Monkeywiz

Well mine at least anyway, I’ve been trying to cycle the five and a half miles each way to work and back as often as I can muster the energy, mainly because I hate paying for the train, which is almost always invariably late, too busy and smells.
The down side is that I’m pretty lazy so it’s a lot of effort, and this year it seems lots of other people have decided the train is a no-no too, so the canal tow-path I use to get to the city centre is getting pretty crowded, but I persevere as it’s the only exercise I get and it is remarkably quiet along the canal again at the slightest sign of bad weather.
Feeling rather unwell today (it’s the beggining of cold season after all, and as we know I get so many colds throughout the winter on and off it’s almost one long cold of varying severity) I decided not to get changed into my cycling gear for the ride home (it’s usually really muddy and I try to make it at least a bit of a work out so changing at each end is a must) and that I’d go slowly and only ride part of the way, and use the train for the rest of the trip home (the canal follows the rail line, or vice versa, most of the distance between my work and home).
It seems I should have just got the train all the way or rode home as fast as normal, as I now feel even worse for the ‘rest’. There is plenty of room to pass oncoming traffic or overtake slower cyclists/joggers/pedestrians if you pick your spot and notify the other party of your intention, but tonight all of a sudden where a bush slightly narrows the tow-path there was another cyclist on the inside of me overtaking, his handlebar touched mine and then I was sliding along on my face and my bike was trying it’s hardest to reach the bottom of the canal.
The other guy rescued my bike (helped by the fact my pannier bags had acted as poor mans water wings and stopped it submerging completely, the edge of the rear wheel was still showing) and I lent him what little tools I had to (unsuccessfully) straighten his steering back out, and then I rode my dripping bike home.
And the worst part? Despite being massively sore and my face stinging like trying to eat raw onion and salt filled jellyfish with your eyes, I look absolutely fine, as if I’d just been out too long in a strong wind or gently slapped by a child, not one cool manly scar to show for the whole ordeal!

Last weekend I attended the second annual Birmingham International Comics Convention (I know, I didn’t realise there’d been a first either, thanks a lot to a friend of mine who told me about it, you know who you are).

I had a pretty good weekend overall and managed to get out of there spending hardly any money on comics/graphic novels etc, and even managed to snag a few free sketches/signatures from a few luminaries of the comics world.

As I pre-ordered tickets I got entry into the launch night the evening before the show in a pub in Birmingham and found myself sat at a table with Bryan Talbot and Jordan Smith with Mike Carey and lots of other ‘names’ milling around within arms length, but I found myself a little shy that evening (uncharacteristically so, especially with a couple of pints inside me) and decided to let them all talk to people they knew instead of bothering them, before retiring fairly early (not the cheapest bar I’ve been to).

Getting to the show late the next morning, I just managed to get in and get a seat for ‘Comic Artists Flip Out’ which had Alan Davis, Staz Johnson and Mark Buckingham at the front of the room sketching whatever they felt like on A1 sketchpads (and taking requests and answering questions at the same time). It was great fun to watch professionals knock out such good pictures in such short order, and the really good part was that everyone in the audience got a raffle ticket before they started and as soon as a sketch was complete they called a number and whoever had a ticket ‘won’ the sketch. It turns out Mark Farmer was sat in the row in front of me and won the first completed sketch which just so happened to be an Alan Davis Batman, (I was gutted to say the least, but then I actually won a Mark Buckingham sketch myself).

Later on after queuing for an age I got to talk to Dave Gibbons who was a genuinely friendly and chatty bloke. As I knew Dave was going to be at this event I thought it would be fun to try and make something to take along and get signed, but as I’m still not very good or fast and only had a limited amount of time to work on anything I decided to use one of the penguin cast-off’s I had lying around from the penguins I make for my fiancée I made a couple of ‘Rorschach Penguins’ gave one to Dave to keep, and he was more than happy to sign the other one for me as well as do me a little personalized Rorschach sketch and sign all my copies of ‘Watchmen‘.

After a bit more wandering round I just managed to catch Mike Mignola before he went off for the first of his Q&A sessions of the weekend and gave him a ‘Hell Penguin’ custom I’d made and got him to sign one for me too. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get into his incredibly popular talk that day, but did manage to catch the ‘Darkness Calls‘ talk the next day as well as see the Q&A session with the incredibly talented and unassuming Kevin Nowlan who later on did a quick Wasp headsketch for Susan and a Jack B. Quick for me.

My only regrets from the weekend were missing the Adi Granov and Esad Ribic talk and the Matt Hollingsworth colouring master-classes and that I didn’t manage to get more sketches and signatures, but then there’s always next year.

…to my sister and her now husband (yet another backdated post but this was the day/time they got married).

And a good day was had by all I must add, although I think it would be best to leave it quite a while before I decide I’m going to drink white wine, cider, rum and rose wine all in the same evening and in much larger quantities than is sensible for any man. It was also a great excuse to try out the camera I got for my birthday, my favourite picture of the day (taken by my cousin), is where every single member of my immediate family is looking in a different direction, with only me and my niece looking at the camera, I think it’s an accurate portrayal.

I hit thirty today (and when I say hit I mean hit, boy that smarts).
Not much to else to say on the subject other than, c’mon boffins hurry up with that damn nanotech anti-ageing treatment, till then I guess I’d best start to exercise and treat my liver with a bit more respect. Hmm, don’t want to seem like I don’t trust them though, maybe I’ll give the boffins another 5 or 10 years first.

I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while now, and thought I’d start trying to make regular posts again, and ease myself back in by adding a few back-dated posts of some of the things that really should have been mentioned when they happened.

The most obvious one is that Mike Wieringo died of a heart attack at his home in Durham, North Carolina, at age 44. I used to regularly check his blog to see some of his almost daily warm up sketches and to read his commentary on life as a comics artist, and have a large number of the UK reprints of his and Mark Waids run on the “Fantastic Four”.

He seemed like a genuinely nice bloke, and I don’t think I’ve ever read a bad word said about him by anyone on-line, which is surely a mark of his character for a successful artist in a competitive industry. His brother and best friend are working with his web-hosts to keep his site active and just as he left it, and it’s certainly worth a visit if you’ve never been there before and a revisit if you have.

Congrats to Jami from Angry Zen Master and his wife to be Audrey who are getting married today.

All the best and I hope you have a great day.

Well after 6 months of ‘actively seeking work’ interspersed with some freelancing jobs I’ve just started a new full time job as a Junior Web Developer, hooray for me . It means some of my other extra-curricular projects (planned flash games, sculptures, t-shirt designs, re-designing and building my own websites, CG models and animations, starting to keep fit, etc., etc.) are going to suffer whilst I re-adjust to a normal working week, but hopefully in the not too distant future I’ll be kicking the internet’s ass during the day and belting out some more artistic projects in the evenings (either that or watching tv ).

Blimey, the world doesn’t get any less weird (which of course is a good thing, more weirdness I say).

The age of the fish was determined by removing an ear bone, known as the otolith, which contains growth rings similar to those in tree trunks.

The estimated age was between 90 and 115 years old

Full Story