Following the previous post on the 20th anniversary of Club Comicana / Vamporama…
Well, I did finish Club Vamporama as a concept in 2021, by sending our heroes back to 1982. That is some 21 years before the eponymous “club” (owned by Bette Noir) even existed! But…
NOTE: After you’ve read all the posting below (and I hope you do!), please go look at the 2021 posting “The Last Club Vamporama”—I had sadly accidentally deleted the original version of this posting, rather than making it private, forcing me to recreate it—and it’d be really cool if you could leave some new feedback & comments there! Thanks.
While on the theme of 20th anniversaries… I did my first Club Comicana strip around October 2006. To celebrate, let’s have a bit of history and rare art!
That first strip was going to be dropped into my regular “Networks” column for Comics International #201—however, Dez abruptly sold the magazine, and I didn’t get along with the bumbling fool who was tasked with killing it off taking it over… so I didn’t continue working for the mag.
But in actual fact, the very first (unfinished) strip was started in the summer of 2006. And I recently realised, I had never posted it on here. So here it is…
Read More »Club Comicana-Vamporama at 20
I can’t believe I’m writing down that it’s TWENTY YEARS since my mother died. In all kinds of ways it seems surreal, improbable and deeply perplexing to try to process this apparent fact of chronology.
And yet, there it is. I have lately been rebuilding/restoring the old archives on this blog, dating back to December 7th 2000 (how naïve it all seemed back then), more than half of which are now back online, with much more to come… and there’s no doubting that these events happened a full two decades ago. The same day Alex Toth died; the birthday of both Vincent Price and Christopher Lee—what is it about May 27th?!
This is mom in August 1956, aged 13. She was a cool teen.
If you haven’t already, I hope you go and read the blog I wrote back on May 27th 2006 (and indeed my contribution in the comments thread). These posts say it all, with much more clarity and raw immediacy than I can hope to summon today. I was curiously impressed, looking back, at how articulate I was. I’m not sure I’d handle it as well today. I know I wasn’t, in fact, handling it well at all at that time (who does?)—but I was expressing myself extremely well.
I would like to use the second half of this post to… go deeper. But first, the positive stuff. I have a photo album page, fully restored and updated, dedicated to mom—which I will update over time, as I continue to scan more of the best old photos I have. You can view the page as it stands here:
Some memories of mom as we approach the 20th anniversary of her death…
I got my love of horror from mom. Where mom got it from, who knows. But she was hooked on weird stuff fairly early on. One of my favourite stories that she liked to tell also explains her approach to me and horror movies when I was a kid.
In the summer of 1958, the UK was buzzing with the release of Hammer’s first entry in their Dracula series. Starring Christopher Lee as the Count and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, the word was that this movie was seriously, hard-core scary and maybe, too, a little bit (GASP!) sexy!
Mom was 15 years old on August 13th 1958. Dracula was an “X” certificate—she was too young to see it.
Read More »Me & Mom & Horror (and More)
A pile of Drew Friedman!
As much as I still love Drew Friedman’s artistry today—his painted work is fabulous—I do have a huge fondness for the crazy stippling he did in the earlier part of his career.
Read More »Drew Friedman
I mean, it’s not up to the standard of the three series of Daredevil that were on Netflix, c. 2015-18. The third season of that (actually a version of F Miller’s Born Again storyline) is about as good as live-action superhero material gets. Notwithstanding my reservations about superhero stuff which excludes kids… and this most certainly does, in all its incarnations… the Netflix show, but especially season three, was excellent.
Netflix DAREDEVIL. Who’d think that DD played by a Brit would be so good?
Born Again of course is full-on Disney/MCU/Kevin Feige territory. This left some people to dismiss it as foredoomed junk from the outset. Not entirely without reason, perhaps, but……
Read More »Daredevil: Born Again… is OK
(Top note: the personal posts are back!! Please tell me this isn’t a mistake.)
NEWSFLASH: I need to lose weight.
REWIND: I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had my ups-and-downs, weight-wise!
I was always pretty skinny up until about 1988, when I first gained a bit of weight. And I do mean a bit. At the time I was drinking some alcohol and also smoking an amount of pot (which, I’m sure many of you know, gives you “the munchies”). So, I was aghast enough, after seeing a photo where I looked kinda round-faced, to go on a diet! I probably weighed 11 stones. But by mid-1989, I weighed a mere nine stones—the lightest I’ve been my entire adult life. In fact, I was a bit too light. I am, after all, 5’8″, and my build, while not large, is not petite—so nine stones was pushing it!
It didn’t last long. I was back up to maybe 10.5 after a few months. And that, to my mind, was a good weight for me. Anyhow, I have to say that at the age of 20, losing weight was a breeze. I had a simple method: I just ate exactly half of every meal. The weight came right off, quickly & efficiently.
Read More »Battle of the Bulge
I used to make a habit of it back in the day—restless tinkering, never quite being satisfied. In the last decade, although this site has been through a number of changes, I’ve been less inclined and not even sure what purpose the site served. For a long time the Portfolio section attempted to be an all-encompassing summary of everything I supposedly do, for example, and it never quite worked. So this time out I have focused it just on my artwork.
LOL, look—some people think my artwork is crap! But I have as much right as anyone to improve. I believe my portrait work has improved significantly in the last six years. Overall my stuff has enjoyed a more modest improvement. No doubt I have weak areas. But it makes sense to me to focus the Website on something in particular. It gets messy otherwise.
Read More »Fiddling With The Site
For this, my top ten Bowie songs picks, it’s my third rodeo! As the blog’s made a bit of a comeback (for now, who knows?!), it seemed like a fun thing to reprise.
I did this the first time on November 9th 2003. I took a second shot on August 20th 2013.
But first, a pic. That’s how we do it, isn’t it?!
And here’s the list…
Read More »The Return of the Thin White Top Ten
