219: zines and terrible scenes

Bits of paper, some with words, some with pictures, others with both or neither.  Some of the pieces of paper are folded and fastened together often using small bent strips of steel wire.  When compiled these are known as books or magazines or, when constructed by a wannabe illustrator, designer or pretentious hipster, they are zines.  (Speaking of pretentious, those first three sentences were phrased incredibly pretentiously; what was I thinking?)  I haven’t the money to go spending on zines at the moment; but if I did, I would.  Waiting to start a family on my shelf are only two zines, Protomurk by Zeke Clough, and Dogs & Dice by Martin O’Neill.  Between the two of them they pretty much cover all basis of my interests.

Zeke Clough (this painting is his)

Protomurk is sixteen pages of Zeke’s garishhh bright colours and obsessively crosshatched surrealist and non-representational nightmares; melting pig-face bleeds into boggle-eyed duck and hypertense clown-machine, whilst exposed synapses and gagging baby flipper-insect watch over swinging witch and handsome hand-faced abomination.  If there is a story I think that about sums it up. 

Dogs & Dice is a collection of collages assembled from scraps of paper ephemera, postcards, newsprint, rolodex cards, etc.  The artwork is beautiful, and perfectly shows how simple images can have so much power.  The best part for me is the photos of Martin’s bits and bobs collection; shelves and pigeon-holes stuffed with dolls faces, mouth casts, typewriter keys, playing cards, reference books, etc.  And the Bisley cabinets with collage material prepared and organised into categories; retrotech, cutlery & religion, woomen & boobies, radio-morse & blowers, Gloria Gaynors, digital bollocks, thrills & swoon, Canada vs America, and of course, dogs & dice.  A good lad or lass at Magazine Junkie has upped a load of pictures of Dogs & Dice so I don't have to: you can view them here.

Martin O'Neill 2008

 I’ve never made a zine.  That seems to be the done thing for people like me; creative, like drawing and writing, like organising things into boxes and files, lots of pencil cases and packs of cards.  Yes, I shall make a zine.  For some reason no-one, as far as I can tell (with the most cursory of google-glances) has made a zine out of Plasticine and named it Plastizine.  Possibly because it’s a rubbish name.  All I can find along that vein is an old abandoned GeoCities music forum called Plasterzine archived on OoCities; probably only of interest to the most anal and completist of all Internet Archaeologists.  I imagine a little magazine with each page made out of Plasticine, brightly coloured and flat-ish.  For practicalities sake the actual zine would be made from photo reproductions of the pages, not the actual pages themselves.  I’ll add that to the ‘maybe’ pile; don’t steal it!

I've got years worth of drawings that could easily be arranged into a zine of sorts.  Couple those with some scanner collages (I don't know about you, but I really like them), come up with a semi-witty/'arty'/self-consciously-weird name, scrabble together some printing costs and Bob's your wotsit, I've got a zine.  I have to many other ongoing unfinished projects to add making an original zine to the list, plus I promised to illustrate a story for my dad.  It would be nice to have a book/magazine/zine made, but dad's story gets priority before my zine.  Plus I'd probably just make it all about octopuses, or something... now there's an idea!

Scanner collage 4

I'm really enjoying doing these; tossing together random elements collected over many years, seeing what the elements say to each other.  Just looking at the visual mish-mash.

218: ladders, scamps, scallywags and imaginary onions

Stupid scaffolding has been up on the house for only a couple of days and already a gang of scally-wags has been clambering all over the house.  What I want to know is why the builders have left their ladder up as an invite to tosspots, tied it at the top so I can’t take it down, and ripped up the front gate just to make access even easier.  It’s like an invitation to aggressive and naughty little idiots.  “We’re not fucking robbing you, what’s the fucking problem.”  To keep quoting from their stupid defence I’ll have to remove all the rest of the “fucking fucks” or it’ll look like I’m cheating on the word count.  “Get back in your house or I’ll smash you.”  “Which is your window?”  “Go on then, ring the police.”  Etcetera, etc, &c... 

They were, of course, all talk and no trousers (tracky bottoms tucked into socks), scampered off, and almost immediately began climbing all over the next group of semis down the street.  I came back out to try and take down the ladder; they saw me and shouted “it’s him again” and when I came back out a few minutes later to get the bus, they were nowhere to be seen.  Now all I have to worry about is midnight reprisals.  Our bedroom window is at comfortable kicking height, and the scaffold is loaded with heavy metal clamps and fasteners to lob crashing and unwanted into our lives and laps.

For obvious reasons I don’t want them up there; invasion of privacy, they might hurt themselves, they might snap our telephone wire or aerial or the neighbours satellite dish, they’re in my garden on my house, aggressive and ignorant, little Viz Rat Boys.  Anyway I don’t want to look out of the window and see teenagers tumbling past at terminal velocity, with only the newly laid tarmac to break their fall.  That would be terrible (terribly inconvenient... am I being unfair?  Probably, but...).  Only another six weeks to go, and then the house will look marginally different from the outside, woo hoo. 

Looking up from my desk during the week and seeing the feet of builders walking passed the window at ceiling height creates the perspective of living in a basement flat.  I can produce a comfortable delusion for myself by imagining it’s not a basement, it’s a garden flat or lower ground floor.  There, it’s not a building site after all; it’s a garden flat, full of strawberry plants and fresh herb bushes, yummy!  Home grown potatoes and carrots for tea roasted with home reared lamb; perfect.  I’m hungry.  See you later. 

Scanner Collage 3

217: The terrible, hideous, eldtritch torment of reading H.P. Lovecraft

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a novella by H.P. Lovecraft, and like the cyclic unquenchable need to eat and sleep and remain enslaved to all the functions of life and death, I am repeatedly drawn back to turn its dark pages to consume the twisted tale of Mr. Ward’s downfall expressed in baroque and beautiful prose.  For the third time in one halfyear I find the book clasped in my clammy trembling fists; its cheap paper absorbing the terrible stench of death from my pores poring fear sweats.  Why can I not wrench myself from its terrible clutches; from its unlikely expositions and its characters' detailed knowledge of the arcane and the fantastical?  Its eldritch screams awaken my obsession and draw me stumbling and moaning to the darkest corners of the bookshelf, forgotten by all but the mad and the wicked.

Raymond Carver

It’s also the sort of story, and Lovecraft the sort of writer, that is impossible not to want to emulate, with his drawn out, many-pointed sentences, and blizzards of lazy adjectives.  (Why describe something as ‘making me hold my breath and listen to the silence over the whap-whap-whap of my heart’ when you could just say ‘it filled me with an inescapable and eternal dread which even now, all these years later, I still feel when I recall the name grN’afthargk-tang, and that hand, the window, The Hand....’?  Why indeed.)  The need to stretch sentences to breaking point and to torture my own credulity is undeniable, but the influence on creative and contemporary writing is terrible.  I should I know, in my heart of hearts, be reading Amy Hempel and Raymond Carver and emulating their originality of metaphor, their use of themes, and their metaphoric use of matter-of-fact statements to allow the reader to unpack and assemble the emotions, rather than spoon-feeding them fat, thin, lazy, speedily.

 

But yet again the call of dark magic, sealed vaults, ancient beings, alien forest-dwellers, trans-dimensional brain-stealers, and other unlikely overwritten nonsense, whispers from the back of my mind before rising to a deafening scream behind my eyeballs.  That’s a pointlessly complicated way of saying I enjoy reading some of his stories more than once.  Some of them are short and about nothing; merely a glimmer of an idea or a recollection of a dream.  These ones are not so exciting.  But others are elongated tales of forgotten catacombs and terrible histories that can only be imagined; tantalising tip-toeing explorations of vast worlds, abandoned by black magicians or inhabitants from outer space.

Now that’s out of my system for hopefully a day or two.  I’m sure there is no point in my reading any of it back; it undoubtedly makes no sense at all, but that doesn’t really matter.  I’m not trying to tell a story, just doing a bit of exercise.  My typing fingers will have biceps like bison, and my eyes will be square like L7 from staring at the black on white of Word.  Someone, who will remain nameless has come in and put the telly on and now I can’t concentrate on writing.  Signing off; be back later for more of the same.

216: Blogger or WordPress; MySpace, now even worse!

I’m toying with the idea of moving the blog over from Blogger to WordPress.  Let’s take a look at the two and see what the best course of action is.  There are plenty of comparisons out there written by people with varying degrees of knowing-what-they-are-talking-about, and the general consensus seems to be a preference toward WordPress.  I have no experience of WordPress but am lead to believe I could modify the entire look of a blog using my own illustrations and handwritten links and tabs.  Also apparently Blogger only stores 1 gig of pictures, but WordPress can take 3 gig of pictures as well as docs and pdfs.  I’ve collected together links to a few comparative articles:

• Blogger vs WordPress: In my opinion WordPress won my heart
• Blogger vs WordPress comparison chart 2011
• WordPress vs Blogger
• Blogger vs WordPress: 10 Features for Beginners

At the moment I’m comfortable here on Blogger (or BlogSpot as I always want to call it).  A lot of Blogger’s knockers seem to be slipping into anti-Google anti-globalisation worries about privacy issues (which I think is missing the point, whatever that may be).  And in actual fact there really isn’t much difference between the two.  I imagine one day I may swap over but it’s likely to be based on a whim rather than real practical need, like when you get the sudden desire to move all the furniture around in a room.

I could do without spreading myself even thinner online than I already am.  A few years ago I had a Bebo account which has long been deleted.  Next to go I think should be my MySpace account.  I never use it, but thought it OK as a sort of makeshift portfolio; now it is even slipping in usefulness for that as they have messed with the format ruining my carefully laid out design.  Despite the fact that nobody ever uses MySpace anymore (now bizarrely styling itself as My_____) Alexa amazingly ranks it as being the 67^th most popular website in the world.  I have no idea how this is possible unless that is all generated by fraudsters and unsigned bands spamming each other.  I also have photobucket and twitter accounts that I never use.  This is too much clutter and one of these days something needs to go.

an exciting scene, yesterday

Speaking of something needing to go, yesterday’s haircut was a resounding success.  I have morphed from a scruffy pleb into a handsome young chap in the time it took to make awkward small-talk with the lady with the scissors.  While I was having the snip (so to speak) a window cleaner came in and started telling the staff about his sore thighs.  Then he whipped out some bootleg DVDs and CDs, and a CD with old photos of Moss Side on it.  He managed to punt a few of these to the girl who washes hair and sweeps the floor.  Then he borrowed a stool and went outside to clean the windows.  He wobbled and tottered dangerously on the unstable stool as he over-reached to the top corners, but didn’t topple.

UPDATE:
Had a couple of hints and tips from concerned citizens.
Matthew from Refute.me.uk says:
I'd go wordpress - loads of features. Thought about getting a separate domain name? You can get email hooked up to it. Probably good for portfolios and stuff too.
Mr Ralph from Bab Kubwa says: 
Don't bother with wordpress.com - you need to go self hosted with your own domain. Then you can customise as much as you like and take advantage of all kinds of clever plug-ins:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

Another scanner collage (2)

215: Recommended blogs (I was going to call it 'Tip-top shit-hot dogs bollocks blogs', but thought better of it)

http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/

The inspiration for my own blog.  Comedian Richard Herring began his daily blog on 30^th November 2002, and he continues with an entry for each date even as we speak.  It’s sort of a diary and sort of an exercise in writing, exactly like mine (except Warming Up is a much better name than Block Chop).  Before I started my own blog I didn’t think I would be able to do a post a day; I thought maybe I could manage two or three a week, but sensibly realised I would end up doing all of them at the same time on Sunday evening each week.  The whole project would have crumbled within a couple of weeks.  Sensibly I went for the daily option, and haven’t looked back since!

http://www.thestylerookie.com/

Surprisingly good fashion blog written by a 13-year old girl.  It’s full of striking images, bright colours and weird hats.  It seems like a fashion student’s research folder, and is well written and sarcastic.  Plus it gets millions of hits and has got her jobs writing for big fashion magazines and invites to loads of top fashion shows.  There was a profile about Style Rookie on BBC 2’s The Culture Show last week, so I’m joining them in jumping on a bandwagon.

http://geeksjournal1976.blogspot.com/

A geeky freelance writer uploads his extremely geeky diary from 1976.  He talks about buying comics and his favourite TV programmes, expresses guilty feelings about ‘it’, stresses about girls and school, and entertains us with some fabulously geeky photos of himself.  Each post is accompanied by a modern commentary trying to explain what his teenage self is going on about.

http://nedrants.blogspot.com

A confused lad stresses about sex and church in one long rambling post, and then vanishes from the face of the Earth.  Why has he not posted again, and has he grown up a bit?

http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/

http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/

http://www.minority-thought.com/

Three excellent blogs that read the tabloid press so you don’t have to.  Ever wondered exactly how much regurgitated press releases, vague unresearched bullshit, and straight up lies are printed daily and repeatedly in the Daily Mail, The Sun, and the rest of them?  Now you can see the hypocrisy and the untruth picked over piece by piece in excruciating, disheartening detail.  Chief enemies to keep an eye out for are Richard Littlejohn (Daily Mail columnist who makes his millions spreading lies about immigrants and local council health and safety) and Richard Desmond (owner of the Express and the Star who has withdrawn from the Press Complaints Commission).  These blogs make depressing but addictive reading.

http://wefuckinglovemusic.blogspot.com/

Recommendations (and downloads) of obscure, eccentric and amazing music.  Its non-genre specific so has everything from noise to prog, pop to dub, classical to muzak... you get the picture; it’s varied!  An incredibly great place to find things you would probably never hear otherwise, gifted to you by various contributors.

http://unemployedazoid.blogspot.com/

Very-occasionally updated but very funny ramblings of a regularly unemployed fellow like the rest of us.  Hasn’t posted since just before xmas so I guess he’s busy.  I hope he breaks a leg and is bedbound with just his laptop and his imagination to keep him occupied.  Then once he’s used up all the tissues he might write another post.

http://mollycrabapple.com/

Wonderful illustrator and hot chick (in whichever order you prefer).  Draws and paints beautiful women, pigs in hats and octopuses.  Founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, a franchised burlesque life-drawing class that has spread around the world.

http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/

Great posts about all walks of illustration art; classic advertising, comics, political illustration, kids books, graffiti.... Varied and interesting.

Scanner collage 1 (because there might or might not be more)

I have boxes and boxes full of postcards, business cards, novelties, paraphernalia, and paper ephemera; the sort of gubbins that, if I was a proper artist, I would be using in sketchbooks, paintings and collages.  So I thought why not grab an assemblage of colourful and interesting pieces out of the first box (the one that my old Burton's shoes came in) and throw them semi-randomly on the scanner.  So I did.  And I don't know what you think, but I'm actually really pleased with the way it turned out.

Also here are a couple of line drawings I threw up last week.  They were both slightly too large for the scanner, and one is definitely better than the other.  They are sort of obsessively created using a simple Sharpie marker drawing filled in with tiny repetitions of fineliner.

214: emergency intensive care hair cut

Haircuts are rubbish.  Big ones, small ones, fancy ones, plane ones; they are all stupid.  Topiary for the scalp.  I once heard hair being dismissed by a wise man as ‘just material on your head’.  Why must it be faffed with on a regular basis by a professional faffer with an expensive pair of scissors and the power to spray water all over your head?  Some people like to get their kids circumcised, and despite all the disadvantages to that, at least it doesn’t grow back every couple of months.  At least we aren’t required to present ourselves at the salon at regular intervals for foreskin styling.  Scientists!  Please drop all your fruitless work in cancer research and sub-atomic exploration, and band together to create a pill that stops hair growth once and for all.  Freeze my hair in a permanent state of just-passable, slightly ruffled neatness, and stop the constant millimetre by excruciating millimetre decline into shagginess.

‘How would you like it cut?’ is one of the hardest questions I am ever faced with.  So far the best answer I have come up with is, ‘like it is now, but shorter’.  It sounds pretty silly, and is both inaccurate and unhelpful, but without knowing all the technical terminology it is the most mature response I can muster.  I would just shave it all off myself, but it makes me look really odd.  I become strangely aware of my profile and feel really big-nosed, over-bitey, speccy, and bumpy-headed, like a caricaturised drawing of myself.  And although my hairline does seem to be ever so slightly inching its way upwards, I still have a healthy head of hair that I want to make the most out of while I can.  Then as my formerly flowing blonde locks become wheezy and arthritic, I’ll send them to Switzerland for a spot of assisted suicide.

All this nonsense is just cos I am going for a haircut in a few minutes.  I go about as often as I go to the doctors (not very much).  Often people put off going for the doctors for ages because they are scared of finding out there is something wrong with them.  Eventually a minor complaint compounds into something serious and they have to be rushed to hospital in a hurry.  It would suit me fine if there was a hairdressing equivalent to this.  When my hair gets so scruffy it looks ridiculous and even a hat can’t hide it, my nearest and dearest can call the emergency number and have me rushed off for an intensive care hair cut.  Then I get a couple of days bed rest as an inpatient in order to recover, and a follow-up appointment to see how I’m doing after a month or two.  Perfect.

After I’ve had this hair cut I fully expect my neck pain to ease up.  The extra weight is the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  Except it’s not straw, it’s hair that looks like straw.  My step will spring, my legs will leap and my tongue will tra-la-la with the freedom of the lifted load.  Wish me luck.

213: codenames and wheelbarrows

Most of this weekend passed, I spent at my friends’ house eating their delicious food and playing with their 9 month old son, my godson.  My fiancée was away in Belfast planning the wedding; trying on dresses, worrying about money, and visiting hotels and wedding fairs.  Rather than sit at home playing computer games and procrastinating, I hightailed it to the friends’ where we could talk about music, politics, parenting, family, weddings (!), and the like.  It’s seemed like it had been a while since I saw my godson, but in reality it was only a few days.  Usually my fiancée takes over and I don’t get a chance to play with him.  So this was a good opportunity to teach him how to wave bye-bye and help him practice walking by holding his hands while he toddles and stumbles bravely around the living room.

I think it’s important to not start naming names and discussing other people’s lives and stuff in this blog, which is why I keep having to use phrases like ‘my fiancée’.  I’m not repeating this over and over just to show off in some pathetic little way.  Maybe I should come up with code names for all the people I mention.  ‘My fiancée’ could be replaced with ‘Codename F’, and the wedding could be renamed ‘Operation: Bankruptcy’.  That might get complicated for everyone if I have to start remembering codes, and I might become obsessed and start using them in real life.  That way madness lies, I think.  Best if I stay away.

Our wedding

Now it is a fact that I seem to have got behind with my blogging, and missed a day out in the last week.  I’m not sure how this has happened but off the top of my head I think I missed Sunday out.  Maybe more; I’ll have to double check.  But I am definitely playing catch-up, so this post is standing in for Monday’s, and then I’ll have to rattle out something for today (Tuesday).  I’ll try and make it about something.  I’m applying for copywriter jobs (I’d be brilliant at that!) so maybe something related; I don’t know. 

I’ve been struggling with Richard Dawkins’ The Extended Phenotype, which I had high hopes for but am finding quiet tedious.  The Ancestors Tale, The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker were all brilliant; fascinating and lucid.  But Extended Phenotype just seems like a tedious essay or paper with thousands of references to other writers and their work in every sentence.  This is disappointing because I have read somewhere that Dawkins considers it his most important contribution to the field.  Once I get my head around it, or break through the crap to get to the good stuff. I may be able to write a bit about it.

The workmen from the council are at this moment unloading a load of scaffold poles in the garden and beginning the process of building platforms up the side of the house so they can look in our windows, and use our toilet by peeing in through the window.  The council are re-cladding the exteriors of all the houses on the estate, and I think they’ll be on the roof messing with the tiles and chimney stack.  My flat is the tops storey of a two storey semi-detached, and any minute now I will glance over my shoulder to see a big bloke in high-vis’ jacket and hard hat staring in at me through the window.  The next six weeks will be spent being woken up by hammering on the walls at 8am and keeping the curtains closed so I can scratch my arse and pick my nose in private.

I hope they are going to tarmac the driveway, because this morning I woke up to see the paving slabs being ripped up and thrown willy-nilly on the lawn.  Then for good luck the gates were smashed up a bit and a little mobile digger was brought along to mangle the gateposts into crushed concrete and twisted re-bars.  Any day now I’m expecting to be cut in two length ways by a falling roof slate, or to be disrupted from my evening meal by a wheelbarrow crashing through the ceiling.  At the moment there is soil were the drive should be.  I might run out and plant rows of onions and potatoes before they make it back with the tarmac.  

212: the problem of the locked door

Jamie Oliver, olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt and black pepper; everything starts with fried rashers of smoky bacon.  And forget that last sentence; I’ve been to the perfect pub.  A hallowed ground of old jokers minding their own and cheap pints of booze I’ve never tried before.  Guinness at two quid and thingy at even less, and no young people standing around dancing.  The nature of this heavenly perfect pub pub is pictured in the portrait of the elderly gentleman with the Jamaican flag background, and the plaque touchingly reading ‘so-and-so, friend of the house, 1934-2006’.  This is the kind of pub I want to sit in, quietly drinking in the corner; perhaps treating myself with the occasional argument about religion or politics (if I want to get my face smashed in), or bag of pork scratchings (if my face is to remain un-smashed).

We left about half an hour after last orders and after walking through two doors found ourselves confronted by a triple padlocked, double chained door, impenetratable by all but the greatest of escape artists.  Wandering sheepishly back into the bar we were faced with the laughs and cheers of the remaining locals.  Was that a rite of passage?  Were we now accepted into the gang?  Next time we venture in we will be able to join the chorus of roaring schadenfreude at whichever bumbling greenhorns are helplessly batting against the locked door like flies in a bottle (a bottle with a door in it?).  As calm and relaxing as the pub was (I don’t remember its name, and maybe never knew it to begin with), I can easily imagine it as the kind of place that might kick off with the odd rumble on derby day.

There was the most inept dj/karaoke tech I have ever experienced.  The music was happening somewhere around the back of the bar, tucked in a corner I could not see, and was generally ignored by all the genial old patrons of the public house.  It was quietly simmering way below the level where it needs battling against, but at random intervals the volume was been pushed up to blasting-point before being silenced like the maddest excesses of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry dubbing.  At which point the dj would take the mic and say ‘sorry, about that lads and ladies... now, er, where were we?  Oh yeah right; here’s Dirty Old Town by The Dubliners’.

We started with a couple of pints of Hyde Kalt, then switched to Guinness.  As if by magic the music changed from whatever background pop the world is currently ignoring like wallpaper, to exciting and energetic Irish fiddling.  Makes me want to stomp my feet and hit myself in the head with a beer tray while yelping fiddle-de-de.  Why did I leave that first unrelated sentence at the start of this blog?  I don’t know, but it’s too late now to go back and tippex it out.

211: Time Team and Songs of Praise

Is there a more boring programme than Time Team?  I used to enjoy watching it on a Sunday afternoon, but watching it now for a matter of minutes on a Saturday afternoon, it reaches boredom point in only three beats and a breath.  Perhaps there is a natural tolerance for tedium on a Sunday that doesn’t exist on other days.  The big shaggy-haired wurzel in the hat has just summed up the entire programme with the proud statement, “I spend my entire life digging holes and finding nothing.”  Tony Robinson recons this isn’t always the case: “Finally we’ve done what we always threatened; after 160 programmes we’ve found absolutely nothing.”  Call me when you find a vast unknown underground maze of catacombs and burial chambers populated with alien remains and ancient black magic paraphernalia.  I want inter-dimensional portals and deadly booby traps, not more broken pots and barbed-wire.

Sunday is a day of inoffensive and unchallenging religious programming that would not be tolerated on any other day; The Big Questions and Songs of Praise, not to mention the never-ending cycle of Antiques Roadshow.  And apparently there is a sort-of comedy called My Family.  No society worth its name would tolerate this kind of shite on any day other than Sunday.  If we were forced to tune in to the unenthused drones of the faithful singing their praise on a Friday evening we would raise up en masse to tear down the last remaining edifices of this so called civilisation.  It’s bad enough when a mass sporting event like the World Cup or the Olympics takes over the television, but imagine if every couple of years the whole country and all the media became obsessed with singing hymns.  Charlie Brooker highlighted the ridiculousness of the World Cup by imagining a world where the entire country periodically becomes obsessed with country music.

It’s possible that there might be other things on telly on a Sunday, but I can’t imagine a way I could discover this obscure knowledge and to be honest I cannot be arsed putting in the effort.  This is unknowable without the most perfunctory spot of research, and shall remain unknown.  Sunday is antiques and Anglicans; and if it’s any different I don’t want to know about it.  I don’t like it, but it’s tradition, and who am I to change things or open my eyes.  What am I really talking about, I wonder?  Durn’t nuh.  Anyway it’s not Sunday today so what am I even going on about?  I miss Time Team.

Anyway what was I talking about.  

Frank Sidebottom illustration & comics from 'Oink!'

I've decided to post this amazing wealth of Frank Sidebottom scans from the defunct 80's comic Oink!.  I downloaded them off demonoid where credit for uploading them goes to stylofone, and credit for drawing them goes of course to the late and oh so great Frank Sidebottom (and Little Frank, you know it does, it really does).

These drawings are so great I thought it important they show up in google image searches and not just as an obscure torrent on a troubled file-sharing site.  Last year I uploaded some Ernst Haeckel images and that consistently gets the best stats of all my posts.  I'm currently obsessed with Beethoven and Frank Sidebottom, but to the best of my knowledge Beethoven didn't do any amusing drawings in the 1980s.

I could neatly organise them into separate issues and categories or whatever, but instead I'll just whack them all on here en masse to save the effort.  As long as they are sitting there peacefully and permanently on the internet then my job is done.

Click on the images to see them massively; perhaps so massively they don't fit on your teeny tiny screen.  And buy Frank Sidebottom's Fantastic Show Biz Box Set; it's too good for words (thanks mum for getting it me for xmas).

I tried to hide the rest of them under a jump-break here, but it doesn't want to work; so prepare for a Frank visual overload.