried to subvert it, hang a lampshade on it - and now another Dave has subverted it in almost the same way. What am I saying? Nothing. It's just weird. I told my friend Jason it gets to me because it feels like my originality is being diluted by these accidental infringements. Jase said that if anyone accuses me of plagiarising those more popular webcomics I can point them to the dates in my archives. That's cold comfort to me. Honestly, it doesn't matter if I got there first. Do you think the first guy to start saying 'random' incorrectly cares that he was there before it was cool and before jackasses like me got sick of it? Jokes and running gags depend repetition - if the same joke is repeated outside this site it only serves to weaken my comedy, to water down the surprise. When I called Tim Buckley a plagiarist I wasn't seriously suggesting he was raiding the Penny Arcade site for ideas, I was just saying it was irresponsible of him not to keep abreast of what other humorists in the same field were doing, that he was doing nothing to avoid parallel thinking. Well, that's bit me in the ass. It turns out nobody's keeping abreast of me. I don't think anyone copied anyone else. I'm not calling Willis or Kurtz hacks. The reality is that I'm probably a hack, that all three of us are drawing on common predecessors, some TV show me and Scott Kurtz both saw during the 90's or something. Dave Willis probably saw that same Star Trek episode. We call those genetic analogues. What they prove is that even when I thought I was being most inventive and original I was probably just copying something else I wasn't even aware of. Worse, it shows what a crashing non-entity I am in the world of webcomics. This hasn't happened because either of them have read my comic, it's happened because they haven't. I'll tell you what I told Jason: the only thing worse than having an idea be done before you get the chance to do it is having it done after you've done it and nobody caring. Jason's birthday Speak of the devil, it's actually Jason's birthday today. So, happy birthday, Jason! Jason is my oldest friend I'm not related to. He is essentially my brother, except from another mother. Different father, too. We're not step-brothers or anything. Jase, it's been 13 years of friendship. Thanks for holding me back whenever I was about to do something stupid, thanks for running with an idea with me when it might have been good and thanks for playing devil's advocate both times. Let's resign ourselves to another 13 years of being stuck with each other. Sex and Pancakes Posted 18:59 (GMT) 26th February 2009 by David J. Bishop
Another way to save money is to eat nothing but pancakes for 48 hours, which I did because this week it was Pancake Day. Of course, it's not called that in America because every day is Pancake Day over there. In celebration of the last day before lent (even though I won't actually participating in the subsequent fasting and repentance) I have now learnt how to make American style and English style pancakes and it is both a delicious way to fill yourself up and a dirt cheap way, too. It's mainly just flour and water with eggs, salt, pepper and a little bit of milk. I think pancakes will have to be a regular thing in my life while I am so poor. Some vile opportunists were peddling instant pancake mix. So it's both cheap to make and obscenely profitable. This would be for people who can't put the aforementioned ingredients in a bowl and stir them with a whisk. Really? Are you that lazy? You can't rotate your arm in a whisking motion? Was it crushed in an accident? Fine you will be spared the burning iciness of my wrath. Everyone else buying instant pancake mix is a chump of the highest order. What next, pre-peeled fruit? Self-microwaving ready meals for people too slothful to press buttons? Anyway for those obsessed with cataloguing what cartoonists have on their pancakes, I had mine with sugar and lemon juice and they were scrumptious. But they were all the more delicious because a) I made them myself and b) They cost next to nothing. You might be noticing a trend here. Coinciding with these difficult economic times is my running out of money. I'm on a pretty tight budget these days, having made all my money in the year the strip started. Now, three years later, there ain't so much to go around. It just so happens that the entire Western world is in the same boat. So any opportunity to eat or have fun that costs nothing is welcomed by me. Next Wednesday: whistling - the cost-effective way to enjoy music. My Lady-Love Posted 14:56 (GMT) 20th February 2009 by David J. Bishop
And, lest I forget, it has helped me draw this. Ha-ha! Yes! There is a new strip up! I don't care if we're running a Zebra Girl update schedule - I am actually updating! For reals! There were teething problems in January what with exams and dissertations and starting the new semester. And then there was the broken tablet in February. But let's put all that behind us! I've updated twice this year! Phew. Okay, we should be seeing some more strips sooner than later. I make excuses about my workload out of politeness - I have actually been drawing almost constantly since mid-January, I just don't have anything to show for it in terms of website content. Not yet, at least. Sometimes you have take time out to tinker and rework things, to step back in an attempt to perceive the whole and make a deliberate decision to redesign. It's time-consuming but I thought it would be a shame to come back after a hiatus without something to show for it. Last time I came back with redesigned female characters. The time before that I came back with knowledge of Photoshop. This time I have something bigger. Something so big I had to chop it up into a lot of little things and spoon them into the website one at a time, which took time but means the changes will not be so jarring. The saddest part? If everything goes to plan and I implement these mysterious changes just right you won't even notice what I've changed. Feel free to submit your guesses in the forum, which has been relatively buzzing with activity as of late. I'm going to draw another strip with my new special lady. R.I.P. Wacom Tablet Posted 15:51 (GMT) 8th February 2009 by David J. Bishop
The tablet has been a good friend to me through late nights and bleary-eyed mornings, through pencils, inks and colouring. It has helped me revolutionise the way I create the comic. At first I didn't get the most out of it - I messed about with it as one would play with a toy but after a while I came to the slow realisation that this tablet was capable of more than just tracing over pencil drawings but that it could create images far superior to those made with crude paper and rough graphite. So I recently took the plunge and shifted my method of comic creation to one wholly dependent on the Wacom tablet's functionality... just as it breaks. There will be a period of mourning, which will coincide with a period without any updates, then when my shiny new tablet arrives I will return, faster and more efficient than ever before. In Which The Cartoonist is Hunted by a Stranger Posted 10:48 (GMT) 1st February 2009 by David J. Bishop
Here's something else that hasn't happened in a while; I was harassed by a complete stranger! Okay, that might be an understatement this time. I was walking through the city centre in the early evening. It was about ten to seven. Then this guy, walking along in the opposite direction, stops me in the street. Except that he didn't stop me. I have lived in or around Leeds for nearly 13 years without being mugged precisely because when someone asks me for the time or says anything that would make me stop on the way to my destination I ignore them and keep walking. When someone asks for the time and they're wearing a watch that means it's time to get robbed. So regardless of what this guy wanted I said "Sorry I'm busy," and walked away as fast as I could. I had a similar experience with a man who asked me for the way to the train station standing outside the train station. Either he had me confused with a tourist information office, he was conducting a social experiment, he crazy or he was up to no good. But as I walked away from him he shouted after me "Don't walk away from me like I'm fucking diseased!" At the time I was unaware my walk had been implying that. I was reminded then of Crazy Bicycle Guy and decided it would be wise to keep my distance. Because I am David Bishop, this new guy also started yelling at me. Was he upset because I wouldn't talk to him? Was he insane? I couldn't hear what he was shouting over the traffic. But as I turned I saw that he was both a) Angry and b) Coming towards me Whatever he wanted to do, I wasn't going to stick around and find out. The problem with this plan was that when I kept walking I didn't have far to walk, since little more than five minutes away were a very busy set of traffic lights, I couldn't cross. Thinking back, I'm starting to suspect that maybe he planned this, that he meant for me to be cut off in this way at such a busy junction. The street was deserted apart from the two of us and not very well lit. This was becoming very scary. The man was getting closer. Turning back to the road, there was a car fast approaching. I did a split-second calculation and decided that it would be better to risk being run over than to risk whatever this guy was going to do to me. "Fuck it," I muttered aloud... and ran in front of the car. I was hit by the glare of approaching headlights but I made it to the pavement on the opposite side. But I didn't stop running. I wanted to stop but my legs were getting their orders from somewhere else now, the ancient and primitive part of me fuelled by instinct and adrenaline. So I ran all the way down the street, past a densely populated shopping centre and up to a busy and well-lit main road. I was safe, I thought. The only way he could catch up with me would be to negotiate the oncoming cars as I had done and then to run all the way down the street. Here, I thought, there would be too many witnesses. Waiting at lights again, I glanced over my shoulder. He was right behind me! The fucker had run all the way down the street to pursue me. This was no longer annoying, I was no longer being pestered, I was being chased. I have no idea why but that just makes it scarier. This is not conjecture. I was definitely being chased. Okay, full disclosure: I am paranoid about followed. It is one of my more ridiculous neuroses. If someone happens to be walking the same way as me I will begin to worry that they are following me, that I have been caught up in some sort of weird conspiracy with clandestine government-funded organisations. I will be the first to admit I am a crazy person. But like the paranoiac whom everyone is out to get, it doesn't mean that this person wasn't chasing me, it just means my worst fear was coming true. It wasn't just coincidence that he was right behind me - he'd been walking along in the opposite direction and had then turned around to run the way he had come to get behind me. Wherever he was heading, then, it was not as important as running after me. He had shifted the focus of his evening to a strictly David-centric one - if he had not meant to do me harm before he probably did now. What are the alternatives? If he was just asking for the time it wasn't worth this, surely? If he wanted directions he was only going to get himself more lost. I checked after this ordeal was over, I didn't drop anything. So I ran again. I turned left down another busy road and settled into a fervent jog. I checked over my shoulder. He wasn't behind me. Had I lost him? Well, no. He was jogging along parallel to me on the opposite side of the road! He was looking right at me! He was actually chasing me! I mean, what the fuck? I had my doubts before but this confirms it. I ducked right into the high street. It was full of shoppers on their way home, a sea of black-coated backs from which I was indistinguishable. I counted in my head how long it would take him to cross the road to follow me and then stopped running, settling into a brisk walk. Yeah, this was some Jason Bourne shit right here. As long as I kept walking and didn't turn around to see if he was following me, he'd never catch me. And you know he didn't because I am writing this now. I think we can all be grateful for that. Well, that was a harrowing ordeal. But today is another story. Today it is snowing! The rooftops opposite my window are white with snow! Swirling clouds of thick white flakes are drifting and tumbling to the ground in a deep crisp blanket. I love this city. More updates soon, hurry back. Hope, Change and a Load of Old Angry Rants Posted 01:10 (GMT) 27th January 2009 by David J. Bishop
There certainly have been a lot of changes in my life recently, the most important being my new girlfriend, but what's more I'm becoming increasingly aware that in four months' time I will have finally finished my course and the part of my life that I had all planned out will have ended. Since I was able to make my own decisions they have all led me up to this point, after which the train runs out of track and I will have to lay some more down pretty sharpish. Generally I can feel myself becoming a different person, the kind of person who's smart enough to know how foolish he is. So, the site is getting a shake-up too. It took me more than a few days but I've finally updated all the news archives and I've given the Rants Page a huge overhaul. No longer is it just five essays that for one reason or another I felt couldn't be made into news posts - now it's a sort of blog greatest hits collection - all the snarky comments about other cartoonists, all my film reviews, all the weird things that have happened to me over the past three years are lovingly reproduced for your convenience. You want to read my tirade against those stupid Subway ads? Just look in the 'Advertising' section. You want to read my review of Gears of War? It's right there under 'Video Games'. Everything unkind I have ever said about Tim Buckley is now collected in one place and the concentrated hatred may well melt your computer screen. Browse with caution. Reading through all that (largely adolescent) output made me realise how far I've come. I can remember the anger and hatred that was in my heart then. It's not gone, by any means. I am still an asshat. But there is less. Good bye, George W Bush - I will not miss you. In other news, I noticed whilst compiling the new Rants page that we haven't had the 'Weird Things Typed Into Google' feature on the home page for a while. Here's what people put in their search engines before they wound up here. Some of these are just bizarre sequences of words: the
fourth floor film - If had known
I would get so much traffic about this film I would have picked
a different floor as my setting. Take a Look at the Brand New Me Posted 15:18 (GMT) 2nd January 2009 by David J. Bishop
Well, I remember writing a list of resolutions for the site, a checklist of goals that I didn't necessarily have to achieve by the next year but had to make some kind of progress towards. All right, here goes: 1. Create at least another 80 strips by this time next year. Well, that didn't happen. I made that list on the 21st of January, so I'd have to bring out one comic a day from now until the 21st to hit that goal. But 60-odd strips is not to be sniffed out. Shame about the hiatus last semester. Stupid responsibility making me work when I could be having fun drawing cartoons. 2. Make some t-shirts. Well, there hasn't been a peep from the fanbase about t-shirts or garments of any kind. If a thousand people e-mailed me clamouring for merchandise I would acquiesce to their demands but as it is I don't think the readership is strong enough to support that kind of project. Plus I'm flat broke - well, actually I'm at the level of poor which people reach after broke. I am anti-rich, diving into a safe full of nega-coins the colour of nothing. I really don't have the money to invest in transforming Fourth Floor Comics from a hobby into a real business. 3. Make some new wallpapers. Okay, I totally did this one. I made three wallpapers. Not as many as I would have liked but certainly more than I expected. I sort of redesigned all the characters half-way through making a wallpaper for each member of the cast so now I have to draw the designs out again. 4. Increase the readership to 12,000 pages a day. Don't ask where I got that number from. Okay, I'll tell you - according to this one guy, that's the size your readership needs to be before Keenspot absorb you into their dreamlike Utopia. This was back in the day when Comic Genesis was called Keenspace, creating the impression that there was transition from Space to Spot - it was called being Spotted. Well these days I feel like I'd be better off making my own luck rather than waiting for some guy in a pinstripe suit to stop me in the street and tell me I have moxie. But 12,000 pages seems like a good milestone by which to gauge my success. Let's see how close I got. Google Analytics tells me the highest number of page views I got was in August: it was just over 17,000 pages. So that's 17,000 divided by 31... Wow, that's 548 a day. I just need to get 21 times as many readers. Last year I said I needed 38 and a half times more - I'm no mathematician but does that mean I'm doing twice as well this year as last year? Let's say yes. Well, time for a new and perhaps more modest list of resolutions for this year. The old goals remain in place - here's some stuff I'm going to get done by this time next year. This is the agenda for 2009: 1. Create at least another 80 strips. I'm really going to do it this time. Even if it does mean averaging three updates per fortnight. 2. Advertise the site on other websites. 3. Make wallpapers for the rest of the cast plus at least another five. 4. Increase the readership to 1024 pages a day. See, that's twice as good again. The advertising should help. 5. Leave Comic Genesis. I get free web hosting, they get to put their ads on my site and profit from my work. Cui bono? Web hosting is not worth this. As soon as I can afford my own site I'm out of here. How many of these things am I going to achieve by January 2nd 2010 (pronounced 'twenty ten', not 'two thousand and ten' thank-you-very-much)? All of them. Eggnog and Steak Posted 17:01 (GMT) 31st December 2008 by David J. Bishop
While we are on the subject, I am tremendously pleased to report that Father Christmas left Gears of War 2 in my stocking this year. It is an amazing game. Reading back over my comments about the last game I feel I might have been a little unfair. I described in detail the one-dimensional characters and the ill-defined world they inhabited but didn't go into much detail about what I liked about the game. Well, I felt at the time that those of you immersed in the world of video gamery as I am will be fully aware of what that game had to recommend it and the uninitiated would be indifferent. I thought that other writers, other points of view who would praise the combat and gore effects highly enough to render my input redundant. Well, if I can't describe chainsawing a monster in half in a way which is at once unique and accessible then I don't deserve a website. Okay, here's what I loved about Gears of War. It wasn't just that you could cut a Locust in half with a chainsaw. It's the sheer unalloyed brutality of every second of the game which is epitomised in such stunts. That mentality of "it's not enough to just shoot the bastards, give them a chainsaw" - which in turn leads to "it's not enough to hack at them with a chainsaw, let them feel every second of it as the camera goes nuts and blood sprays wetly over the screen before pieces of the enemy fly in all different directions" - that mentality is evident in every facet of the gameplay's design. I complained about how the characters were unsympathetic but I cannot deny that when the grizzled and perpetually sardonic hulk clad in futuristic armour you control takes cover you can really feel it as he slams against the wall - a jolt on the vibrating controller, a whoosh of the camera and suddenly it's you taking cover, not some prick you don't care about. That immediacy, that physicality is truly ubiquitous. The feeling of a relentless force of scaly monsters charging at you, the desire to kill said monsters, the satisfaction of running up to them, sticking a grenade to their backs and running away, watching chunks of torso spray across the architecture as the bemused victims meet their timely end - these sensations bypass the brain entirely and are instead delivered straight into the spinal chord. It's like having morphine injected into your ass - the subsequent euphoria is almost instantaneous. I'm not the person I was ten years ago or even five years ago... but a part of me still is. Part of me will always be a four-year-old on his first day at school, part of me will always be a nervous, sweating 13-year-old and part of me is 10 and just wants to see a lot of blood fly everywhere, the part that was on the edge of his seat throughout Michael Bay's Transformers. Gears of War taps into 10-year-old David, constantly. Every time I successfully pull off a head shot, my inner child raises his fist in triumph. Of course it's not a masterpiece but I am able to operate on different levels of sophistication. I mean, the writing in Bioshock appealed to the side of me that is 18 and familiar enough with early 19th-century philosophy to know what a categorical imperative is. Hell, putting down the controller and reading The Importance of Being Earnest appeals to the modern-day University-educated David. I can enjoy works of art that tax my knowledge and intelligence on their own level and even acknowledge that they work on a higher level to Gears of War. But I am not so discerning that I will turn my nose up at perfectly decent entertainment, especially when said entertainment offers such visceral thrills as sawing a monster in half with a chainsaw. On this level Gears of War 2 manages to improve on its predecessor by cranking the awesomeness up past 11 in as many ways as is possible. Now, not only can you chainsaw an enemy, you can engage in a thrilling chainsaw duel and if you happen to catch your enemy from behind you can perform what I can only describe as a chainsaw colonoscopy. You can pick up locusts and use them as shields or break their necks with your bare hands. Head shots work the same as before - with careful aim you can instantly kill an enemy with a well-placed bullet and watch their skull explode like an over-ripe melon but now instead of just falling over the rest of the locust's body sort of stays in the same place for a second, like he hasn't figured out he's dead yet, before crumpling to the floor. It is immensely satisfying. The thing that made the first Gears most compelling for me, and something I remarked on before, is the co-op campaign. There are disappointingly few games that allow you to split the screen and play with a friend but Gears of War was there for us - it allowed my brother and I to battle through its storyline co-operatively. The dialogue was our heated conversations as bullets filled the air, in the absence of any real story we created a sort of buddy movie narrative of our own - a story of two friends working together to defeat increasingly challenging odds, healing each other and watching the other's back. This fraternal bonding process is not something other players will have taken away playing the single-player campaign, this is something we created in our own minds and through our own shared experience. Yes, Marcus Feenix and Dom Santiago were unlikable thugs devoid of personality but we filled those empty vessels up with our own personalities - we made our own game within the half-scripted shell of Gears of War. It was only after my brother and I had finished the game and breathed deep sighs of relief that 10-year-old David sat quietly while my adult self contemplated what had just taken place. Plot-wise Gears of War is merely a series of loosely connected series of gun fights and action set pieces leading up to nothing in particular. By all means feel free to skip the next few paragraphs if you want to avoid spoilers. Delta squad's mission is to put the locusts down once and for all. With this in mind we are treated to a three-act red herring which leads precisely nowhere, after which time the real push for monster genocide can commence. Another two acts of chainsaw-fuelled brutality pass - only then can they put the locusts down once and for all. Except they don't. It doesn't work! Not only is this borne out by the existence of Gears of War 2, they fucking tell you it didn't work right at the end of the game! This voiceover comes in over the footage of the destruction the Gears have wrought, a lady's voice, and she says "They do not understand. They do not know why we wage this war." And that's when I thought to myself "Hey, I don't understand. Why do they wage this war? And who is Dom looking for? And what's the deal with Marcus and his dad? And are the locusts aliens from space or have they been underground all this time? And who the hell is this talking, anyway? Some sort of locust queen? I thought their females were blind, unintelligible berserkers." Then the voice says: "Why we will fight, and fight and fight... Until we win..." Powerful stuff. Then the voice adds "...Or we die." Ruined it. "And we are not dead yet." No, there's no recovering from that. Yeah, so the voice explicitly states that the locusts aren't dead. So all of this, this whole game, has been a hiding to nowhere. They did a thing and that didn't work. Then they did the real thing which was totally going to work once and for all and right at the end they say that didn't work either. Well, that was a complete waste of time. Side bar, voice-over lady: if someone is willing to fight and fight until they win, they're not going to sit back rationally in mid-sentence and add that, on the other hand, ostensibly, they could die. But, that said, they're not dead yet. That's not good writing, that's actually the opposite. It's writing so bad it undermines itself. You can't say "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed," and then add, "or not. Who knows?" Anyway, the toe-curlingly bad script punctuated with oblique references to fathers and people being searched for in lieu of storytelling was easily the worst part of Gears of War and in many ways Gears of War 2 is a drastic improvement. God damn it, there are moments where you actually feel for these guys emotionally, these men who but a disc ago were nothing more than aggressive slabs of ham with guns and frowns. There's actually a real story being told here, a sense of pacing and scale, of character and depth. That Baird is "the smart guy" is no longer just an informed attribute but an actual real facet of a (fairly) believable entity, one who says and does relatively smart things. There is a plot, which develops. I mean, I would expect this of a novel or an above-average film but you have to grade on a curve for new media - Gears of War 2 ticks a lot of the narrative boxes that culminate in a satisfying story. And those niggling questions from the previous game are all answered. First and foremost among the questions on my mind was "How come the locust aren't dead?" Turns out that underneath the locust tunnels which were obliterated was another layer of deeper, more ancient tunnels filled to the brim with even meaner monsters. No doubt if they are obliterated there will be a third even deeper level of even older locusts beneath for Gears of War 3 to tackle. This whole planet is like a giant gobstopper. How many licks does it take to get to the extermination of this stupid species? God knows. So, we can assume the locusts don't come from space and have been down there a long while. And that crazy voice? That was indeed the locust queen but whatever questions that raises about locust reproduction are swept under the carpet by the convenient absence in Gears 2 of berserkers. Yeah and also it turns out that Dom is looking for his wife. There, was that so hard? Why couldn't they have told us that in the first place - i.e. made Gears of War 2 the first game and not bothered with the cock-tease prequel? I mean, aside from chainsaw fun, what purpose does Gears 1 have when all it did was hint at a story that wasn't told until the second installment? If we're suddenly supposed to care about Dom's wife by the sequel the least they could have done is told us he had one. All we got was "I'm looking for someone." If the Gears series was a film Gears 2 would be the film and Gears 1 would be an incredibly flabby opening credit sequence best left on the cutting room floor. It's like the Star Wars prequels - if you want to tell the origin story of Darth Vader we don't need to see him as an innocuous little kid, you start your story at the point of interest, in this case the point at which he starts becoming Darth fucking Vader (which incidentally occurs at some point between the episodes One and Two, since by the start of the latter he's already an egomaniacal douche). Gears of War 2 is the point of interest - all its competence only serves to highlight the narrative uselessness of the previous game. And that's all it is - competence. This still isn't Oscar Wilde. When the exposition finally comes it's delivered in the clunkiest ways - voice-overs, speeches, question and answer sessions between characters à la My Best Friend's Girl. Poor Marcus Feenix is still the same guy he was in the last game. He doesn't care what the locust eat, he just wants to kill them. When Dom becomes frustrated and tearful about having lost his wife, Marcus looks like he doesn't get it, like he still doesn't understand normal human emotion. He's all like "Are you okay, Dom?" and Dom's like "I just need a second, okay?" He might as well add, "It's always the same with you, Marcus. There's more to life than killing monsters, all right? I miss my family! Jeez." Poor Marcus, he's in the wrong game. I didn't notice the huge exposition dumps in the first third until I sat my girlfriend down in front of the game. Whenever the characters started talking about the plot she said "Derp a derp a teetley tum" and I knew what she meant. There has to be a better, less predictable way to deliver this kind of information whilst at the same time not leaving us in the dark. Why didn't I mind before? Well, a) It was Christmas day and b) I was just happy to have answers. All of which lead me to the sad realisation that the difference between Katie and me was that I was invested in the story. Despite the heavy clunks of exposition falling around us, my brother and I still had a blast ploughing through the narrative. I'm not sure if the sudden presence of personality and humanity in our in-game avatars didn't detract from the sort of buddy cop movie scenario we normally cook up on the fly. We didn't need to invent motivations for our characters anymore, they already had them. Perhaps something was lost because of that. It's like in the fifth Harry Potter book where Harry stops being just a cipher through which we see the world of Hogwarts but starts to develop a personality of his own, and a very angry one at that. I found that annoying. I felt me and Harry were desynchronised in our responses to what was going on (and yes that was a deliberate Assassin's Creed reference - I'm on a roll!). I am being facetious. Chainsaw guns and explosions were Gears of War's raison d'etre and it could have been called Gears of War: The Quest for Pudding and the explosions would have been just as enjoyable. That the makers of the game acknowledged that more was expected of them and rose to the challenge, delivering something even remotely emotive and even more gripping action-wise is nothing short of a miracle. It's like if Mac Donald's brought out a gourmet burger made from 100% organic beef. Yes, it's still a burger but you wouldn't know it had come from the same kitchen as a big mac. And I think beef is the perfect context in which to view such things as Gears of War. Those of you shaking your heads in bewilderment as I describe my joy over visceral head-shots need to understand that this is me at my most primitive. I can't help it. Do you think my time would be better served reading a book? Do you think I can't see your point? But I don't see things quite the same way. Different art forms have different flavours and some are undoubtedly more nutritious than others. But Gears of War and its delicious sequel are steaks. One is better seasoned than the other but they are both just unhealthy, buttery slabs of rare beef steak, bloody as hell and appealing to everyone's inner troglodyte. What can I say? Sometimes it's nice to just knock back a beer with your bro and tuck in. Sorry, vegetarians. So that's what we've all learned today. Christmas tastes like eggnog and Gears of War 2 tastes like steak. Happy New Year! Giving is Better Than Receiving Posted 23:02 (GMT) 24th December 2008 by David J. Bishop
I think I like wrapping presents the least out of all Christmas activities. I keep losing the end of the tape on the roll, I get it stuck to my fingers, I always fail to cut enough paper to cover the presents and it's never cut straight. I always leave it too late. But now all I need to do is finish writing this post, set send and then curl up into my warm bed for the best of all nights: the Christmas eve slumber, full to brim with excitement, anticipation and joy. But this year more than ever my eagerness is over the presents that I have bought my family: I can't wait to see the looks on their faces when they see what I have given them. I have spent hours I could not afford and money I do not actually have bringing these presents together under one tree and I couldn't be happier at the prospect of them finally finding their rightful owners. I'm afraid your present, the festive comic, may be a little late. But let's not worry about that! Let's have a glass of sherry, sit down to our glistening roast turkeys and hand brightly-coloured parcels out to each of our loved ones. Now before I climb under the covers I must tiptoe through the sleeping house with these presents like good old Saint Nicholas himself and leave them under the Christmas tree for my brother and sister to find. What more is there to say? To all a good night! It Really Is That Fucking Bad Posted 02:19 (GMT) 14th December 2008 by David J. Bishop
Yes, My Best Friend's Girl is that bad. I don't hesitate to call it one of the worst films ever made. Not just bad by the standards of modern-day mainstream cinema. I mean it's up there with Batman and Robin, Catwoman, Battlefield Earth, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever and fucking Gigli. Ed Wood would have washed his hands of this turd. We know that during the film-making process there are checks in place, that greedy suit-wearing executives oversee the proceedings to bottom-line things and make sure that the project earns money. Yes, these men are soulless douche-bags who stifle the creative process but they also stifle the kind of insanity that led to Bride of the Monster and Manos: The Hands of Fate. So when we describe a film as 'awful' or 'terrible' what we really mean to say is that it's mediocre or lacking imaginative spark. But sometimes even in this environment the impossible happens: a genuine B-movie falls into your lap, a film so bad that it becomes painful to watch. My Best Friend's Girl is just such a film. For a start, this film is ugly. It's dark and grainy and contains far too many close-ups of Dane Cook's grizzled face. Was that too harsh? How can I explain the revulsion I felt towards Dane Cook's screen presence during this film? I mean, this man is considered handsome by some I have no doubt. It's just that here in the world of My Best Friend's Girl he looks tired and drawn, like he hasn't slept in three days. Also he is supposed to look like a tough guy or a dangerous bad boy or something - which manifests itself as not shaving, wearing obscene shirts, smoking, getting his cock out in public and generally looking and acting like a crazy homeless man. A certain special someone I saw the film with (my girlfriend Katie who is also my girlfriend!) thought he looked like an ape. I understand where she's coming from, having recently re-read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The ape-like Mr Hyde is described as inspiring a "haunting sense of unexpressed deformity" in all who see him. That's the vibe I got of Dane Cook. So, yeah, too many close-ups of that, whatever the fuck it was. Second of all there is no plot. The premise is that the stupidly-named Dusty has broken up with his girlfriend Alexis so he hires the improbably-named Tank to take her out on a date and show her such a shitty time that she runs back into Dusty's manipulative unlikable arms. Tank, as it happens, is a professional bastard who does this a lot - men hire him to give their ex-girlfriends a little perspective by pretending to be a horrible person. After a night of what amounts to psychological torture they come running back to their relatively lovable guys. It's called a Tanking. Did you see what they did there? If you laughed out loud at that and slapped your thigh with mirth then you will absolutely love this film, or you would have done if I hadn't just spoilt the best joke in the whole God-damn picture. For reals, that's the best they've got. We never find out what the boyfriends who commission their Tankings did to be dumped in the first place but if I had to guess I would say war crimes, maybe selling drugs to primary school children, because Tank's treatment of these women is appalling - aside from whipping out his knob in a restaurant he also feeds them dogs without them knowing, deliberately vomits all over the floor, angrily shouts at an imaginary ex-girlfriend about getting her and her sister pregnant. Disgusting, extreme shit. Not subtle. It's not really played for laughs that much, either. We don't get to see Tank do that much Tanking and when he does it's just stomach-churning. Watching one person abuse another is only funny when it's surprisingly clever or cleverly surprising (watching a man vomit is predictably stupid) and when we don't sympathise with the victim. But no satirical lens is applied to the woman we see Tank mistreat (I couldn't bring myself to type "we see Tank Tank"). We don't hate her, we just hate him. It's like watching a home video made of a school bully beating the crap out of someone who reminds you of yourself at that age - your sympathies are going to lie with the victim. This isn't Bill fucking Murray in Groundhog Day misanthropically railing against a bland and stupid world prior to some heart-warming and therefore equally entertaining moment of redemption, this is just Dane Cook being paid to be obnoxious - both within the film and in real life, if you think about it. The Tankings - the only imaginable draw of the film - are aggressively, perversely unfunny. Yet they wheel Tank out as if we're supposed to get goosebumps when he's on screen, like we're rubbing our hands together with anticipation at the prospect of guaranteed comedy gold. Barney Stinson he ain't - when he isn't relentlessly making your fists itch with a hatred that threatens to burn through the screen and into the wall behind Tank is just boring. Forgive me if I have given you the impression that Tank is a one-dimensional character. Within the first five minutes of the film we find out that actually Tank cares about the couples he is helping to reconcile and is frustrated by the relentless douchebaggery of the men he helps out in such an underhanded and mercenary way. He's an asshole with a heart of gold! This is what I mean when I say there is no plot - what should be a 90-odd-minute arc of characterisation and exploration is thrust into our faces before the opening credits finish rolling. It seems the writer was so terrified that we might miss this kinder, gentler side of Tank that he broadcasts it right at the start. We see him crying watching Ghost in, like, the very next scene. The writer takes us for even bigger idiots than he is, which we are not. Yeah, so if you've watched the trailer you know that Tank takes Alexis out at Dusty's behest but instead of scaring her away he fucks her. Then they keep fucking. Will Dusty ever find out? Will Alexis and Tank consider that their feelings for each other might run deeper than just sexual attraction? God, if you can't guess should I just say it? When you tell people about a film they haven't seen you either just tell them the set-up for the main drama or you tell them what happens for, say, the first half of the film. Anything beyond that is spoiler country, right? Right, so on that basis I can tell you that yes Dusty does find out that Tank and Alexis have been doing each other. The drama reaches its crisis-point when Dusty storms into Alexis' house and sees Tank carrying her down the stairs... you know, in a meaningless fuck-buddy kind of way. This is the big twist right, when the whole deception that initially fuelled our story comes crashing down and everyone falls out, the end of Act Two in the Three Act Structure? No. I checked my watch. Only about half an hour had passed. This is the 'Tank is an asshole with a heart of gold' thing all over again. That kind of dramatic tension needs building up and exploring and - in what is supposed to be a comedy - exploiting for comedic value. Shit, take your time people, we have all night! Be subtle, seduce me. Yeah, so after about half an hour the film runs out of plot. It's the narrative equivalent of premature ejaculation. What follows is a two-hour meander to nowhere in particular. People do things - we don't know why. Tank goes to see his dad but it turns out his dad is a) Alec Baldwin and b) An even bigger douche than Tank, only without the heart of gold. Again, we don't know why Tank's dad behaves this way. We don't even know why Tank is visiting his Dad - is it for advice? He doesn't get any and nor does he need any, he already knows how he feels about Alexis - he tells his father as much. You get the feeling that everyone is just wandering around killing time. If I was sitting with a screenplay like this spread out in front of me this would be when I would pick up a pair of scissors. Alec Baldwin's character? Completely irrelevant to the plot. He can go. The last forty five minutes of the film? Bye-bye. But then where do you stop? Once you realise how much of the story is irrelevant to the plot it soon becomes clear that almost everything is irrelevant to the plot. Basically, there is no plot. God, there's nothing worse than realising within the first forty minutes of a film that there is actually no plot, that what you are watching is a badly stitched together patchwork of beats the writer saw in other, better films. He saw that they worked, he didn't realise exactly why but he knew he wanted to do something similar. It's kind of like watching the musical episode of Buffy, except instead of spontaneous show tunes the characters keep stumbling into hollow facsimiles of romantic comedy tropes. The meet cute, the argument, the running through the rain to tell somebody something important, the hero overhearing a home truth, the man falling down - they're all there just without any sense of timing, story-telling, heart or really any fucking reason to be there at all. These are separate chunks from better stories, stolen, cut up and then cack-handedly sewn up into a single creature, a lumbering abomination with two many arms and not enough eyes, by idiots. Watching this twisted, wretched thing, this shallow and mindless mockery of life - the narrative of My Best Friend's Girl - lumbering towards a conclusion is frustrating. It's like we all know where the door is but the wretched monster is too stupid to figure it out, so you have to just watch it walk into all the walls before it finally lucks and out stumbles to the exit and you're left thinking that it could have got there a whole lot sooner. Thirdly, there is no script. I'm not sure who to blame for that one, more on that in a second. The dialogue, such as it is, consistently does what every novice writer is told not to do. Dialogue is not there to advance the plot. It is not there to deliver exposition. In a film you provide that information visually because cinema is a visual medium. It's the old, slightly confusing adage of 'show don't tell'. The script in My Best Friend's Girl teeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllssssssss. Fuck. Me. Hard. It tells so much. You will not believe how much it tells. Like, "After all, we are cousins." "Yes, but not blood-related." Who the fuck says that? Or "How was your three month leave of absence from work?" (This is how we find out that three months have passed. What, did they lose part of the film? I mean, later on when another three months have passed it comes up with text saying 'Three Months Later') "Thank you for coming with me to this shop where we are buying a dress for my sister's wedding next week." How about a character doing something confusing followed by a fifteen minutes scene in which another character interrogates them about why they did it. Say Tank fucks a dog and then pushes a clown out of a window and into a bath full of snakes. That never happens in the film, it's just an example. I made this whole thing sound too entertaining, now. It's so hard to think of things you would never want to see, the kind of things you see in this film. I would actually pay good money to see Dane Cook fuck a dog and push a clown out of a window, into a bath full of snakes. So let's say he does this. Then we're treated to a lengthy Q and A which goes a-little something a-like a-this: Alexis: Why did you fuck that dog? Tank: Because I heard you say something before and I freaked out. Alexis: Well, why did you push that clown out of the window? Tank: He said something unkind about you that no-one could hear but me, not even the audience. Alexis: Okay, so why snakes? Tank: Because my father Alec Baldwin told me to put snakes there. Alexis: Wow, this would have been some useful information to deliver beforehand so the audience knew how to feel about what was going on at the time. Why withhold this stuff for no reason except to be annoying but show you crying watching Ghost right at the start? You get the idea. This is the role of about 90% of the dialogue in My Best Friend's Girl - to deliver some clunky exposition at just the time we need it least. The rest of the time it's just telling us how we're supposed to feel about characters. Stuff like "You're a good guy," "You're my best friend," "Dad, I've met this girl and she's smart and fun and strong-willed," and "You are pretty smart." We never see these people do any of those things, they never demonstrate any of these characteristics up there on the screen. Here's what we do see of the characters: Dusty? Annoying. That is his only character trait. Alexis? She's an even bigger penis than Tank because she, like Alec Baldwin, has no heart at all. She's just a bitch. I'll put that down to Kate Hudson's utter inability to portray a human being convincingly. Tank? A fucking bastard who I want to die, no matter how hard he cries watching Ghost. Need I remind you that Hitler was a fan of Charlie Chaplin films? It doesn't suddenly make me sympathise with Nazi politics (and yes I employed the Reductio Ad Hitlerum, this is a Dane Cook movie for Christ's sake and I needed a powerful psychological shorthand, human language is only capable of conveying so much). This kind of "Alexis is smart", "Dusty is a good guy" horse shit is what we call an informed characteristic. The writer decided that this person would be, say, paranoid but had no idea how to demonstrate paranoia so instead everyone talks about how paranoid they are. Constantly. The writer even keeps telling us what to think about Tank after we've already seen him being an asshole. Everyone keeps telling Tank that he is an asshole. Let's not be coy here - the writer is very self-consciously telling us that he is an asshole. In precisely those words. Over an over again. About 15 times. I lost count of the number of times he is described as an asshole. He even describes himself as an asshole. Not bastard, prick, jerk, wanker, toss-pot, douche-nozzle, cock, penis, ass, jackass, asshat, shit, toe-rag, blackguard, fucktard, rogue, knave, anus, oaf, git, knobhead, fucker, shit-fucker, mother-fucker, bitch or dick-head. Just asshole. Am I supposed to believe that a professional writer couldn't think of any synonyms for the word 'asshole'? Come on! If you doubted me up until now, you must doubt no more. We have to be in B-movie territory with that point alone. I haven't seen Santa Claus Conquers The Martians but I can imagine that even the writer of that sorry mess had access to a thesaurus. Check this shit out - it's a free online thesaurus! All you need to do is own a computer or know someone who owns a computer, or failing that all you need to do is to have opened a book in your life or to have met a human being. Instead it's: "You're an asshole," "Leave me alone, asshole!" "What an asshole," "I'm an asshole," and even, I shit you not, "We get it already! You're an asshole!" That last one is an exact quotation from the film. Uh... asshole. This wasn't just a problem on a word level or an overall plot level. Individual scenes just sort of ended halfway through. No beginning, middle or end just an in media res opening a sprawling middle and then nothing. The scenes slowly grind to a halt as the actors run out of words to say. The actors just sort of stand there, dumbfounded. They have been in enough films to recognise that the tensions and emotions their characters are supposed to be feeling have not reached any kind of resolution. So they sort of gurn at each other and flail their arms, desperately trying to communicate the rest of the scene through pantomime alone. This doesn't just happen once, it happens throughout the vast majority of the film. After Dusty has found out what Tank has been up to (the first time) he confronts him about it and says: "Do you have anything to say for yourself?" and instead of words we get a pregnant silence in which Dane Cook tries to communicate as much as he can with no fucking words to say - it's like the film-makers are walking on camera and saying "Sorry, folks! We didn't write any dialogue for this part either!" That kind of fucking thing happens all the way though. In the cinema I was in a state of despair. It has always been a dream of mine to be a professional writer - and here was a guy who had lived my dream and who didn't deserve it. This was the worst writing I had ever heard. I thought my ears would start to bleed. Here was a man who had no idea how human interaction worked, how story-telling, scene structure, character or love itself worked. Here was a man who did not even know that there is more than one way to say 'asshole'. I went onto IMDB to look this guy up. Jordan Cahan. I will remember that name for the rest of my life just so I can despise it. I didn't spot it in the credits. Maybe that's because they took his shitty little script and abandoned it. IMDB informs me that the director encouraged the cast to improvise their lines, sometimes deviating from huge chunks of the script. Well, fuck. What am I supposed to think now? Whose fault is this God-awful film? Is that terrible line of dialogue the invention of Jordan Cahan or Kate Hudson? I got the feeling throughout that whoever wrote this sack of vomit was not actually a writer. Well, Kate Hudson is definitely not a writer so this makes a lot of sense to me. But how far did the madness reach? Did the director just approach Hudson and Cook and tell them, "Okay, in this scene Tank is an asshole and Alexis is drunk," followed by a series of plot points? Is that why the dialogue always consisted of "You're an asshole!" "Well, you're drunk!" followed by the characters just explaining the plot point by point? What the fuck are they doing ad-libbing anyway? What's wrong with having a script? I mean, sure there's no script in real life but I thought we had abandoned realism when the professional sociopath with a heart of gold falling for His Best Friend's Girl first made his hateful appearance. This whole scenario is intensely stagy and artificial - that's not necessarily to the detriment of the thing. Real life is largely boring and uneventful - our minds just switch off for those bits. Seeing those bits writ large (or not writ at all as it were) before our eyes just emphasises the boredom. The role of good writing - and art as a whole - is not to reproduce reality exactly but to represent it in such a way as to convince us that it is real whilst at the same time entertaining us. By asking Kate Hudson and Dane Cook to make up their own words the director is just asking them to write the script, as they go along. And it turns out that they're shitty writers. Deeply shitty. Hell, I'm terrible at improv. I like to sit and take my time, think of the best words in the best possible order and then rewrite and edit the result until it is polished and funny. BECAUSE I'M A WRITER! If you grabbed me in the street and said: "be funny" I would fall apart. Perhaps accomplished, intelligent actors like Stephen Fry or Ian McKellen - people who are witty, quick on their feet and who could have been or are writers as well as actors - could have thought up comedy gold on the spot but those people are not Kate Hudson, Dane Cook or Jason 'American Pie' Biggs. In retrospect the film's arduous attempts to get to the end of a scene with all the drama sorted out and ultimately to shuffle to the end of the film shambolically tripping over as many rom-com clichés as possible were perhaps more the result of mediocre performers being over-estimated by an imbecilic director than an incompetent writer.Then I think to myself, how bad must the original script have been for this to have been the more favourable alternative? Even with a more imaginative cast I don't think gritty realism is really something anyone wants from a romantic comedy. This isn't the Blair Witch Project for fuck's sake. At one point I turned to Katie and said: "How do you make a film? Step one, you start with a script. What's wrong with these people?" Out of the entire film-making process the cheapest part has to be the writing. How much more would they have had to spend for a polished, well-written screenplay? Not a screenplay written by someone with brain damage, not a screenplay you have to write on the spot with ill-equipped and uncomfortable actors. A real screenplay. I would have done it for free, if only to save the world from My Best Friend's Girl. After n number of false endings, pseudo-endings and plot threads running out of tension and momentum literally hours before the credits were set to roll, after all this, it faded to black and we got the words: 'Three Months Later'. I slumped all the way down in my seat and sobbed a little. Another ending? How long do they have to drag the ordeal out before it becomes sadistic in its pointlessness? Why not just have Dane Cook hum tunelessly directly into the camera for fifteen straight minutes? I couldn't take it anymore. I didn't know who was doing this to me but I wanted to scream at them, "Do it to Julia!". Three. Months. Later. You know, forget the fact that the film has already jumped forwards in time and only told us through clunky and obscure dialogue through which only a person paying close attention could quickly piece together that months have passed since the last scene. Forget all that - this time you get to find out that three months have passed. Not two months, not four. Three. Because this story could not possibly be resolved in a shorter timeframe. It's such a slap in the face because the film really could have ended after just half an hour. Actually, you could have ended it after the first five. I'd go with the latter, because it is shorter. Even after the credits roll there's still a slew of questions left unanswered. Like, what exactly is the function of Alec Baldwin's character? Seriously, did he just wander onto the set that day and you thought why the fuck not? If Tank really is such an asshole then why does everyone at his place of work love him? Those fuckers are lining up to give him high fives. And why do all the ladies love him? There's an implication that hot girls - apparently ones with bags of self-esteem - would like nothing more than to jump his grizzly bones. If being a unlikable wanker is such a turn-on, surely that negates the whole fucking premise of this film, that all women prior to Alexis have reacted badly to Tank's behaviour? Plot holes? As we've established already, this is just one big hole - a vacuum - with tattered things that perhaps to a fevered imagination could be described as plotesque floating around in this cold gulf. There is a small scene after the credits which answers one question - what happens to the two characters I cared the least about in what amounts to a veritable conga line of one-dimensional puppets I didn't give a solitary shit about. What happens to these two people I won't name because of spoilers? They are paired off. It seems arbitrary, since they only have one character trait in common but actually both characters have only one character trait (besides being annoying, a universal characteristic in this film) so maybe this counts as true love in the world of My Best Friend's Girl. Of course, I already knew what would happen to those characters. As soon as the second of the two was introduced Katie leaned over to me and said "They're going to pair her and that other guy up at the end. You wait and see." And as soon as she pointed that out it became blatantly clear not only that she was right but also that because she was right, because we were watching a film so ham-fisted in its storytelling that you can predict everything about the end after fifteen minutes, because of this we both knew precisely what calibre of film we were up against. We should have just walked out at that point but now we were invested - we had to see if she was right. And she was. I should just tell you the spoiler - the film spoils itself by flagging up everything which will come into play later, like a stripper showing you a photo of her tits before the show begins. Katie and I played a game of Predict the Next Plot Point all the way through. We also amused ourselves by comparing Dane Cook's face with that of a chimp and with an elaborate in-joke in which Kate Hudson's character is played by one of the hobbes from the excellent Fable II. You see, I forgot Kate Hudson's name in a conversation we were having about seeing the shitty film. I called her Kate Hobson. Which logically led us to think how funny it would be if Kate Hudson was a hobbe, a vicious goblin-like creature with sharp teeth and a vicious but child-like mentality, and how it would probably make for a much better film than the one we were about to see. And we were right. A typical exchange between Tank and the hobbe Alexis would be: Tank: I would kick you in the ass, but my foot might get sucked in. Alexis: Blah! Grrrr! Dah! A much funnier retort. We also enjoyed saying "Arec Bawdwin" in the style of Team America every time he appeared on screen. He was certainly there for no other purpose as far as I was aware. See? This film is so terrible you have to make your own fun just to survive it. It's a true B-movie that benefits the most from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. The trailer for My Best Friend's Girl is itself a masterpiece of film-making, actually: it manages to sculpt from the sea of unwatchable footage something watchable. You would be forgiven for thinking that the film might have entertainment value, even if it wasn't actually funny. It's like that mountain made from mash potato in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Only with shit instead of potato, but the mountain still looks edible. Anyway, the trailer instructed me to "get Tanked" and that phrase served two purposes: 1) It meant that from then onwards my girlfriend would refer to the film as simply Tanked, mainly because of the absurdity of a character whose name is also a verb but also because that's a much better name for what we watched, because 2) It defined the entire film experience. Little did I know I would get Tanked. A Tanking is supposed to be a traumatic emotional ordeal, an evening of raw psychological abuse after which, in the words of Tank himself, "Your brain will be rocking back and forth in the shower for a month". And that's exactly what this film is. Most importantly, at the end of the evening I hated the party that had subjected me to this Tanking and, like Tank's dates, I never want to see them again. Dane Cook, Kate Hobbeson, Jason Biggs, Jordan Cahan, Alec Baldwin, fucktard director Howard Deutch (more like Howard Douche): if any of you bastards dares to make another film ever again, or even go near a film camera, I will hunt you down and beat you to death with your own legs. To be honest, I would walk fast by security cameras just in case. That goes double for you Kate Hobbeson because you were already in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, you used up your second chance on that. Count yourself lucky. Right, I have now officially spent more time writing about that perfect shit-storm of a film than it took me to watch it (and probably more time than it took Jor-dan Ca-han to 'write' it). I'm going to have a shower and cry. P.S. It's only called My Best Friend's Girl and not Tanked because of that song 'My Best Friend's Girl' which they use in the trailer and three times during the film. There should be laws against this sort of thing. Let's Not Be Pedantic About Spelling... Today Posted 02:19 (GMT) 1st December 2008 by David J. Bishop
Here is what Nialls did: in response to some sort of challenge he made a list of all the webcomics he reads and then assigned each one to a significant landmark in his home town of Stanley in Australia. Then he made a map and went all over town putting post-its in these key locations. I say significant landmarks - this is a town in Australia I have never heard of which looks pretty small in all the maps: significance is relative. Anyway, each post-it says "This place reminds me of ______ _______." and each one is carefully tucked away somewhere in Stanley. It's all pains-takingly documented here. Did you know he ate M&Ms and listened to Angus & Julia Stone whilst on this mission from God? It was ampersand-heavy day. Anyway, by now I think you can guess where I'm going with this. The list of webcomics Nialls enjoys reads like a who's who of big webcomics players (bearing in mind that to some extent significance is relative in webcomics too). He's got Mega Tokyo in there, Shortpacked, Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Questionable Content, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Octopus Pie, Dinosaur Comics and of course PvP. There are some of my regulars missing and there are some on the list that I must admit I've never heard of but right on that list, rubbing shoulders with the big boys, is Life on the Fourth Floor. I understand that many of my readers also read other comics, I just never realised that people who read other comics also read mine. This was my first time seeing it that way around. And all these titles were treated with equal importance. He didn't leave me off the list because of my poxy 158-comic archive and save his post-it quest for more worthy strips. He made his map and he put LotFF on it. That is strangely humbling. Here's
what he wrote about Fourth Floor: I chose the Stanley Hotel
for this one. It’s about the only building with four floors
in it. This is poetry. It was when I read that part that I started to wonder at the size of Stanley if the Stanley Hotel is the only building with four floors. Maybe there was an earthquake there recently that knocked down all the taller buildings. On the other hand if Stanley really is such a small town that just makes this narrative of website-mapping richer - it's a small town being shaken up by webcomics, like Footloose but with cartoons. Nialls or Niallsb or whatever your name is - thank you for considering me as equal of your crazy post-it challenge as PvP, thank you for reading the strip and for expressing your readership in such an idiosyncratic way and thank you for seeing the Stanley Hotel and thinking of me. It's nice to know that my site isn't just floating out there in some 'cyber space', that is is anchored to a single place, a single hotel. It's nice to think that there's some corner of a foreign lodge that is forever England, specifically the one behind a potted plant. And it's also nice to know that it reads: "This place reminds me of forthfloorcomics.comicgenesis.com". Yeah, that's why it took me eleven months to find out what Nialls had been up to. Bless his little cotton socks, he's only gone and spelled the address wrong. Thanks anyway, mate. It's the thought that counts. Short Answer? Amnesia. Posted 16:07 (GMT) 24th November 2008 by David J. Bishop
I could paint a picture of myself being buried under an avalanche of work but being an English literature student makes the concept of 'work' a good deal more nebulous. For me work consists of reading lots of novels and poems, something I used to do for fun. Of course all the fun is sucked out like so much squirty cream from a can as soon as things have to be read by a deadline but from a distance it could be on a par with playing video games for a living or tasting ice cream professionally. My life consists of pottering about, keeping a clean and tidy flat with a well-stocked fridge, translating a bit of Beowulf from the original Anglo-Saxon, reading a bit of Oscar Wilde and generally thinking deeply about things - this is the bread and butter of my career, it's all preparation for when the shit comes down and I have to write a seven page essay about sensation fiction or a three hour exam about masculinity in the 1860s. My job is to have thought of something to say by then. Could I think whilst drawing a comic strip? Maybe. What else has been consuming all my time? Well, I got a pretty bad cold last week. More than just a little sniffle, too - a full blown viral contagion which left me without a voice and only a hacking cough, running nose, soar throat, aching head, severe temperature and, yes, even hallucinations in its stead. This beast was infectious, too - I managed to spread it to six other people just by being in the same room as them over a single weekend. I have been known in the past to exaggerate my state of suffering somewhat, suffering more than any ailment from that special hypochondria known to experts as 'man flu' but this really was as bad as I'm making out, if not worse. I was bed-ridden and I couldn't even enjoy it - lying in bed was sweaty torture, I couldn't even think straight. I was disorientated and useless. What do hypochondriacs do when they really become ill? Do we doubt our illness, wonder if this too might be our neurosis jumping on a runny nose as being pneumonic plague? On the contrary - we relish it. I am happy to say that for the past week, rather than doing any of my pressing storybook-reading, dissertation-writingor comic-drawing, I have been wallowing in my misery. But that's just one week out of two months. What else has been keeping me away? Well, I've been getting out there and seeing human beings - talking to friends, drinking with other friends, going to parties hosted by people I don't know and talking to complete strangers. I have been playing hard and I make no apology. And here's why - I spent five months as a complete shut-in, doing nothing but updating this comic two and sometimes three times a week and it got a lot of comics drawn and a lot of new readers were brought in. But it didn't get a lot of new material written. I think maybe that's because for my comic about people in their twenties, about living in a flat, about social interactions and relationships to be a success I should really experience being in my twenties, live in a flat with a load of other people in their twenties, interact socially and talk about relationships first hand. When I buried myself in the strip I was missing out on this rich seam of comedy gold. And thank goodness I have been out there, going along to parties for the hell of it and chatting to strangers because that is how I met Katie - and here you might raise an eyebrow knowingly as I finally get to what I've really been doing all this time, or for the past four weeks at least. I have met a girl and at some point between now and a month ago she became my girlfriend and I her boyfriend. It is fairly early days yet so I don't know how much to report. I want to tell you how excited I am, how much happier and more confident I am now than before but I won't. As important as this may be to me it will soon become very tedious for you I'm sure. I will say this: she is very funny. One of the funniest people I have met, as it happens. Since you mostly know me as a comedian I thought that would be the most relevant angle. Katie my new girlfriend is so funny that just from spending time with her I now want to write comedy again, I want to blow the dust off my Wacom tablet and ignore my dissertation and let Life on the Fourth Floor live again. You can only stay away so long before that familiar itch starts to develop under the skin. Life on the Fourth Floor is coming back - soon. And thanks to my time spent away, thanks to all the squabbles about washing up and all the new people I have met - especially one - it will be funnier than ever before. So that's nice. What have you guys been up to while I've been away?
Posted 01:29 (GMT) 22nd October 2008 by David J. Bishop I'm back, everyone! Sorry for the radio silence and for the lack of updates. It's been a month now, which for a professional cartoonist is outrageous but for a kid doing this in whatever spare time he can scrape together isn't that bad, especially in light of everything that's happened to me. Basically I got meningitis - not the kind that kills you, the kind that just puts you through a week of misery and can be mistaken for flu. But meningitis sounds a lot scarier so I'm putting that front and centre. So as a student I'm supposed to spend half my time working and half my time not working - and this not-working time can be spent buying groceries, eating, sleeping and drawing comics. But when you spend a week with meningitis that's a full week of not-working, and worse still it's not-working time in which no groceries are bought or comics drawn - and then afterwards you have to catch up on all the work you missed and then the milk you didn't buy and the comic you didn't draw. It's like fucking time arrears. And I'm experiencing a credit crunch. As of today, however, I think I have my shit together. I will tentatively try to work on the strip whilst researching and writing a dissertation. And, if I have time, finish reading two Victorian novels. But then what will I do tomorrow? So I apply myself to the grindstone, trying to please everyone and disappoint no-one. The stupid part is the simplicity of it all. The last year of the course, the finish line in sight. Some ten weeks of hard graft, followed by another ten - then a degree. That I will have a degree in English by the end of this process is almost entirely assured, that it will be a good enough result to open up the doorway to a future in which a large number of my dreams come true is in doubt - but to ensure that I do well enough to take this academia thing further and become the guy writing the books instead of reading them I need only follow a simple series of instructions: read this, go there, write that, submit it then, talk to that person, read this, repeat, revise. Success is almost within my reach. Every step I take is weighed down with the potential for doing well - with all the fresh hope and promise that three years of debt and personal growth will not have been for nothing. For the first time in my life I have a real sense of purpose, purpose that stretches into future for ten, twenty, thirty years and more. For the first time I know what I want to be when I grow up - and it is not a cartoonist. I am already a cartoonist, and have been since I first picked up a crayon. I doubt very much that cartooning will pay the bills (whatever my skills), which is ultimately what being a grown-up is all about. When I grow up I want to be a professional academic. I want to be an expert in my field, I want to teach other people about the things I'm passionate about. I want people to call me Professor David Bishop. A man's got to do what a man's got to do. Right now, I've got to put on my academic hat. But of course underneath, I will always be wearing the cartoonist hat. Don't think I have forgotten you, gentle reader, for even a second. It's just that over the next few months I have to work harder than I have ever worked before in my life to get what I want, to become the man I've always wanted to be. This can't be like last year when I spent my revision period drawing and revised on the bus on the way to the exam. I can't goof off. I already know I can do pretty damn well without even trying. Now let's see how well I can do if I try. If I don't, I'll always wonder - and that regret and disappointment could fuel another five years of cartoon strips... or it could drive me to suicide. In the spare moments I have, cartoons will appear. Ideally on a weekly basis. But some weeks will be more challenging than others. You have stuck with me through hernias and appendicitis and now even meningitis. Now you must stick with me through this - this is just something I have to do, in order to live a life without regrets. More shortly.
Posted 22:53 (GMT) 17th September 2008 by David J. Bishop It was a wonky battery in the end. I happened to peer behind my laptop and found the battery was protruding out of the back at a weird angle and that was as unnerving a sight as broken bone protruding from one's skin at a weird angle. The day before I unplugged my laptop and, rather than just switching to battery power, it just turned itself off. And I, like so many before me, lost all my work. I should have saved. I should have saved! Why didn't I save? I was a fool! And now, for another Wednesday, I come to you cap in hand without a strip but for altogether different reasons. I am going to work twice as hard as before to claw back what was lost and four times as hard again to make this week's strip. I want to write a nice long news post, so I'm at least bringing something to the table that isn't an excuse but honestly that would be time not spent drawing or, if I feel like a break from drawing, studying. I feel really shitty about leaving you high and dry two weeks in a row. Come back again soon, I promise I'll have done something.
Posted 21:16 (GMT) 11th September 2008 by David J. Bishop Hey boys and girls, things are still pretty hectic over here at fourth floor headquarters. I've only just moved in, I'm still getting adjusted to my new place and stocking up on essential things you take for granted like bacon and Domestos. Comic will be up in the next day or two and hopefully after things stabilise we can get closer to having a strip up every Wednesday as promised. Terribly sorry but these things are unavoidable. Stay safe out there!
Posted 16:44 (GMT) 3rd September 2008 by David J. Bishop Hey, happy September boys and girls! This week I am moving into my new flat so that girl who's stalking me is going to have to stand outside somebody else's window. Hah! Anyway, a new flat means a new academic year and a new academic year means I start working full-time again as an unpaid undergraduate. And long-time readers will know that this means a return to the once-a-week schedule of old. Sigh. But we've had a good run - from May to September with two strips a week. That might be our longest uninterrupted stretch of awesomeness yet. And we've had a record-breaking couple of months - as of today we are on 153 visits a day, compared to just 100 back in July. And there have been a total of 8,721 visits in the past month, when the record had previously been just 5,191 the month before. A huge surge in readership figures, then; the graph is pointing up. So I just want to wish a warm welcome to those of you who have started reading recently and give a big thank you to the existing readers who posted in forums, voted on Buzzcomix even though the vote incentive was broken and coerced their family and friends into visiting the site. Please bear with me during these lean autumnal months and the winter of discontent which will follow and, depending on whether or not I see my shadow in May, we'll return to the twice-weekly schedule after the exams. And hopefully at the end of all this I will have (in addition to a mountain of debt) a degree in something. Well, see you next Wednesday, true believers! I'm off back to the big city! (P.S. I just realised that all the news posts on this page gave the date as being 2007. What the fuck is the matter with me?)
Posted 22:42 (GMT) 30th August 2008 by David J. Bishop The new strip is up at last, I beg your forgiveness for its terrible and uncharacteristic lateness. Timing is everything, and this one was mistimed. More detail, more effort, more care and attention went into it than I thought I would put in. My problem is that I love you guys too much to rush these things. Anyway, I promise the next chunk of free entertainment will be more punctual and then we can all forget this happened. Keep it real, Floorians. This space will be filled up with my usual embittered verbosity as soon as I think of something to be indignant about. It's only a matter of time.
Posted 12:00 (GMT) 27th August 2008 by David J. Bishop Okay, stop me if you've heard this one. A short bald man walks into a bank and says "Excuse me, you have a checking account that's free. Really?" "Yep, the WaMu free checking account," says the pretty red-headed woman behind the till. As names for free checking accounts go, this one is pretty imaginative. She goes on: "Comes with free cheques for life and free ATM cash withdrawals." But by this point, the man isn't listening. He's lost in his own little world where he's driving down a highway in the sun, the wind in his hair (yes, he suddenly sprouts long hair out of his bald head) and Twisted Sister blaring on the radio, not a care in the world. He pounds his fist in the air triumphantly and as the car speeds away we see the licence plate reads 'WH00-H00'. "You also get free ID theft services," the girl adds, breaking him from his reverie. But this guy's already sold. All he can say in response is, "Nice." Then we cut to a plain green field and a voiceover which says: "WaMu free checking: we don't nickel and dime you." The words on the screen read 'Whoo hoo!TM' (Really? TM?) and some other voice-over says "Whoo-hoo" in a sort of half-hearted way. It's lack-lustre. Like he's found a free paper clip. I'll go over why that's one of the stupidest commercials I've ever seen in a second - and yes I did see it, I'm not just telling you a story about a bald man opening a WaMu account. It's a real commercial, I swear to God. Yeah, so, I'm watching a lot of American TV online these days and so that means I'm being exposed to a lot of American ads. And they're completely different to European advertisements, catering as they do to a completely different set of expectations. Over here adverts are all sizzle, no sausage - they're not selling you sausages, they're selling a lifestyle. They want you to want to be the kind of person that buys this brand of sausage. All the American adverts I've seen, on the other hand, set their expectations a lot lower. They just want you to buy the sausage and if they can get to the end of the advert without convincing you it's poisonous their work here is done. American advertisers seem to think that the best way to sell whatever it is they're selling is to just show you other people using the product and finding it satisfactory. Perfect example, some guys in uniforms go on the streets, in some sort of lorry, taking a cereal on tour like it's a rock band. They accost passers-by and urge them to try new 'Honey Bunches of Oats'. The people in the advert try it and seem to like it - Fin. These aren't even real people doing this taste test, they're actors. You can tell from the way they behave and from the quality of the film - these are people pretending to be members of the public trying a cereal. The message we get is: "Look at these people pretending to like this product. You might actually like it. Still, regardless of how it really tastes, none of them are dead." They have demonstrated, at least, that Honey Bunches of Oats are not in fact poison. Obviously when this idea was first storyboarded and pitched on the space station orbiting Earth in which all adverts are made they had the idea of actually taking the cereal on tour and filming real people eating it. Why they didn't just go with that idea, why they instead chose to fake it, is lost on me. Perhaps they were looking for a more genuine response than Americans' genuine response. Perhaps some people didn't like the oat bunches, honeyed as they were, and they thought editing out those negative comments would be dishonest - and so instead decided to stage the whole thing. It makes me think that maybe they couldn't find anyone who liked it. But this much we know: it won't kill you to try the freaking cereal. Try it, why not? Like I said, lower expectations. The WaMu advert has taken this a step further, although WaMu is not the only offender, just the worst - this advert has the highest bullshit:product ratio. It's always the same formula - customer walks up to guy selling product, buys product and then something awesome but jarringly unrelated happens to make you think that, even though everything about this scenario is a fiction, even though the guy is an actor just pretending to have a good time, maybe this could happen to you if you booked a flight with American Express or bought a Double Whopper or donated blood. The difference with WaMu is how low the bar is set. So very low. Our bald man is sent into a fevered dream state of rock music and open-top cars and over what? A free checking account? With free ATM withdrawals? Now, I'm English. Very English. I am right now drinking tea with three sugars, wearing a tweed jacket and a monocle. And one of those is actually true. Right, so over here we call checking accounts current accounts (and we drive on the left-hand side of the road!) but the principle is pretty much the same. Except that I have never heard of a current account where they charge you for the privilege of borrowing all your money. What else? Free ATM withdrawals? You mean, they don't charge for taking your own money out of a cash machine? That's what gets the bald guy creaming his pants? Here would be the radio version of that advert: "It's that exhilarating feeling you get when all your hair grows back and you're driving down a highway in the sun in a sports car listening to 'I Wanna Rock'. WaMu: We don't sell you your own money back to you for a small price." Shit, that's a boast? The alternative is "I would like twenty dollars of my own money back please." "Okay, that'll be a dollar fifty." I know you guys don't have free healthcare over there but is this the standard? Selling people their own money to them? That's just insane! Why don't I just wander the streets of Wakefield selling people five pound notes for ten quid each? That's 200% profit! This is blasphemy, this is madness! This is... WaMu. It gets better, free cheques for life. That means they don't charge you for spending your money either! How generous! Wahoo! Fuck me, if they penalise you for using a cash machine and writing cheques, what's the point in putting all your money in a bank anyway? You might as well just keep it at home in a jar. At least that way you can reach into the jar without being charged for it. So yeah, not doing these things ain't exactly a big deal. Oh, and let's not forget our good friend 'Free ID theft services'. Which means in the unlikely event of someone stealing your identity and committing fraud in your name, your bank won't charge you money! Aren't they amazing? I can feel my hair growing back already! Advert number two in the WaMu circus of horror: woman sits down next to friend in a coffee house which is in terms of decor half-way between a Starbuck's and a primary school classroom. She asks her friend what he's doing on his computer. And he isn't reading Penny Arcade, he's "signing up for WaMu free checking online. It takes less than seven minutes. Pretty fast, huh?" "Yeah," she replies, wistfully, "really fast." No, that's not really fast. There's a lot you can do in seven minutes. You can save a life in seven minutes, you can bump into the love of your life and get to first base within seven minutes. Hell, you can read through about 10 comics in my archives in seven minutes. If I'm in a coffee house I'm only going to be there for half an hour tops, I don't want to spend a whole seven of those thirty precious minutes signing up for a bank account, not with people looking over my shoulder. Considering how long tedious bureaucracy usually takes to wade through, I suppose seven minutes to set up an account is pretty fast. But it's not really fast. It's not breaking the sound barrier across salt flats in a pink jet-propelled car fast. Because that's the fantasy coffee lady indulges in. For some reason she's wearing a pink fluffy jump suit while this is going on, too - I suppose that is the female equivalent of reversing male pattern baldness, huh? Wearing a lot of pink shit? We come back to the real world and the dream of a seven minute account sign-up has been so visceral that she has crushed her pastry using it as a steering wheel. The only good way for the advert to end at this point is for a glob of foam to escape from her mouth and it turns out she's having some kind of seizure. Alas, this is not the case. WaMu, what you're offering is mediocre at best, and the visual illustrations you are using to emphasise these 'perks' of not wasting our time and not cheating us only emphasise their mediocrity. I don't know if you're being ironic at this point or if you're just trying to add so many bells and whistles that all people remember is the bald man's hair growing back and they don't remember any of that other stuff (i.e. your shitty offer). All I know is that if the most exciting thing you can imagine is a checking account sans unnecessary charges you need to seriously rethink your life. Go sky-diving, eat a peach, get laid - whatever it takes. There's a third advert which is based around the first one, which opens with a guy walking up to the till saying: "So you're the guys with all the free stuff." No! No they're not! Not screwing people over is not free stuff. Now, if the account really did cure baldness at no extra cost that would be something special, but not being charged for no good reason is not. Special, I mean. Not special. (By the way, I'm not going to describe this guy's fantasy because it is too stupid for words. Okay, he tucks himself into a tight ball, rolls down a bowling alley, gets a strike with himself and then does a funky little dance. Happy now?) Again, we get the tag line: "We don't nickel and dime you." Well, get this shitheads - you're not supposed to nickel and dime people! Stop trying to take credit for something you're not even supposed to do in the first place! In the words of Chris Rock: what do you want, a cookie? I thought about asking this girl out and I was tempted to go with the Honey Bunches of Oats approach and tell her "If you're willing to lower your standards, I'm willing to buy you dinner." Simple, no-nonsense. But now I'm thinking maybe I should go with the WaMu approach, keep it simpler: "If you date me I won't try to rape you." Sounds like a winner to me! Guys with all the free stuff my ass. I'm actually making a comic strip for free twice a week and I can't give this thing away. These twats are making mercy a selling point and it actually seems to be working! No APR, no interest rates, no overdraft details, we know nothing about this account. It must really suck if their biggest selling point is a seven minute sign-up. Okay, I'm going to make a TV ad for Life on the Fourth Floor. A guy walks up to me and says "You're the guy that makes the free comic?" And I say, "That's right. The Life on the Fourth Floor free comic is a digital image you can see with your eyes, you can respire whilst reading it with free oxygen and at no extra charge I won't come round to your house and kick you in the testicles." "Wow," the guy mutters to himself before drifting into a fantasy world where he rides around on a kick-ass bike, grows two inches, does a flip off a giant ramp made out of pizza, sails over a swimming pool filled with ice-cold beer and lands on the other side between Angelina Jolie's breasts. Then my snarky Gordon-Ramsay-sounding voice comes on over the footage and says: "Life on the Fourth Floor: we don't kick you in the balls. Wahoo!"
Posted 14:27 (GMT) 23rd August 2008 by David J. Bishop I'm trying to be less angry these days. There's nothing wrong with being a bitter husk wallowing in cynicism and despair but there's such a thing with being too bitter. But maybe it's time I shelved the positive outlook and found something to get angry about, since the alternative is me eating and describing sandwiches. So, House Bunny. Anna Faris. Forgive me for explaining something which for some of you will be old news but over here films usually get released about two months after they're shown in the states so many of you Floorians won't know what the hell I'm talking about. They're all like, House... Bunny? Is this a furry adaptation of a successful medical drama? No, no it is not. The plot, as I gathered from the trailer, concerns a Playboy Bunny called Shelley who gets kicked out of the Playboy Mansion and somehow becomes a 'House Mother' (I originally typed that as 'Mouse Hother', illegal in 47 states) of a sorority house. No, I didn't know there were such things as House Mothers either - it doesn't help that the premise and title all assume a fairly detailed knowledge of the American college fraternity and sorority system. We don't have that over here and I don't understand why these organisations exist or what purpose they serve. All I know is they all have names made out of letters in the Greek alphabet and you can be kicked out for not being pretty enough. Jeez, why do I have to know the ins and outs of a system utterly alien to me just to figure out what the title of a film means? It's interesting how you can't say "torch" in an English film because American audiences don't know it means "flashlight" but American releases can be as insular and confusing as they like. Anyway, Shelley becomes the 'house bunny' of Zeta House, populated by very intelligent but 'unattractive' girls. They are all top of their class but none of them can get any boys. In steps the bunny to help! A make-over montage later (and this is the part of the trailer where 'U + Ur Hand' by Pink blares somewhat ironically over the footage) and the girls discover their inner 'ho-bags! Yay! What am I saying, 'somewhat ironically'? There are at least three levels of irony in that choice of song. The line "I'm not here for your entertainment" playing over footage of a Playboy Bunny? The implication that doing a girl's hair and dressing her up like a stripper somehow constitutes female empowerment? How about the phrase 'you and your hand' itself, what it refers to, and how you know there will be some guy doing that whilst watching this film? It's like a perfect storm. Now, I'm not going to deny that I'm a pretty geeky guy. The combination of 'cartoonist' and 'runs his own website' practically says all there is to say about how nebbish I am. But my nerd levels are not over nine thousand. I don't keep pens in my shirt pocket, I don't choreograph my own lightsabre duels and I don't cosplay. But I'm geeky enough that I find the girls in the House Bunny trailer really attractive pre-makeover. I think girl geeks are sexy, just as wrench monkeys find girls who are into cars sexy or gun nuts find girls with semi-automatics sexy. Shit, if I met a girl who could quote Firefly I would marry her. I would propose on the spot. What I'm saying is that whoever you are there is someone out there who thinks what you do is hot. There is even someone out there who will think this way about you who you will also find attractive too. If you make yourself over to become someone you're not you're denying yourself and this hypothetical dream partner the chance at true happiness. You've heard that confidence is the sexiest thing you can possess? Well have the confidence to just be yourself. Those that conform, those that care about being popular or who change their behaviour to match everyone else in the room, are the boring ones. Those same geeky girls in the House Bunny trailer after their make-over just look uninteresting. Sort of plain and homogenised, like extras in a film. Not ugly by any means but unremarkable, lacking in personality, generic. I'm pretty sure that's what House Bunny is trying to turn every girl in the Western world into. Pussycat Dolls. The second half of the trailer has a HIL-ARIOUS subversion of this tired make-over trope, when Shelley meets a guy and tries to seduce him using her air-head Playboy charms but discovers he's attracted to intelligent girls! Or, as it's worded in the trailer, "What if Oliver doesn't mind a smart girl?" Doesn't mind? What the fuck is this, 1532? Are people still worried about education melting women's brains? That's the most appalling sentence I've heard uttered all week, and I watched an Anne Coulter interview the other day. Yeah, so when Shelley realises that Oliver doesn't mind smart girls, we see her hefting books around comically and wearing huge glasses made out of the bottoms of coke bottles and wearing frumpy clothing, all in attempt to look smart. Ha. ha. ha. Now, I know there's going to be a nice moral at the end about being yourself, that the girl-geek-in-slap who says "Now we can be the best versions of ourselves" in the trailer is going to be proven wrong, that the whole conformity and beautification process is going to spiral into self-destructive bitchiness, that everyone's going to learn how to give a care and that Oliver is going to tell Shelley that he doesn't mind that she is a superficial idiot. But that's not going to negate the effect of the rest of the film, the core message of which can be summarised thus: 1. Smart women are ugly geeks. 2. If you want to look smart, dress up like an ugly geek. Why are all the brainiacs in house Zeta also geeks? There is such a thing as a smart glamorous person and such a thing as a stupid geek - I myself am living proof. In fact, I get by mostly by pretending to be smart, by people assuming I'm smarter than I am just because I'm a total dork. But that's hurting my case for being yourself so enough about my pseudointellectualism. Look, even after we get the nice moral ending about being yourself those girl geeks aren't going to go back to exactly how they looked at the start of the trailer - there's going to be some sort of compromise in which the girls find their own semi-'ho style and the house bunny accidentally picks up some quantum physics or some stupid bullshit. How do I know this? Because in a Hollywood film everything can't just go back to how it was at the start - all the characters will have changed by end, albeit in terribly shallow ways. So the film won't get around this reinforcement of the bespectacled smart girl stereotype - reinforcing the belief that education and intelligence turns girls into cardigan-wearing socially-stunted losers who cannot get boys (that all-important goal). Not only is it not true, it's encouraging girls to be less smart or to pretend to be stupid - and not college girls, because college girls aren't the target audience for this film about girls in college. It works like this - girls in college want to watch films about women living in New York, girls in high school want to watch the films about college and small children want to watch films about high school - hence High School Musical and (shudder) Bratz. So the target audience for House Bunny is actually younger and more impressionable ladies, ones who I fear will be more affected by its message. And, as a single guy who is genuinely looking for intelligent women with big sexy brains, that can only be a bad thing. Let's put it this way, I'm doing a course in English Literature at a University with one of the largest research libraries in the UK in a class with a roughly 2/3 female population and even I am struggling to find women who read. Conclusion: House Bunny is sexist shit, ruining it for everybody. But then what else can we expect from Anna Faris who, outside of her work in the Scary Movie franchise (I could just stop typing now), was last seen setting women's lib back by a good ten years in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, the message of which was "power and self-confidence makes women scary and unattractive, and their insecure boyfriends feel threatened by that". Well, now intelligence makes women unattractive too! Hooray! Next up: boobs make women unattractive. Anna Faris plays a flat-chested girl who helps a load of women get breast reductions. High fives all round. In other news you may have noticed I used the word 'thus' back there. Yeah, thus. Not 'thusly'. Thus. Most adverbs end in '-ly' - most. But some do not. 'Thus' is one of those. Please don't stick a '-ly' on the end just for the sake of it. You're destroying the English language. 'Thusly' isn't a word, so stop it. Just stop. If you can't figure out how to use 'thus' correctly just don't use it at all, just say "like so". Finally I want to give a big shout out to Anne in Spain, who posted a link to my strip in her Spanish language blog. As far as webcomics are concerned, for Anne it's just Fourth Floor and Wapsi Square, which is most flattering. I assume Anne speaks English because she's not going to get a lot out of this site if she does not but just out of politeness I'm going to draw upon the only Spanish I can remember from high school. Muchísimas gracias, Anne. Tengo un perrito caliente, me llamo David. No lo se. Se puede. Hacías. Como estas. There, that's all I got. Alcohol, you have a way of emptying one's mental recycling bin of all unnecessary files. Peace out.
Posted 08:45 (GMT) 20th August 2008 by David J. Bishop Hello one and all, hope August is treating you as well as it is treating me - I am having a terrific month. Yesterday for lunch I had a cheese steak sandwich from Subway and it was twelve inches of deliciousness. The bread they used for my sub was fresh from the oven and you could taste it. It was to my liking. But enough about my lunch there is a new comic to read! I really like the way this one turned out on both an artistic and a script level, and that's rarely the case. I don't know what's changed in the past few weeks but since I finished the finger storyline I've been bringing my A-game. Or rather, I thought I was already bringing it but then found secret reserves of unalloyed A which were then put to good use. Understand that whilst I may be blowing my own trumpet just a little bit, my default position is usually self-doubt and failure. So high fives all round! I have more comics to recommend but I don't know if I should. I am always in two minds about recommending anything, just because I worry about how it reflects on me and my own comic. Like if I told you I'm huge fan of Celine Dion. I'm not by the way, but you would draw conclusions if I said I was, which I am not. Also, my recommendation seems to be the touch of death for any strip. For example, I recommended Marry Me to you all just for that comic to end - turns out they were just turning the script for a movie into a comic to better its chances of being optioned, which was disappointing. The kind of story they were telling would have fit better with a webcomic format, and would have benefited from a more prolonged and detailed exploration of the characters and story possibilities. I recommended it in the first place because the excellent opening made made me excited about where they were going with it - turns out the answer was nowhere. Three cheers for wasted potential! I also recommended you check out a comic called Draw Write Play which on paper looked like Penny Arcade but with girls. However, the writing was competent, the art was excellent and, you know, like with Marry Me I wanted to know where Miss Caroline Dy was going with this. Then practically the day I post the link she stops updating the comic and then Draw Write Play transforms itself into a blog. Where's the comic? I'm damned if I know. It's all rather bewildering, to be honest. I'm not saying you shouldn't check out the blog, I'm not saying Caroline Dy isn't still a very talented artist. But it's rather like recommending a restaurant to a friend only for the friend to find a furniture warehouse in its place, a warehouse unaccountably still called Joe's Diner. So, allow me to recommend some more comics! Here's hoping these ones won't disappear without a trace as soon as I post this: The Non-Adventures of Wonderella: There are comics with an axe to grind, there are comics trying to tell an epic story, there are comics centred around a single hobby like playing video games or collecting toys and there are comics copying the comics about video games. And then there are comics that are just trying to be funny. The Non-Adventures of Wonderella is just such a comic, and I declare its noble efforts a success. A tremendous success. Dude, I laughed my ass off. My Stupid Life: This strip is simple, endearing, witty, stupid, true, heart-warming and funny. Sometimes it is all those things at once, sometimes it is just four or five of those at once. But it's always funny. Kind of makes me want to get married, though. That isn't a bad thing in its own right except that I'm alone in the world. Hey, at least I've got My Stupid Life. Chainsawsuit: Okay, this one definitely isn't going down the tubes because it's drawn by the always-professional Kris Straub. Listeners of the now-dead Daily Affirmation podcast Scott and Kris used to do will know that Kris is an exceptionally funny man who can take ideas down bizarre and entertaining tangents. This comic is that part of his brain condensed into a comic and it warrants a read. Check it out. In other news, barbecue sauce is the new ketchup. I've been putting it on everything lately - I think I'm addicted. To deliciousness!
Posted 04:45 (GMT) 16th August 2008 by David J. Bishop Just a few parish notices this time round, I'm going to be mercifully brief after Wednesday's info dump. Still, it's fascinating stuff if you're into that sort of thing. My brother was on hand to remind me that for people who don't really care about webcomics as a species aren't going to glean a lot of entertainment out of a hyper-detailed explanation for why cartoonists should listen to criticism. He also said that I came over as quite egotistical, since the core message is 'Ooh look at me, I'm growing as an artist'. Whilst I do agree with him I make no apology for my ego. To be a good cartoonist you need to convince yourself that you are awesome in order to have the confidence to bear your soul before an audience that could potentially include.... well, everyone. Which is not to say I am a good cartoonist. No, the fact is that all cartoonists think they rule - that's only a bad thing if they suck. First notice, there is a new strip up. The plot thickens and we finally find out what Charlotte is up to. I dare you to guess what's going to happen next because you will be wrong. Second thing you should be aware of is something I haven't done a very good job of promoting. Do you remember this strip, written by contest-winner James? Well, the competition is being held once again. Basically, whoever sends in the best Fourth Floor script gets to have their entry made into a comic. There are no real rules besides that. If you looked at contest-winner James' entry and thought you could do better (or even if you didn't) e-mail me a script. It's not that hard really, I do it every week. Fans (all seven of you), now is your chance to become part of the comic's history. And since there have been no entries so far it's safe to say that the one person who participates will win by default. So get scribbling! I'll post a reminder about the contest once a month until it's over. Thirdly, I've gotten some feedback about the incentive art not loading. I'm aware of this problem but I don't really know what to do about it. Buzzcomix is a fickle mistress. If the pencils don't load properly today they will almost definitely be there tomorrow. Once you vote you can check back as many times after that as you like. All right!
Posted 08:40 (GMT) 13th August 2008 by David J. Bishop First of all there is a new strip up! I'm awesome. Secondly, I've written a new rant. This has to be my longest yet. It details (amongst other things) what I think of people who hate Scott Kurtz, the philosophical nature of truth and knowledge, transgenderism, what I really think of Misfile and its fanbase and the epic story behind the changes in the character designs. It's mostly about whether or not a cartoonist should listen to criticism. In retrospect, it would have been a lot quicker just to point at Tim Buckley and say "There! There's a cartoonist who doesn't listen to criticism!" Anyway, you know how I said before the majority of what I do around here is motivated by guilt? Well it turns out the rest is motivated by revenge. Interesting self-revelation there. Gather round, children, and I will tell you the tale. A very long, unedited, confusingly-structured tale. I call it 'Hitler Was a Vegetarian'. I've made a couple of posts in the forum as well, one about the rant and one about what I was thinking about in the shower today. If you want to chime in with your opinion or just get the kind of extra detail into my life that there's no room for here in new posts then by all means drop in - as with e-mails I am always on hand to deliver a personal response. In other news, I told you before about my recipe for Super Coffee. Well, I went on a fun-filled trip to Alton Towers with my siblings and brother-in-law. A fun time was had by all, a day of fast food and fast roller-coasters. A day of intense joy and over-excited high fives. In all the excitement I impulse-bought a gigantic souvenir mug from the gift shop. And I mean this mug is massive. It's about the size of three and a half mugs (I measured) and it stores an entire teapot full of tea. I have to stir this thing with a tablespoon instead of teaspoon - and it's to scale, that's how big this frigging mug is. I can only lift it with both hands. Anyway, imagine me taking my recipe for Super Coffee and tripling the quantities in this big-ass mug. And then drinking it all really fast. Does it come as any surprise that I'm writing this at 3:30 in the morning and I really need to pee?
Posted 09:34 (GMT) 11th August 2008 by David J. Bishop I'm always finding excuses to do nice things for you and now I have two. The nice thing this time round is a new wallpaper in the wallpaper section. It's based on the X-men parody I did back in May, which I've got a relatively large amount of feedback about from people telling me it was their favourite strip. So that was all the excuse I needed to make you all a nice wallpaper. Now, some cartoonists might charge for such an ass wallpaper but not me - it's completely free. My gift to you. I said there were two excuses for rewarding you with free stuff. The second is this: we broke all records for readership this weekend. The stats aren't final yet (they never are) but there are roughly twice as many of you this month than there have ever been before. On Friday 650 people came to the website at once. That's more people than I've ever met, more than I can count. I don't know what I did, if anything, but suddenly visitors are on my comic like white on rice. So, a huge welcome to all you new readers - please be patient wading through the archives. I was 16 when I drew the early strips, they get much better after about 20 minutes. Enjoy the new wallpaper! By the way, if you vote for us you should be able to see the pencils for the latest strip. I think I've finally managed to get it working. Anyway, even if it's still broken you should vote anyway because you want to see the strip succeed. Right?
Posted 18:15 (GMT) 9th August 2008 by David J. Bishop First things first - new strip. It is our 150th strip! Back in December I decided we wouldn't mark this milestone with a celebratory comic because that just isn't done. Your first 50 are noteworthy. 100 strips is double that. So then you have to wait until you double it again and bring out the paper hats when you hit 200. After that it gets tricky. I mean, does 300 strips demand fanfare? Do you just have to wait until you hit 500 then after 1000 leave it at that? So, no 150 comic. Still, 150 strips in just over three years is pretty ass. That's about 50 strips a year, which is not too shabby. It almost feels like I've redeemed myself for that lengthy hiatus I made you all endure way back in the early years. Almost. I know I'll probably look back on this day in five years' time and chuckle that I thought '150' was such an important number but in some ways it is. The rule of thumb with most webcomics is that the first chunk of the archives sucks, or at least is a lot worse than what follows. And part of that is relative inexperience on the part of the artist but another part is that characterisation takes time. You need to establish who the people in your story are, you need to establish the relationships they have with each other. In order for character-based comedy to work the readers need to know how the characters will react - Hell, in order for the writing to work the author needs to know. It's round about the 150 mark that the strip begins to blossom, that the characters and setting come into their own. Getting to this point has been like passing a kidney stone. Trying to write a comic well is frustrating, it's like writing a novel one postcard at a time and posting them to the reader - and you're only allowed to write two postcards a week. You need to choose very carefully what's going to happen next, which dynamic to spotlight. The temptation is to cut corners, to rely on well-trodden character archetypes and instantly-recognisable visual cues to lay your groundwork for you. But then you end up with flat cookie-cutter characters. So you sit and you wait, and decide that this Wednesday you will show this new sliver of that character when they talk to this character. But now the groundwork is finally down. I mean, it's not like my work here is done. It's not like you all know everything there is to know about Michael, Jack, Charlotte et al. But now, at 150 strips, I think we've got to a stage where someone can read through the archives, get to this point and have a pretty good idea of what Life on the Fourth Floor is about, you know? And that's a pretty good feeling. This strip is becoming, at long last, what I always wanted it to be. What it's always been deep down. There just wasn't enough for you too see. Anyway, as my thank you to the die-hard fans out there (all eight of you) I've decided to put up a voting incentive. Now if you vote for the site on Buzzcomix you can see the pencils for the latest strip. Just click the link below or the vote button to the right and see the original art for today's comic, complete with absent-minded spelling errors!
Posted 17:24 (GMT) 7th August 2008 by David J. Bishop Yo, new comic. Read it already. Why come it is late? Well, for one the raw awesomeness of today's strip could not be contained in the four days I had in which to make it. Also it was my mother's birthday this week. Life, you see, is about choices. I had the choice of getting the strip up on time and disappointing my own mother on her birthday and being a day late. I chose the latter. I'm not one of those brooding cartoonists with a tragic past, drawing strips in an attempt to avenge my parents' death. I have a family and sometimes family comes first. But not often. I could always fall back on the 'free entertainment' argument. Perhaps when I'm making a hundred quid in donations each week I'll neglect my mother. Is that a good excuse? If it is, why do I still feel guilty? Maybe I'm just obsessive. Speaking of obsession, I've invented a new drink! Because I'm that bat-shit crazy. It's called Super Coffee. If you have ever wondered what gives me my edge, what makes Fourth Floor so God-damn awesome, then the answer is I am fuelled by Super Coffee! Here is the recipe. Ingredients: One Mug Boiling Water (Two thirds of a mugful) Fairtrade Instant Coffee (Five heaped teaspoons) Sugar (Ten heaped teaspoons) Milk Directions: Mix ingredients in a mug. Stir with a spoon, making sure as much of the coffee dissolves as possible (not all of it will). Always make sure you only fill the kettle with as much water as you need at the time to save energy. Drink. If you feel your heart is about to explode, it's working. I have pulled my share of all-nighters working on the strip and have found myself about to pass out at 5:30 in the morning. One mug of Super Coffee later I'm dancing around the kitchen to 'No Sex For Ben'. Thanks, Super Coffee! In other news, Katy Perry kissed a girl and liked it. You know, just to try it. Don't really know why that song has got under my skin this week. Maybe it's the catchy rhythm and abundant hooks, maybe it's the titillatingly saphist imagery. We may never know. At Last The World Revolves Around Amy Posted 03:57 (GMT) 2nd August 2008 Okay, new strip in place and you can read it if you have not already. Hooray for me! A lot of what I do around here is done out of guilt. For example, Wednesday's strip was late, which leads to guilt over being such a lousy cartoonist, which leads to me spending all the time between 6 am Thursday and now working away on improving the strip like the ill-shaven obsessive I am. So here's what's happened - more plotting out for future months (and indeed years) of storylines, story arcs and character development. Also slight tweak to some character design - you will find that the male characters all have proper eyebrows and not just lines. It's a style that never looked good on the girls (nota bene those who pluck their eyebrows and draw them back in with a pencil) and which I have only used 50% of the time when creating male characters. If you look at my smiling and erroneously-bearded face above this very paragraph you will note real eyebrows hang over my dreamy eyes. From now on that is the golden rule. There are other character design tweaks in the pipeline but I don't want to pile too much on at once so it can wait. Guilty leap forward number three is me working ahead by a good month with the pencils, which means I can now look ahead at August and see how it shapes up story-wise. Folks, it looks like this month will be Amy month. Fans of Amy can rejoice. It's not fair for me to have a favourite character but Amy is both easy and fun to write - so easy and fun that if I became lazy the entire strip could degenerate into 'The Amy Show'. So I try to use her sparingly. As much as I love her, you can have too much of an evil, bitchy thing. Then again, I don't want any of the core six characters becoming a Robbie or a Jase, one of those characters in a comic that is introduced from the start like all the others but gradually fades away as the author realises they have no idea what to do with them. Of course, we can't all be chiefs or there wouldn't be any roulette croupiers and some characters must inevitably fill a supportive role, like healers in an RPG. But we want to avoid Robbie-and-Jasification. So whenever I find myself neglecting one of the cast I'll shove them into the spotlight for a while. We have had storylines revolving around Shivani, we have had storylines revolving around Bob and we have had storylines revolving around Michael. For the first time ever we have a month-long storyline revolving around Amy. Just to stop it from becoming 'The Jack Show'. P. S. Speaking of Jack, this is for the benefit of my mother. The guy in today's strip is not supposed to be me. The groom in Sunday's comic is not me. Jack is not me. Stop asking the same question every time you read the comic. Just because a character a) is male and b) has dark hair does not mean he is me. Aside from the fact that a character bearing an uncanny resemblance to your son has already appeared twice, it's blatantly obvious to everyone else that my Mary Sue character is Kingyo. Strip Up At Last Posted 06:18 (GMT) 31st July 2008 The strip is up at last. It was worth the wait, right? Shit, it's exactly a 24 hours and one minute since my last news post. I'm so bad at this whole punctuality thing. Still, somewhere in the world it's still Wednesday. Call Me David 'Icarus' Bishop Posted 06:17 (GMT) 30th July 2008 Having provided three strips in as many days and having gotten the comic back on track we must descend once again into mediocrity and failure. Like Icarus. That's... that's where I was going with that one. We're back to a two-a-week schedule and that schedule is doing what it normally does i.e. kicking my ass. If I was a bastard I could tell you that you've already had one of your two free comics this week on Sunday in the form of the super-awesome extra-special birthday strip. If I was a bastard. But because I am nice I'm calling that a seasonal bonus and providing you with strips for both Wednesday and Saturday, which will bring the total to five comics in ten days. Because I am nice. Now, that many kick-ass strips takes it out of a guy so I'm afraid today's installment will be slightly delayed. There's no saying at this point how slight the delay will be - it could be up Wednesday or it could be early morning Thursday. Of course, it all depends what time zone you're living in. I think my readers in China have a good chance of seeing it... yesterday. And that's pretty damn punctual. So, for those of you skipping down to the last paragraph, I like making you extra things but the extra things take a little longer, so sit tight and keep coming back throughout Wednesday, Thursday and then you're safe until Saturday. Most of you won't be reading this until Tuesday anyway. The Man Who Was Awesome Returns Posted 09:06 (GMT) 27th July 2008 Because it is his counterpart's birthday today, there is a special bonus comic for the third day in a row which sees the return of Matthew, Shivani's ex-boyfriend. What adventures has he got up to since Christmas when they broke up? See for yourself. My brother is just as awesome as depicted, even in ways you at home can appreciate - he has been on-hand as a sounding board for many a half-finished punch line and as a hypercritical eye to every completed strip, pointing out exactly what was done wrong in each instance - perhaps so I can improve or perhaps because he sees my chest swelling with pride and likes to watch it deflate. He is the one who decides if something is funny enough to be worthy of your consumption and, as I mentioned last year, he has also pretty much written some of the strips, more than I would like to admit. If you see him in the street, you owe him a drink. He'll be easy to spot, he's the one sending ripples of awesome out in all directions, breaking hearts and saving lives one day at a time. Happy birthday, dude. Twofer Posted 07:29 (GMT) 26th July 2008 Just like I said yesterday, there is a new strip up today. I feel kind of bad that yesterday's update got so little time in the spotlight but you can still find it here if you missed it. As always, the archives page is here for you in this time of confusion. How did I manage two strips in such record time? Easy - I haven't been to bed since Wednesday night. I'm actually starting to hallucinate. I wish I was joking - I'm seeing things, shadows that look like human figures moving across reflections in the piano opposite me. They only move when I look at something else - as soon as I look at the reflection properly they stop. And of course when I turn around there's no-one behind me. I'm just literally losing my mind a tiny bit at a time. Time for bed I think. My eyelids feel like sandpaper. Meet the Hacks Posted 16:28 (GMT) 25th July 2008 To celebrate today being a Friday we have a new strip up and this means I have finally caught up with my own update schedule. So there will be another comic tomorrow. In fact, just keep coming back every day on the off-chance that comics have sprouted up of their own accord. And today's strip includes a cameo from Nick, LotFF Fan Club Member No. 35! If you would like a cameo, just e-mail me and ask. In
other news, I was quite amused to find this comic on the Ctrl+Alt+Del
website, the site I mysteriously keep returning to like a dog returning
to its own vomit. Tim Buckley has Then again I can't crow too loudly since, for all my attempts at originality, my modus operandi has always been to create what is essentially a remake of Friends in the style of Family Guy - at least, back when both shows were funny. They've both rather lost their way as of late. But don't worry, the same won't happen to LotFF because it's not written by a team of people the membership of which is in a constant state of flux. No, the comic will always be written by me so it can't get any worse. Who am I kidding? As if it could get any worse. Anyway, speaking of unoriginality and hack comedy let's talk about Disaster Movie. You can watch the trailer here and if you follow that link you will be able to catch a glimpse of the poster, too. From the trailer alone I caught references to 1. Iron Man 2. The Incredible Hulk 3. Enchanted 4. Hancock 5. Sex and The City and 6. Juno. Somewhat tellingly, none of those films are disaster movies. And even more tellingly, the last four are comedies. How can you satirise a comedy? I mean, comedy by definition presents a situation and then finds funny things to say about that situation. Poking fun at something which is essentially already poking fun at itself is not impossible but very hard. I'm not saying Sex and the City isn't ripe for parody (because it definitely is) but Enchanted? Enchanted is a parody of a Disney movie. Hancock is a parody of a superhero movie. How do you parody something that already parodies itself? Well, they don't. In the trailer, Iron Man is hit by a falling cow, the Incredible Hulk's jeans tear off, Giselle from Enchanted is hit by a car, Hancock flies into a lamp post and Carrie is beaten up by Juno. Noticing a pattern here? Step 1. Dress someone up as a character from a genuinely entertaining film. Step 2. Hit that character with a bad prop. Step 3. Return to Step 1. A cow does not satire make. What flaw in Iron Man are they pointing out here? Iron Man's weakness to cows? The thing that doesn't exist? There's nothing funny about that, nothing satirical, nothing which elevates this gag above a seven-year-old child pointing at Iron Man and saying "Ha ha Iron Man is dumb!" (which no seven-year-old would do because Iron Man is awesome). They don't even say why Iron Man is dumb, they just hit him with a cow and we are supposed to be in stitches. The stupidest part is, the Iron Man film does quite a bit to play with the expectations of a super-hero film, creating a number of genuinely funny moments. But let's face it, Iron Man is a rich alcoholic in bright yellow and red metal suit. There is room for parody there, if one was so inclined. But these jackasses don't even try. Or they don't know how to try. Who are these jackasses? The same guys who made Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans (more on that title in a second) and, presumably, the unfunny parts from Scary Movie. Who are they? Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. I am utterly opposed to violence and murder in every way but if any two people did deserve to die these two would. They're not just idiots, they are thieves. That bit at the end with Juno kicking Carrie in the face? Stolen right out of Don't Mess With the Zohan. Almost verbatim. If your shtick is 'every character from every film released this year plus jokes' they have to at least be your own jokes. Otherwise it's not just unimaginative it's immoral. And I'm not exaggerating to make a point, I'm serious - stealing other people's ideas and passing them off as your own is just evil. And really, Zohan? It wasn't funny when they did it in the first place. It gets better, by which I mean it gets worse. If you look at the poster you'll see crude facsimiles of Kung Fu Panda, The Dark Knight and Hellboy II - films which have only just come out. There is no way these guys could have seen those films in time to make this one, unless they have a time machine. Which means they can only have watched the trailers. Think about that for a second. They are 'making fun' of films they haven't even seen. How can they get away with this? If I was to write a review of Final Fantasy XIII in which I said it was bad that would be libel. How can Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer point at Batman and say "this came out this year, it is dumb" before they've even seen the film? Satire is a powerful weapon which should only be levelled at deserving targets. In order to find out if a film is deserving of parody you have to watch it first. I, however, do not have to watch Disaster Movie to condemn it - the poster and the trailer commit enough sins already. And not just jokey film critic sins of bad writing or unimaginative plotting but actual real sins like stealing and lying. I've had enough. I for one will not stand for this kind of bull shit anymore. The human race needs to take action. These parasites have attached themselves to the film industry in order to churn out lifeless, brain-dead copies of every main character from every film released since their last cinematic abortion. The only way to stop them is for film-makers to stop making films. Seriously, just wait for a couple of years and Friedberg and Seltzer will have to come up with their own ideas. They will wither and die without a host. We'll find them both in a ditch somewhere, all grey and shrivelled like E.T. Sure, we'll have to go without films for a while but won't it be worth it to see these hacks perish? Maybe not. Okay, plan B. We go round to their houses armed with clubs with nails in them and beat them to death. Seriously, how would you feel if you spent years of your life creating a genuinely heart-warming and funny film that is simultaneously a parody of Kung Fu movies and an awesome Kung Fu movie in its own right? What if the protagonist was a flawed but loveable Panda voiced by Jack Black, a character that teaches children that it doesn't matter what they look like, they can still do anything they put their mind to? And what if two douchebags came along, watched the trailer, picked up on the fact that there was a panda but nothing else and shoe-horned your character into their low rent r-tard movie which just so happens to be exactly the same as the one they made last year, right down to the '[INSERT GENRE] MOVIE' title, the poster showing that title in chunky red capitals with all the cast gathered around it and the same demeaning Carmen Electra cameo? How would you feel? You'd be heart-broken. You would be well within your rights to go round to those douchebags' houses and beat them to death with spiky clubs. Let's do this! P. S. I have a theory that every film with 'Meet the-' in the title is automatically bad. Look at the evidence: Meet the Fockers, Meet the Robinsons, Meet the Spartans. All badly-written films with badly-written titles to match. How can a title be badly written you ask? Simple. At its most basic level, a title answers the question of 'What is this film/book/comic strip/TV show about'. What is this show about? It's about How I Met Your Mother. What is this book about? It's about Great Expectations. What is this film about? It's about Spider-man. What is Meet the Robinsons about? It's about the fucking Robinsons. The 'meet the-' part is utterly redundant. Just call it The Robinsons. I think it's safe to say that when I watch Patch Adams I'm going to meet Patch Adams. You don't need to tell me I'm going to meet the people your film is about. 'Meet the-' just adds a nauseatingly self-satisfied sheen to the whole thing. 'Meet' is the first word of, like, 70% of all trailers. "Meet Frank. He's a cop with a lot of time on his hands. But what Frank doesn't know is he's got a time machine buried in the back of his head etc. etc." Imagine the annoying trailer voice-over man saying that. Not the good one, the smug-sounding one. The one who does the voice-over for Rob Schneider films. That's what I hear every time I see a film with 'Meet the-' in the title. Let's just say I don't have high hopes for Meet Dave. P.P.S. Yeah, I know I described Carmen Electra's cameos as demeaning. Carmen Electra, a woman who became famous via Playboy and Baywatch, doing something which is beneath her. I stand by it, those films are dog shit. We're number 385. Not as good as 'UNA Frontiers' but still better than 'Rockin' with the Erock'. Fourth Floor is a Toddler Posted 7:27 (GMT) 23rd July 2008 Hey, two things - firstly, there's a new strip, for free! Secondly, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to e-mail me their feedback and support in the light of my last news post. You know who you are and that you are awesome. If anyone else feels like e-mailing me I promise I will personally answer each e-mail in detail, usually in a way which is about twice as long as the original message. I'm quite an inefficient writer. That means even if you send me hate mail I will treat you to a detailed and thoughtful response, as some dude called Phil could testify (if his words weren't muffled by his own ass). Those two things out the way, I'd like to report that yesterday was one of our best single days for readership. Which is surprising because it represents a week's worth of page views in one day but unsurprising in that it was a Tuesday. And Tuesday is the best day for readers. That means that most of you guys come here on a Tuesday to read the strips or the news posts or whatever else happens around here. We update Wednesdays and Saturdays, the past two weeks have seen a Monday Wednesday Friday schedule to catch up. The only day that has been neglected is Tuesday and I suppose to a lesser extent Thursday. I think in the history of the strip only one update has been on a Tuesday. Maybe two. So, why Tuesday? Tuesday nothing happens here. Tuesday I play video games and eat cereal. It just doesn't make any sense that anyone would come here at that time. If any of you can shed some light on the subject we have a forum but somehow I think this is going to be one of those things that doesn't get any response. It's driving me crazy though. I mean, why Tuesday? Why? Oh shit I almost forgot. Thirdly, today Life on the Fourth Floor turns three! God, has it really been three years? Well, looking back at the first strip it feels like it's been 8 years. I really used to suck, didn't I? I suppose that's the drawback to improving, you look back to see how far you've come and all you can do is cringe. Well, 143 comics in three years isn't bad, that's nearly 50 a year. That's more than I ever expected. All of this is more than I ever expected - just being a cartoonist, creating characters and telling stories that keep people coming back every week, bringing smiles to thousands of people - this is what I always dreamed about. Thank you all for making this possible, for reading through the bad parts in the archives, for coming back every... Tuesday... for sending your encouraging e-mails and for your word-of-mouth advertising that has brought us up from 0 readers a day to nearly 100. You guys are the coolest, smartest and biggest audience I have ever had and the best part is when we're celebrating four years I know you will be cooler, smarter and bigger. Hopefully so will the comic. Some of the Worst Similes Ever Posted 9:55 (GMT) 21st July 2008 It was such a success last time we are again working to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule this week, which will allow me to catch up at long last. So here is another new strip just for you. This is hard work. Well, this concludes this storyline! Scheduling issues aside, I deem it a success. I mean, I'm happy with how it turned out visually, I'm satisfied with the pacing, the characterisation and the comedy. And all I can do is make comics that please myself on some level and hope that my readers feel the same way. I'm flying blind, reaching out to an audience of 6000 silent people - you guys. I can only assume you like the way I'm running things, because you keep coming back and don't complain. So far, no negative feedback and quite a lot of positive feedback (by my standards, anyway). I got an e-mail a while back from someone who thought I was awesome, and that's always good to hear. And Perk Daddy said in the forum how much he liked the X-men strip, which totally made my day. And I suppose if you eat a delicious meal at a restaurant you're not going to give your compliments to the chef every single time. Still, in light of this month's storyline it's interesting how much my relationship with the site's readers is like having a relationship with God. You can't see him, you can't touch him, you only know through a handful of texts that you're doing what he wants you to do - but you believe that he exists, you take it on faith that he's there and he's on your side. Actually, it's more like being a scientist who runs 100 experiments but only gets the results back on six of them. And all those results support the scientist's theory so from that he has to just assume he's a good scientist. No, wait. It's really like being a stand-up comedian - except the audience are in the next room and whilst they can hear the jokes you can't hear the laughter and you don't even know if people are walking out of the comedy club. What I'm trying to say is I appreciate it when you take the time out to applaud and the more often you do that the better indication I get of what I'm doing right. And then the stand-up routine improves for everybody! Thanks very much, I'm here all week. You've been a great audience... I think. Tip your waitress. We're number 390. Not as good as 'Cat's Grace' but still better than 'Rockin' with the Erock'. Wha? Indeed Another New Strip Posted 12:43 (GMT) 18th July 2008 Friday is the day upon which Ice Cube may well hit the highway on the Vegas run, the night upon which everything is popping. Friday is the day the Cure fall in love. And it's the day Steely Dan collects everything that he is owed, and indeed the day is Black. More importantly, Friday is the day we update for the third time this week. Feast your eyes on this! I have also taken the liberty, sir, of updating the Archives page. What with our erratic update schedule, you may well have missed one. Easy to check with this handy numbered list! Don't say I never do nothing for you. I still remember the day I made the archives page, because it forced me to come up with names for each strip. I had always hated the convention of naming each page and vowed I would be different, but the best laid plans of mice and midgets etc. etc. now each strip has a quirky little name. You can have fun reading down the list of strip names and watch them go through phases. At first they are all very descriptive, then they gradually become more abstract and eccentric until finally, at about number 80, two strip names together form a quotation from Oscar Wilde - and those two strips are not next to each other on the list, either. That is some Da Vinci Code shit right there. Another, about 50 strips ago, is a description of Kingyo's penis. Looking back, I don't think the names add anything - except a terrifying insight into the author's demented train of thought at the time of writing. Still, jolly useful nonetheless. Also, the time has come to begin worshipping Neil Patrick Harris as a god. Observe. Another New Strip Posted 18:24 (GMT) 16th July 2008 Wassup, people! It's Wednesday, and you know that means another strip. Because we are updating on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule this week there will be another update on Friday! See you then. If you want to stay up-to-date with the strip even when it's updating frantically, you can always subscribe to or bookmark the Fourth Floor Twitter feed. Between now and then, I would appreciate if you voted for us on Buzzcomix or Top Webcomics because it helps raise awareness for the site. And now would be an ideal time to recommend the strip to friends, since we're updating so much. I knew I could count on you guys. Peace out, see you Friday. We're number 402. Not as good as 'Tweep' but still better than 'Singularity Blues'. Miscarriage of Justice Posted 14:36 (GMT) 14th July 2008 For those hitherto unaware, there is a new strip up as promised. This week we are running a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule because a) It is the holidays b) I am behind and c) I love you all but don't get used to it, I struggle to update once a week during the lean Autumn and Winter months. Let's see if I can work ahead after we catch up again. Anyway, enough of this blasted shop talk. Has anyone been reading Ctrl+Alt+Del or however you're supposed to pronounce it lately? What the hell has happened there? It's been a while since I ranted futilely about Tim Buckley's shortcomings but I have focused in the past on his biggest flaw, the hopelessly derivative nature of his work. It seems since then he has developed a whole new flaw - horribly down-beat drama. Allow me to elaborate. Actually, before I do I'll stop myself. I've criticised Buckley for writing about the same topic as another writer and (accidentally?) writing the same material. So, full disclosure, I've watched Yahtzee's critique of webcomics and found it very funny. I suggest you go away and watch that before hearing what I have to say. He basically covers all of the main points here, definitively, forever. This is a seminal work of Buckley-bashing which will shape all future works. I prostrate myself before him. He has cut to the very heart of the matter - the ease with which Buckley does what he does, his refusal to accept criticism in any way and the eccentric and charismatic author-insertion persona who behaves like an idiot/jackass and is loved by everyone nonetheless. It's all there, it all fits, it sings. Since Yahtzee never actually mentions Ctrl+Alt+Del I fear I might be giving the game away. However, he does at one point mention "Bontrol-Bolt-Belete" so perhaps I'm not spoiling anything for you. He also says this: "Let's say, for sake of example, that you're sick of making Companion Cube jokes, and suddenly do a serious storyline about your female character having a miscarriage. Obviously, you'd need to have several blood clots in your brain to think this is a good idea; you're established as a wacky humour comic, so this is going to be an awkward tonal shift at best, and hugely disrespectful of the subject matter at worst." You might have guessed that this is exactly what has happened in Ctrl+Alt+Del. And I have to agree with Ben Croshaw on this one, it's an incredibly stupid move. Now for my thoughts. I'd be lying if I said the storyline hadn't affected me. I know people who have had miscarriages. I think even people who have never had children can understand to a certain extent the excitement and anticipation of pregnancy and how a miscarriage represents those hopes being crushed. We all get it. And so I was touched on an emotional level - even though I don't give a shit about any of the characters in Ctrl+Alt+Del. It's not my fault, I've never been given a reason to care about them, Tim has no idea how to write sympathetic characters. Still, this storyline got to me, not because it was well written but because I am a human being. Which makes me feel a little used and manipulated. I was thinking "What? This is how we're going to play it, Buckley? Miscarriages?" It's just mawkish. You feel dirty for being made to care about these characters by a writer going for the lowest-common-denominator tragedy. And that's what this is; the equivalent of winning a fight by kicking the other guy in the balls and running away. Yes, you've succeeded but you really shouldn't have had to go there to do so. And this whole pregnancy story arc felt like an after-thought anyway, like Tim rushed into it. One second, it's stupid jokes about glue and plans for a wedding, the next - BOOM - pregnancy. At the risk of sounding like a broken record I will point out the fact that February is the month PvP's wedding storyline got into full swing. I'm not saying it's related, I'm just saying. Anyway, because of its awkward pacing Ctrl+Alt+Del's pregnancy was never treated with any real emotional gravitas until it ended. And even now, in the aftermath, characters are working through their emotional problems in a way which does not equate to real human behaviour. In any way. In my years of reading Ctrl+Alt+Del I've noticed a tendency for Tim Buckley to rigorously apply logic to any human interaction. Two characters will argue, one will deliver an impassioned speech and the other will respond by pointing out exactly why that is illogical... and thus somehow win the argument. Defeated, the angry character will exclaim "Logic... my anger's mortal enemy." Or some such bullshit. Have you ever heard anyone say that? Yes, it's meant to be a punch line but a few weeks before that the punch line was a dead baby - now we're supposed to be in the realms of real human suffering. But instead, it's emotion being overcome by logic, drama for Vulcans. But we all know in our hearts that this rings false. Emotions cannot be rationalised, passion defies reason by definition. Whatever logic the head contributes, the heart will over-ride it. Heated arguments are never about who can provide the most reasoned response but about who can shout the loudest because that's the way humans work. Tim Buckley... just doesn't get us. I can't avoid the feeling that he would prefer us to all act like the emotionless robot character. I would argue therefore that he really has no business writing about miscarriages. And now it looks as if Lilah might be breaking off the engagement. I'll try not to roll my eyes. That's a nice message to send out to couples going through these kinds of problems - yeah, life doesn't really go on following a tragedy. But really, if anyone is going through something as sad as this in real life, are they really going to want to read about it in Ctrl+Alt+Del of all places, a strip which in between installments of a storyline about a dead foetus treats us to a one-off 'gag' about a man being rendered sterile? So... he can't have a kid either. Nice. No, not nice. That's just psychotic. What the fuck is he thinking? And really, if Lilah does break off the engagement over this it will be biggest plot hole ever, since she's managed to put up with her fiancee acting like a complete douche in every single previous strip. It's a retcon, really. Like I said before, he just doesn't get us. Which makes me wonder why I read Ctrl+Alt+Del at all. Why do I torture myself like this? Why do I keep coming back to a strip I don't find funny, one which is so badly written as to make me question whether the writer has ever spoken to people in real life? I think I read it because I still have hope, hope that it can improve. I get the impression he's trying, somewhat desperately, to make his strip work on a real emotional level, even if it's handled with all the delicacy and precision of a gorilla performing brain surgery with an electric shaver. As I said before, I've ranted in the past about how unoriginal Tim Buckley is. Well be careful what you wish for because this car crash of a storyline is Tim Buckley trying to be original. It is original, I'll give him that. But only because no cartoonist in their right mind would ever do this. At least, not this way. See you on Wednesday. We're number 413. Not as good as 'Used Books' but still better than 'Within Shadows'. "My Name is... Ovenready!" Posted 15:58 (GMT) 12th July 2008 Just to show off, I have completed another strip and it is awesome. I tried updating once every other day in June to catch up but it nearly killed me and I ended up back where I started so forget that. For the next two or three weeks we are on a tri-weekly Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule until the date matches that shown in the archives. I'm not sure which is more disgraceful, that I managed to get in this mess in the first place or that it has taken me this long to rectify it. For those interested, I have a Twitter thingy which will tell you what I'm doing as it happens, including when I'm updating the strip. Should be useful considering the majority of my readers live in another time zone. Why Ovenready? Well, it's a funny story. About six years ago I was registering for something and all of my usual usernames had already been taken so I just typed in the first word that came into my head, one relating to chicken. Because it's so useful, it's sort of stuck as my handle. It just happens to be a really stupid handle. It's no 'Strider' or 'Tycho' that's for damn sure. This made me think. If the Matrix is real and, once liberated, we will all be known by our hacker aliases then mine will undoubtedly be Ovenready. I dread the introductions. "Just going round the room, this is Trinity, Apoc, Cypher, Tank, Link and... Ovenready." "Hiya!" "Stop waving, Ovenready." See you on Monday. Sweat is Not a Dealbreaker Posted 17:24 (GMT) 9th July 2008 Looks like I am back on the ball and updating on time! The catching up is imminent - watch this space for more installments. The storyline has taken an interesting turn if I may say so myself, a turn in which I don't draw a picture of Mohammed (PBOH). Just want to make that clear before anyone burns my house down. Not that anyone but the most violent and unrepresentative extremists would want to burn my house down. Maybe the Misfile fans. Anyway, it's been a while since I ranted about the frighteningly uncanny trends in modern advertising. Here's one: weird eyes. Actually, this isn't the first advert of its kind I've seen, I believe there was a Mastercard ad in the Americas in which a guy's eyes are looking in different directions, but it certainly is the freakiest. For the benefit of those reading this in the future through magic four-dimensional telescopes (chronoscopes?) the advert shows a slightly dishevelled and unkempt-looking young man frollicking on the beach with a girl about four fathoms out of his league. He lays her down on the sand, she bites her lower lip - I think we can all guess what's going to happen next. Well we'd all be wrong. Instead of, you know, having sex with her our hero starts doing this weird thing where his eyes look in all different directions and the helpful voiceover tells us that a) He's checking his armpits to see if they're sweating and b) That he does this every time he sees a woman. Oh-ho-ho! When will the archetype of the young man who becomes sweaty and nervous at the mere sight of a woman die? More importantly, who - I mean who - WHO proposed an advert for men's antiperspirant in which a man's eyes look in all different directions like someone's hit him in the back of the head too hard and now they're stuck that way? WHO? I know who, I bet it was the same guy who dreamt up threatening sexual predator salad people for Subway and the same guy who thought of the ending to this advert. In my previous polemics I have described this man as awkward and bespectacled - he is the sum of all fears, the widowmaker: a man who has no understanding of human behaviour or what people find repellant and disgusting but who nevertheless has a highly-paid and influential job in advertising. How else can we explain these freakishly disturbing adverts, with a message that makes such little sense? And yes, these adverts make no sense. I could forgive the hideous imagery if the point being made was a valid one. I mean, just as Subway's promise of 'no surprises' is undermined by the knowledge that no fast food is surprising and the Lynx dark temptations' promise of chocolate-like irresistibility is undermined by the chocolate man's arm being broken off in the final seconds of the commercial, the anitperspirant's message that sweat is a dealbreaker in any sexual encounter is downright erroneous. In fact, the advert itself seems to reflect this - the girl seems ready to fool around with our ill-kempt hero until he starts doing the weird eye thing. And then, rather than screaming, she just looks bitterly disappointed. Unless this is Schrodinger's sweat, which doesn't exist until it is observed, this perspiration hasn't suddenly come into being so ostensibly the look of disappointment isn't because the guy's sweating, it's because he's doing the weird eye thing. And isn't that always the case? Things look like they're going your way, then your partner strokes out. So the advert's message seems to be that if you self-consciously check to see if you're sweating you can destroy the romance of a moment instantaneously. And until he checked, she looked like she didn't mind. Maybe she hadn't noticed the sweat-marks under his arms, maybe she had but she didn't care - either scenario is realistic. Nobody cares about sweat. Sweat is not a dealbreaker. You know the number of times I have been in some sort of intimate or romantic situation and noticed sweat marks? About a dozen, over the five years or so I have been sexually active. Did I give a shit? Of course not! If you sweat so much that the Wicked Witch of the West could well be threatened by your underarm area perhaps that may give you cause for concern but otherwise just forget about it. Wash every day with soap, apply whatever potions and ointments you think will help prevent sweat and then forget about it. Because if you think sweat can come between two lovers I have some bad news for you - there is no product that can stop you from sweating altogether and if you engage in any strenuous physical activity you are going to sweat. And if sex requires no exertion on your part, if you just sort of lie there, you're doing it wrong. What I'm saying is people who have sex sweat. It's a sweaty, messy, sometimes awkward, sometimes silly, intimate, stupid experience. If you're looking for 'perfect' sex in which soft incidental music starts playing as soon as you get going, nobody sweats, nobody misses a beat or does something embarrassing, both parties climax at the same time and the bedsheets perfectly cover men from the waist down and women from the neck down then you really are living in an advert and you should watch out for vegetable monsters and chocolate gimps. Okay, forget the sex. In any relationship you should feel safe enough to be yourself, wear what you want and excrete the fluids you excrete without fear of rejection. Anyone who is so picky that they're not willing to overlook pit-stains is never going to find love. And now we reach the part of the rant where I stop typing the first point that comes into my head, pour myself a second cup of tea and maybe re-read what I've already put and think about what I'm getting at. What I'm trying to say is this advert is not only frightening to behold but also insidious and unethical. It's a deliberate effort to undermine people's confidence about their own natural physicality, an attempt to engender nuerosis in our nation's youth. And if you encourage people who want to have sex with each other not to sweat you're really standing between them and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets sex. And that, as we all know, is just plain wrong. Sorry, I just realised you'll have to mouse-over the strip I just linked you to in order to appreciate the reference. Still, I think I've made my point. So Many Ninjas Posted 23:50 (GMT) 2nd July 2008 I don't know when you're going to see this but I apologise for the radio silence here on the site. I've been having problems with my FTP program, which is what I use to put content on the site. You can see why this might be problematic. The catching up continues, during what has to be the most visually ambitious storyline I have ever undertaken - I'm not going to lie to you, it's kicking my ass. And whilst that may mean more delays as I wrestle with each new update I believe there are some things more important than professionalism and one of those is storytelling. Another is aesthetics. I hope the latest strip, now you finally see it, lives up to that ideal. I'm always painfully aware of LotFF's elders and betters, precursors, inspirations, potential sources of plagiarism and, perhaps worst of all, shitty comics which are unaccountably more popular, to whom popularity is everything. Since this storyline started I haven't really talked much about what's going on, what I'm trying to do. Well, I'm trying to explore the conflict between secularism and religion, use it to characterise key members of the cast and explore how it can affect friendships without picking sides, lecturing, straw-manning or blaspheming. I don't know how successful I've been but at least you get to see Michael lose a finger. It's funny because it's not happening to me. While we're on the subject of webcomics, I would like to address directly every cartoonist whose strip appears on the Buzzcomix list of webcomics. Are you all sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin: Stop telling me how much you suck. Perhaps I need to explain myself. If you vote for the strip by following the link at the bottom of each news post you can follow a link to see our standing on the Buzzcomix Top 100 list, of which we have never been a part. We're usually somewhere around the 400 mark. Anyway, in this list of comics people have voted for there's a title, a display of the number of votes and then a short spiel persuading you to read the strip. Or rather, persuading you not to. For reasons I can't completely fathom, the vast majority of these blurbs describe their comic as stupid, unfunny or inferior in some way or, worse still, don't bother to describe anything. Here are some real-life examples from the Buzzcomix site: "Poorly drawn comics about a small, violent elf and his drunken adventures. Often described as hilarious or retarded." "We're the C-grade Sonic comic that the D-grade Sonic comics make look like a B-grade Sonic comic. So go read those, THEN read us." (Don't even get me started on Sonic sprite comics) "Kinda leaves you with that 'what the?' feeling." Yeah, I'll say. The internet is full to the brim with comics that are convinced they suck. They have one paragraph to convince me to read them and all they can tell me is that they're rubbish. If your work is unfunny by your own standards, what chance do the rest of us have? If your project sucks so much ass, why are you even doing this? Is it a purely self-deprecating thing, like they have to pretend to hate themselves just to appear modest? I don't get it. Worse still are the hopelessly vague or generic descriptions: "A funny single panel comic about anything!" Great. That narrows it down. "OMG ANGELS AND DEVILS. GRARRR LOVE!" That's not even a sentence. "i promise there will be no TENTACLE SEX." What, are you just going to list all the things that aren't in your strip? "So many comics, so little time..." That's not a description! That's just an unrelated statement! "The unluckiest girl in the world has to face the new chalanges [sic.] life brings upon her. Can she remain the same?" That could apply to any story about a girl. Someone is faced with challenges, whilst alive, and changes? Way to stand out from the crowd. Seriously, is that the best you can do? Your one chance to sell your webcomic to me and you can't even be bothered to tell me anything about it? I'm not sure which is worse, the descriptions completely lacking any descriptive detail or those which are just an ecclectic list of things: "Violin playing, awkwardness, and stupid, stupid decisions...sometimes." I really can't picture those things together. "Two scientists, a malfunctioning teleporter, and an alternate universe. What could possibly go wrong?" I smell a zany adventure. "Gore, Sex, Yaoi, Demons and Angels. There will be no regret in doing the sin." Oh Christ no. "Love, Maids and the Apocalypse." And videotape, I imagine. "Crazy Vietnam Vets, Talking Mops, and Wizards!" Ker-azy! "A goth, a geek, a coffee drone, a ninja, and... Tyler." "College life just like your remember! Except with more maniacal corporations, Evil Living clothing, Secret Government Agencies, Robots and Ninja Assassins then you had..." "In Which Japanese Mythology, Lost Ninja Clans, High School, and Kids wielding magical weapons are intertwined into a simple comic." "Three superheroes in love battle giant zombie turkeys, redneck cyber ninja monkeys, and Tim Curry's evil twin." "Pimps, Ho's, Ninjas, and cannibalistic street gangs." "Demons, robots, ghost pirates and zombies. And ninjas. Don't forget the ninjas." You know what? I won't forget the ninjas. It seems no list of seemingly-unrelated tropes would be complete without ninjas. I'm detecting a recurring ninja theme in all this. Clichéd internet humour aside, I would like to question the wisdom of presenting the entire plot of your strip as an unordered list of ingredients. That's like describing Lord of the Rings as "short people, wizards, eyes on fire and jewellery" or Jurassic Park as "frog DNA, sex changes, amber and flea circuses. Also a fat guy gets black sludge in his eyes". I'm not saying these things are not present in the story but I don't see how listing them is going to persuade anyone to watch the film. I like chocolate chip cookies. I think few people will argue that they are anything but delicious. Imagine you had to sell chocolate chip cookies. Would you walk up to someone and say "hydroxypropyl methyl cellulose; glucose syrup; rice starch; sodium bicarbonate"? No you wouldn't. The webcomic will not improve until we all collectively improve and if the standard we are setting for ourselves is "make something badly-drawn and unfunny that includes x, y and ninjas" then we might as well commit suicide en masse right now. I know it's not fun toiling in obscurity, I know nobody reads your comic or votes for it. On the other hand, if you're doing your best to drive readers away with these kinds of bullshit descriptions then you only have yourself to blame. I'm not saying these strips are bad, I'm saying they're underselling themselves. One of the comics is called 'Pointless' for God's sake. Stop telling me how much you suck. What I Thought of The Happening and Other Stories Posted 16:15 (GMT) 23rd June 2008 I normally start these posts by telling you there is a new strip up but I am so God-damn productive that I must tell you there are three: And so I have nearly caught up. What these three strips represent is a prolonged argument between two friends told over three parts. Not the easiest thing to make entertaining but I've got some positive feedback so I must be doing something right. Finishing last Wednesday's strip thrills me indescribably - that one punch line has been planned for a good two years and today it sees the light of day. Sometimes what I get down on paper isn't quite what I had in my head. Sometimes I manage it. This is one of the few cases where the strip is better than I imagined. Enjoy. Anyway, I promised you a huge news post and a huge news post you will get! Actually, the news post I wrote was so long and so epic I had to give it its own page. You can read it here. It's essentially my thoughts on every film I've seen since Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Turns out that's more films than I remembered. Should be pretty funny. Best read in small doses, though. We're number 419. Not as good as 'Shimmer' but better than 'Eben07', which has ninjas in it. Catching Up Posted 09:15 (GMT) 19th June 2008 With humblest apologies, I present a new strip. I've been updating regularly for about two weeks now but I still haven't managed to catch up. In fact, for one reason or another, I seem to be falling behind my catching up. I won't bore you with excuses. Instead, I will give you another new strip on Friday and then another on Sunday and one every other day until we're back on schedule. Me? I'll sleep when I'm dead. So, keep coming back and check the archives pages regularly. Huge news post in the pipeline, too. They Don't Look a Thing Like Onions 3: I Was Right About the Olives Posted 02:35 (GMT) 13th June 2008 There is a new strip up. I know, I know, it's been a week. I offer up no excuses, save the assurance that my attention was unavoidably focused elsewhere and resources of time and energy were stripped to a bare minimum, which probably had something to do with a colossal 16-panel behemoth which took four days to complete, four days I couldn't spare. I really could have done without that strip arriving at the time it did, when I needed to catch up on May's installments but the schedule dictated that the X-men strip fell where it did and I obeyed. Ironically, it is by sticking to the schedule that I have fallen behind schedule but such is life. I'm back and God damn it I'm pissed. Subway. Subway's advertising campaign, as I have previously ranted at length like some ill-kempt locust-eating prophet on the edge of society, is the stuff of madness. I don't know what diseased mind thought Subway customers being threatened in alleyways and parking lots by monstrous vegetable creatures with lax acknowledgement of personal space and a tendency for unwitting sexual innuendo was a good idea but it hasn't strengthened my love for the company one jot. It's only led to hours of confusion - trying to figure out how a hastily cut-together 30 second abortion of up-beat saxophone music, irritating characters and downright confusing dialogue can lead some people to buy sandwiches and others to fear for their lives. Or, more accurately, their anuses. Yes, I - very immaturely - chose a semi-ironic sexual reading of the whole affair, arguing that these onions and peppers weren't talking about hurting the smug twats who had shunned their brethren as sandwich fillings but instead had other designs, homoerotic ones. When a 6-foot red onion says "We can make you cry" it can either mean he can make you cry because he's an onion or because he's going to hold you down and do unspeakable things to your orifices. At least, that's how my mind works. To me, the whole thing smacked of psuedoeroticism, from the jalapeno's allusion to his "little friend" to the unnaturally acute satisfaction displayed on the faces of Collin and Brian, men who could be sued for sexual harassment just by making eye contact. I even picked on the poor sandwich girl, whose only crime was wearing red lipstick and looking down in such a way that suggested (to me at least) that she was batting her eyelids a bit. Really, I wasn't being serious. These two advertisements consist of a series of unfortunate mistakes that amount, with careful warping on my part, to double entendre. I just want to make that clear - the adverts aren't really about the vegetables' romantic designs on customers but rather about their ineffectual (and poorly communicated) threats of violence... at least, that's what I thought. Maybe I was right all along! Don't believe me? Then how do you explain this? Because I fucking can't. If we look back on February's post my last word on the subject of these sammich plugs went as follows: "Expect to see a smug man called Dave surprised in a cellar by disgruntled black olives asking him why he didn't want to swallow them soon." And lo and behold, they bring us olives. And they seem to have picked up on the idea that these vegetable-men want sex. In short, I can only conclude that the Subway people are reading my news posts. I'm getting ahead of myself, let me describe the advert for the benefit of future generations who will not have access to anything as ephemeral as a Youtube link. Like those that went before, the advert features lingering shots of salad and meat sailing through space, colliding wetly with bread, whilst an earnest voiceover does the disconnected talky bit. Two people are having their sandwiches made at once - both are asked if they want olives simultaneously and the man says no (he will be attacked later) and the woman says yes... and there's a moment when he turns to her in disgust as if to say "How could you?" She smiles obliviously, unaware that his eyes are boring into her accusingly. There are a few things wrong with this scene and this is before the fucking hideous olives appear. Firstly, they never have one guy just make your sandwich from start to finish, it gets passed down a line of people - so the same person will ask those people if they do or do not want olives. Why does it matter? Because it's a production line - it's every bit as revolutionary as it was in the Ford factories in 1920s America. It's a really efficient way of doing things, it's the only way they can have the time to tailor each sandwich to your individual whims and best of all it's really impersonal - which is great because I hate people. Not you guys, you guys are all right. What I'm saying is that the production line is what makes Subway great - that should be their selling point, not 'no surprises' which as I've said before makes no sense. Secondly, I don't want to be looked at by the person next to me like I'm endorsing infanticide every time I ask for olives. Don't encourage people to go somewhere where all the sandwiches are the same. That's food Nazism and I won't stand for it. You don't need to tell people that they will be judged if they pick the wrong vegetables - people are already baffled by choice, it's probably what's scaring your customers away - that and the giant olives. Yes, the couple sit down on a bench and are approached by a monstrous black olive with a twisted, wrinkled pug face and it says: "Did it hurt when you fell from Heaven?" Now, I was expecting the man to be attacked but that never happens. It seems the creepy vegetable creatures have changed tack and are no longer punishing those who reject them but rewarding with cheesy chat-up lines those who select them. The carrot not the stick, pun intended. I say it seems because in all three TV spots these vegetables have shown an inability to unambiguously state their intention. They can't just say "I fancy you" or "I'm going to break your fingers one by one until you cry". Noooo, they have to say "We make beautiful music together." Which means sex. Let's not mince words - ladies, if a man calls you can angel whilst his wing man plays a lute he's not just being nice. He's trying to seduce you. Which means the olives are trying to seduce the woman. Which means the jalapeños and the onions perhaps had the same goal in mind. Which means... I was right all along! This is what I mean when I say the people at Subway have been reading my posts - they have picked up on the idea that these are amorous vegetables, that above all they want to have weird animal/vegetable sex with Subway customers. They have established weird illogical rules in their private nightmare world of gigantic talking onions and then broken them. What am I supposed to do? Comment drily on the olive's suggestive grin, the unashamed attempts to woo the woman who likes olives? They're not buried under layers of subtext waiting for some immature obsessive such as myself to unearth them and bring them up to the air, they're there right on surface for all to see. The whole advert, for all its rushed editing and minimal dialogue, only makes sense if you understand that the olives want to have sex with this woman. It's almost as if they're admitting that they were deliberately suggesting that before. It's eye-opening, really. What the fuck are these people trying to pull? It's like providing a paranoid man with comprehensive evidence that he is under surveillance and, yes, there is a conspiracy to kill him. They're using my own sex jokes against me! But then, the olive is still an ugly fucker, the olives are still frightened away by Subway staff members materialising out of fucking nowhere. Before we were supposed to think (at least I thought we were) that they were coming to the rescue but now it just seems like they're running around stopping men from having their girlfriends stolen from them, like maybe there was a serious risk that she would break up with him and join the three olives on their gondola for a little ménage à quatre (or is that mélange à quatre?) if those sandwich monkeys hadn't shown up. But if they are sticking to the established formula, where is the shot of the man biting into the sandwich and developing a horrible shit-eating grin? Why do I get so riled up by these advertisements? Well, they don't make any sense and nobody questions it. It's like things in our lives don't have to make sense, like society has reached a point of dementia where walking, talking, sexually insatiable vegetables can be accepted as normal. Furthermore, the olives all seem to have what I can only describe as bad Italian accents but they're so bad that I was only tipped off by pictures in-store of these olives with huge black curly moustaches when I bought my cheese steak today. Now I think about it, the jalapeños seemed to have vaguely Mexican accents - although they quote Scarface and Tony Montana was Cuban so fuck it, maybe the peppers are Cuban. It seems that Subway are just doing a run-down of crude racial stereotypes. In that case, why they didn't go the whole hog and make the black olives black olives is a mystery. Cowards. Subway, if you are reading this post please listen. Stop with the stupid costumes and the silly voices. Stop trying to sell your sandwiches on the basis that certain actions will be punished/rewarded by the appearance of brutal vegetable abominations but then assure us not to worry because Subway employees will scare them off. Unless your message is 'Subway: protecting you from generic threats' you've failed in whatever you were trying to deliver. How about this? Stop selling your sandwiches full stop. They sell themselves. Here's an advert for you (since you already stole my idea for sexually suggestive black olives): talking heads of everyday people describing their favourite sandwich and which ingredients and sauces compliment them the best. Like a guy who tells you that you must add red onion to a meatball sub because it's "gorgeous" or a women telling you that her favourite sauce for a BMT is Southwest. Fade to black. Then the tag-line fades in... Subway: it's fucking delicious. That's all you need to say. That's all you ever needed to say. The magic was inside you all along. Send the focus group that gave thumbs up to mutant fruit to a mental institution. Webcomic Haiku Posted 06:04 (GMT) 2nd June 2008 I come before you again with nature's delicious bounty, by which I mean a new strip. In addition to lovingly crafting this offering I have also written summaries of other, more successful, comics in the form of delightful Haiku. Apologies if you don't know any of these comics - honestly I'm flattered that you only read mine. If you're a fan of any of these strips don't take the Haiku too seriously, it's just a bit of fun: Penny
Arcade PvP Ctrl+Alt+Del Sore
Thumbs Atland xkcd Starslip
Crisis Least
I Could Do Three
Panel Soul Have fun writing your own! Feel free to e-mail them to me and I'll put the best ones up on the site, assuming any are submitted. Halle Berry's Ego Posted 18:30 (GMT) 30th May 2008 Wahey! Another strip up. Also, there was a new strip up on Monday. Since I've been catching up this month rather than just updating twice a week on time, you will have almost definitely missed one strip because of the relatively small amount of time it spent on the main page and the sporadic unscheduled posting. Here are the month's strips so far: 123 - Wednesday, May 7, 2008 124 - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 125 - Saturday, May 17, 2008 126 - Wednesday, May 21, 2008 127 - Saturday, May 24, 2008 Read them, enjoy them, cherish them. The next couple will be up soon and then we'll be all caught up. At least until the next set of exams. Anyway, time to talk about the latest update and the welcome (at least in my opinion) return of the Fourth Floor Players. Yes, after a week of semen jokes I felt it was time for a parody of the third X-men movie. Last time (almost a year ago now) it was the comic Misfile that I placed under the white-hot glare of my fierce wit and you can see the result here. The fact that I see X-men III: The Last Stand and Misfile as being equal is either a huge compliment to one or a huge insult to the other. I'll let you decide which is which. Anyway, the X-men strip took a lot longer than I thought it would (hence the four-day gap between updates) because it's 16 panels long. The longest strip to date, the equivalent of two weeks' worth of updates. It's long, disjointed and contains entirely too much Storm - exactly like the film, except my version is less cartoonish. Stop reading now if you haven't seen the cinematic abortion that is Last Stand. But honestly, it's been two years.
What was the deal with killing off and writing out so many characters in such an anticlimactic fashion? I mean, what were they thinking? I have no objection to killing off characters - it lets the audience know you mean business and adds dramatic tension. But unless there's some narrative purpose to that character's death it's at best cheap and worst utterly superfluous. There was really no good reason why any character needed to die in that film - with the exception of Storm and she was practically the only character who fucking survived. But she really needed to die - more on that in a second. The only reason why those characters were written out was because the actors portraying them wanted to leave the franchise and boy did it show. Alan Cumming didn't even show up to be killed off. It's just a punch in the face to anyone who liked the first two films. So instead of a plot we get a series of pointless and anticlimactic deaths strung together by coincidence and Idiot Plot. A whole load of new characters are shoe-horned in but none are given enough screen time to develop, not even Kelsey Grammer as Beast - a masterstroke of casting! Beast was always my favourite when I watched the Saturday morning cartoon and casting Frasier Crane in the role was genius. And even though every second he's on screen my heart dances with joy there's just not enough of him. Such a waste. None of the characters are given enough screen time and the whole experience of watching the film is utterly dissatisfying as a result. Sometimes there are tantalising moments bordering on greatness but they are seen through a glass darkly. So, with so many characters jostling for screen time, how come there's so much Storm? She straddles that film like a colossus (or like Colossus) and it grates on my nerves. Halle Berry came out with all this bullshit before the film's release about how the character of Storm was much stronger and more significant in the comics and fans were clamouring for her part in the franchise to be expanded beyond the (thankfully) relatively minor role in the first two (watchable) films. I'm pretty sure that whatever Storm's role in the comic books is, no-one was asking for more Halle Berry. Halle Fucking Berry. Halle 'Catwoman' Berry. God, that woman can't act for shit. Suddenly, she gets an Oscar (how?) and from then on every film she's in has to be The Halle Berry Show. She somehow has managed to insinuate herself into every significant scene in X-men III, like a parasite. She doesn't have anything to do, she's just there - and for some reason she has a completely different personality now, one altogether at odds with everything established in the first two films. And for no reason at all other than to date the film horribly, a new hairstyle. She has billing above both Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart! She even starts delivering lines that are normally reserved for characters like Gandalf in LotR or Sir Leigh Teabing in the Da Vinci Code or, indeed, Patrick Stewart in everything he's ever been in ever. We all know that these are actors who can pull off a line like "Are you ready to do what's necessary when the time comes?" Coming out of Halle Berry's mouth those words just sound stupid. Kelsey Grammer could have pulled that off. Halle Berry is out of her depth, like a spoilt child insisting on the biggest portion of chocolate cake and then finding they don't have the appetite to poke it all down. Considering the story of Magneto in the X-men trilogy is one of well-intentioned efforts spiralling into evil because of hubris you'd think someone would have noticed something similar going on behind the camera. Last Stand is a film swallowed whole by Halle Berry's arrogance - she is a stone around its neck, choking the life out of it, a blight on modern cinema. And she's got to be stopped. Also, the script is pretty weak and all of the sub-plots have all the strength and momentum of kitten farts but it looks like we're out of space. Oh well. Stay tuned for the next strip in about two days, if all goes to plan. A Side of Bruce Willis I'd Sooner Not See Posted 04:38 (GMT) 24th May 2008 Ho ho, and the site is updated once again with another new strip! I told you I would make it up to you and make it up I have. Due to the frankly embarrassing speed at which these new comics have been churned out I feel I must remind you that I have also posted this strip and this one already this week and you might have missed them. No sense putting all that work in if people are going to miss it. Speaking of which, today's masterpiece refers back to this strip because that's how I roll. In other news, I am still staying up all night and sleeping all day like some kind of freaky bat creature. I don't know if I've been drinking too much Red Bull or too little but this irregular sleep pattern is disruptive and unsociable and society surely will not allow it. It's already stopped me from handing in my post-dated rent cheques for next year and prevented me from getting my hair cut. Something must be done before the mob arrives with its pitch forks and torches. If I only knew what. Finally, I would like to share some of my favourite new search threads that have led unsuspected surfers to this site, courtesy of Google. Whilst none of them can beat comic forced orgasm nazi “time travel”, some come close: bruce
willis – early in career pornographic photos I especially like that last one, because it shows that some people think the same thoughts as me although the one before that is pretty funny because it's more of a demand than a search, operating along the same lines as the computers in Star Trek. "Computer, explain the ending of the movie The Fourth Floor." The less said about the philosophical quandry of whether you would eat yourself if you were a hotdog the better. We're number 344. Still not as good as 'Outlaws-Tales' but better than 'Innocence Lost'. I Am Nocturnal. I Wish I Was Joking. Posted 02:59 (GMT) 22nd May 2008 All right, there is yet another strip up, the strip for last week. The strips (plural) for this week will be a little longer coming. I am, after all, only human. Still, you wouldn't know it from how quickly I churned out this update - it happened so fast you may have missed this update which precedes it. Anyway, I really like the way this new strip turned out and yes I am fully aware of the deeply-embedded irony. It was deliberate. What wasn't deliberate was how I have become nocturnal. I have been working on the strip virtually non-stop for the past 48 hours. I've been getting plenty of sleep between work sessions but instead of sleeping at the normal human time I've just been sleeping when I felt tired. So I've been waking up at 7 in the evening, then falling alseep again at 4am, then getting up at 9 (I forget which one) and then napping until 2. I woke up on Tuesday at 5 in the afternoon. So my circadian rhythm is all shot to Hell. Now I don't know what I should do, whether I should go to bed at night even when I'm not tired or stay up all night and all day so I will be extra tired when the next night-time rolls around. The problem with that plan is it never works - you end up falling asleep at about 3pm and waking up some time during the night or making it to the evening and then falling asleep for 14 hours at a time. The alternative - lying in bed even when I don't feel tired - just feels sort of pointless and unproductive. But I can't keep sleeping during the day, emerging to feed at night. For one I have things to do, human daytime things like hair appointments and social engagements. Plus, I'll start to forget what natural light looks like and then we all know the sound of grass and the taste of bread are next. Before too long we'll even forget our name. Right, that's it. I'm off to bed. Next update happening very soon. Sit tight. Jason Segel Will Save Us All Posted 06:41 (GMT) 20th May 2008 I'm back! You know I couldn't stay away too long. Yes, the exams are over, the academic year is at a close and for the next four months you have my undivided attention. Bask in it. I'm back, baby - and it feels good. And with my return comes the unmistakable smell of a delicious new strip fresh out of the creativity oven. Please forgive my post-modern indulgences - I was thinking about the selective use of continuity in the comic and I just couldn't help myself. Don't take it too seriously, I am just fucking with you. Then again, when am I ever not fucking with you? Oh, there's so much to do, so much to talk about! First and foremost, if you haven't yet seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall you most certainly should. I raved about Knocked Up last summer and was cautiously optimistic when I heard about a new film starring and written by Jason "Marshall-from-the-one-of-the-funniest-sitcoms-ever-How-I-Met-Your-Mother" Segel. I should have been ecstatic considering how good it sounds on paper but the trailer only hinted at something which may well be good but could just as easily disappoint, which is to say none of the biggest laughs from the film are in the trailer. Thinking back, that's actually a good thing since there's nothing most trailers love more these days than ruining all of a film's biggest surprises. I'm reminded of the trailer for Shrek 2 which revealed the whole "Pray for mercy rom Puss in Boots" scene in its entirety, not to mention its omnipresence in TV spots - it got to the point that when I actually saw the film the kids behind me spent the entire scene reciting the lines as they occurred, as well they might since it's a very funny scene when you re-watch the film on DVD years later - but whenever you see a film for the first time at the cinema it's always infected by your memories of the trailer. Forgetting Sarah Marshall's trailer wasn't exactly misleading (not like the awful trailer for My Big Fat Greek Wedding - witty, subtle tale of emotional growth and family tradition equals falling down?) but it neatly avoids all of those pitfalls, giving away just enough to whet the appetite but spoiling nothing. And I won't spoil anything either - just see the film before everyone starts talking about the hilarious thing with the stuff that made them laugh out loud. I will say that Jason Segel is a very talented and relatable actor and an excellent writer both of screenplays and songs. In fact, I think he just might be my new hero. What I'm trying to say, really, is that I was surprised by Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I was surprised by how funny it was, I was surprised because none of the surprises are spoiled in the promotional material and I was surprised because what could have easily been a by-the-numbers romantic comedy (not that there's anything wrong with that) turned out to be a startlingly original and unpredictable film. And that puts it right up there with my all-time favourite When Harry Met Sally. I suppose what's interesting about films like Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall is the way they explore changing ideas of masculinity in the 21st century. These films aren't about losing your virginity to a pie or lighting your beer farts, these films are about confronting parenthood and crying over your ex-girlfriend - essentially stories of men tackling responsibility and emotions head-on and all the interesting comic scenarios that are thrown up by that, rather than the hollow and unrealistic story of some guy running from responsibility or his feelings until he finally learns not to, as if that's the biggest step any man's going to take in his life. It's when you confront your feelings that things get interesting, it should be the catalyst for a plot rather than the ending. These are very funny films - films that real people can relate to - about achieving maturity in a post-feminist society and their critical reception and financial success shows that cinema and audiences are maturing too. What an exciting time to be alive. Anyway, stick around because I'm going to pelt strips at you none-stop until I've caught up. Come back every day to make sure you don't miss a thing. In fact, you probably already have missed something from the last catching-up session so now would be a good time to re-read the archives from about here onwards. Right, back to the grindstone. |
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I'm
sorry to all my readers who are miserable and/or single, I've been
thinking of a way to say this that doesn't sound smug and I've realised
there isn't one. The fact is I'm truly happy. It started as something
that only happened a couple of times a week when I saw my girlfriend.
This is the same girlfriend I've been talking about for the past
three years. About six months ago I began being happy every day,
the same time my girlfriend moved in with me. Now I experience joy
on an everyday basis.
If
you have not already, behold the 
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