Hello all! Time for the roundup of my life as of the last 2 days or so
"Would you rather be dropped into the middle of an olympic sized swimming pool with a shark or 15 piranhas?"
Yes that utterly random question with two equally dislikable choices can only mean one thing. A night in with the lads. (Ben is responsible for those types of questions) This is how it works: Basically a load of my mates bundle round to the farm and play whatever new console games have been purchased to death on either
a) Matt's XBox
b) Richard's PS2
c) Ben's dreamcast or
d) my GameCube.
In fact Richard now also owns an Xbox for reasons which have not become clear to me yet. Anyhow we tend to play the game to death (ie: Vice City / GTA 3/ Halo/ Gauntlet Dark Legacy - Penny Arcade strip about a similar gaming experience ) and then sit around and maybe watch a movie. God Bless having mates. How else could we ensure all the good games got played other than by having all the major console bases covered? I mean sure we could actually fork out for them but some of us having to lend money to girls who never pay us back or something equally fiscally draining (BTW the money lending is entirely Matt's domain =] I've offered legal advice as to what he can do to reclaim the balances should he so choose to hehe)
Anyhow amongst the copious amount of cola and other soft-drinks and whatever beer was carted over we tend to have a great laugh and just chill-out before going to sleep at a ridiculous hour. We are the media generation =]
Last night was a great laugh although we were pitiful on the attendance levels =] Ben arrived as usual as did Andrew some time later but he later left fearing Richard's Wrath. You see he sort of left Richard to find alternate modes of transport to his house.. And by leaving him to find the modes of transport I mean he drove off whilst he was getting something from McDonald's. And by 'alternate modes of transport' I mean he walked.. And by 'to his house' I mean fecking miles. Needless to say Richard was swift to offer many means of vengeance which did not appeal to Andrew and so, wishing to have his clothes/limbs both intact and dry (one suggestion involved the pool) he left before Richard arrived. It did seem a bit out of the blue as Rick wouldn't really have done more than have a go at him with a laugh.
Someone up there is looking down on me.... And laughing his ass off
Yeah, those of you who have watched the seminal classic Steve Martin portrayal of Sgt. Earnest Bilko that quote will make sense but even without prior knowledge it is easy to convey the feeling that ones legs have been involved in some hideous experiment involving a 15 stone wrestler and a copy of "Physiotherapy for the Steroid-influenced demented".
Basically the buses that go from the Farm (Where I was last night) are about 1 an hour.. Except on Sunday, which it was today. When they are 1 every 3 hours so I decided to walk into town instead of waiting for the next bus. I was like "hey I did this when I was 11 on my bike so no problem right?" But of course the operative words were "On my bike". Basically the whole sodden trek was like something out of a WWII Escape movie. By far the highlight was when I stopped at this big-ass puddle and thought to myself "Man that is one biiiiiig-ass puddle.." just giving a passing 16 wheeler truck time to accelerate and dump the contents of the puddle onto me. You can't make comic timing like that.
Spare time.. We like
Yeah so tomorrow is monday and I have loads of spare time. I figured I might actually get down to illustrating a full comic strip. Here's the deal. About 6 months ago I figured it'd be fun to draw a comic strip featuring my mates and I found myself writing loads of scripts on the spot, some actually quite funny according to the other people who read them. I learned to draw really basic Anime. I mean people like Ian McKonville and Mike Krahulik are artists, in so far as they can draw stuff like say "Draw a vacuum Cleaner" and they'd draw it well. I approached it from the point of view of a formulaic system for getting down images from words but I remain a big advocate of the 'active strip'.
There is a superb Calvin and Hobbes strip where the two are standing almost motionless in a very un-C&H like manner talking to each other about Calvin's Grandad saying comics had just become "a bunch of xeroxed heads talking to each other" culminating in the lines "Your grandad sure takes the funnies seriously doesn't he?" "Yeah mum and dad are looking into homes for him". Anyhow the point is I could just do like 3 of 4 drawings of each character and multiply them endlessly to create a uniform and decent product but there wouldn't be any of the kinetic appeal that sets apart such great webcomics as PA and MacHall. In short I'm going to keep drawing these strips till I can finally have a product I'm proud of and as soon as that's done I'll put them online.
Right I'm going off to bed now because I'm shattered!
Posted by John Swaine at January 19, 2003 10:10 PM