Gosh where do they find all these fresh new writing talents? He asks, looking at a shelf of books by TV’s Lenny Henry, TV’s Konnie Huq, TV’s Paul O’Grady, TV’s Rosie Jones, TV’s Adam Hills, TV’s David Baddiel, TV’s Stephen Mulhearn, football’s Marcus Rashford, & Tom Fletcher out of that band.
You wait all week for AI “artists” to post drawings with dodgy fingers, and three come along at once.
We can laugh now. They’ll have buried us by Christmas.
Hope you all enjoyed Peak TV (I know I did). Cos that would seem to be very much last year’s thing.
The thing I’d like to see? and it can’t be hard for someone to do (technically if not rights-wise) is a Universal Interface. One screen where you can search for any show on Disney, Amazon, Netflix, iPlayer, Apple, Now, Britbox, ITVX etc. The headline shows on the front page would pay to be there, which is what funds the Interface, and more people are going to find more shows which otherwise get lost (especially when a streaming service has a bad interface of its own, like iPlayer and ITVX do).
Someone’s going to tell me this already exists, now, aren’t they?
This is a very informative article, and the subject of a couple of good chats I had at Macc Pow yesterday
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July 2: Last nights film: Emily The Criminal = very good.
Hopefully the collapse of streaming services will mean we get more movies like this - mid-budget with the emphasis on good writing and creative originality - and fewer mega-budget bits of fluff which are all FX, CGI and stars without good storytelling underneath.
Recommended
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July 12: Greatly enjoyed Big Train, one of the many sketch shows the BBC is currently re-running (also loving The Fast Show & Reeves & Mortimer).
It reminds you what a shame it is what’s happened to Graham Linehan’s mental condition, because the writing here (by him and Arthur Matthews) is spectacular. The surreal juxtapositions, coupled with the excellent direction, also by Linehan, stands the test of time and was groundbreaking.
Recommended, with the caveat that, when you start appreciating Linehan’s oeuvre, it’s best to stop when he gets on Twitter.
Sigh. Nostalgic for the days of magazine printing, Stu.
I used to deliver my 90s humour mags (UT, Gag , Bloody Hell etc) directly to the printers in Bristol. In fact it was they who had put me in touch with the publishers in the first place, as a way to give them something to print.
How the processes changed over the last 30 years is stunning. Back then they, or another supplier, had to do the scanning and separation and to turn our flat art into printing plates. Another of my publishers sent everything to Hong Kong. Work that I could do on my home scanner or entirely in Photoshop these days.
Seeing the massive machines churning out pages of colour magazines is an unrivalled sight and remains a great memory. It’ll be sad to see it gone, but gone it will soon be.
Anyone else have memories from the days of printing?
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Where is Barry?
Barry? Barry?
(Just completed season 3 on #NowTV @skytv @HBO to find Season 4 has vanished. Why?)
Happy new week, happy new AI artist who’s posted “their work” and forgotten to #CountTheFingers
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I know everyone's excited to get their hands on my duck feathers that I import from that place in the Yorkshire Dales.
Settle Down.
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Todays fun question: The Writers Guild of America is on strike, joined by the Screen Actors Guild, for the first time since 1960. But who was the leader of the screen actors union in 1960?
Go on, have a guess before you look.
I know.
(And the answer was: Ronald Reagan)
Re: Sag-Aftra Strike: You know what this means? Comic Con will be a con where they have no choice but to actually talk about comics.
(I’m joking. The panels will be full of movie producers and publicists. And there’ll be as many film clips as ever. Sorry, comics. You’ll be there in name, again.)
Here's something I've never tried before, selling a page of original Beano artwork on eBay. It's a splash page from my debut Bash St Kids strip in 2005, Queen Toots, which features lots of stars of the Beano at the time, inc The Three Bears, Billy Whizz, Little Plum and others, alongside Toots and the Kids.
I'll be interested to see what anyone thinks it's worth. If it doesn't reach the starting bid of twenty quid, we can conclude I am the least collectable artist ever to work for The Beano. (This is, I'll conclude, not my greatest work. I was still finding my feet, and. having to "ghost" the style of Mike Pearse.
If this sells, I have treasure trove of this stuff, recently unearthed from the storage unit.
(Reader, it sold for sixty quid)
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That was embarrassing. Went to visit a shark in hospital and went to the wrong department.
Orca ward.
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A discussion about AI reminded me of the Mellotron, and how the Musicians Union downed tools at the sound of it. Because, like the synthesiser and sampler that came after it, and now AI, it replaced humans’ jobs.
I know AI is different. But our ability to predict how these things will, er, play out remains as unreliable as ever.
For now I’m happy to play a cross between King Canute and an old man yelling at clouds. And keep counting the fingers. #AI
Spot me? I’m the ONE person who’s blinking!
July 7: Has anyone worked out Threads yet? I’m finding that, with a search function that only links to user names, it’s impossible to follow a topic. And no use of hashtags, though they work fine in instagram.
Am I missing something?
July 13: Anyone else finding Staged series 3 a bit rubbish?
Never mind jumping the shark, they just sit round discussing potentially jumping a shark, then don’t even bother.
I’m not sure I see the point of it. I’ve seen meta done betta.
I was today years old when I discovered Jon Barinholtz out of Superstore and Ike Barinholtz out of Whitehouse Plumbers are two different people.
July 10: Big thanks to Tony Lee for having me there as a guest and showing amazing patience with us all at this weekend’s London Film & Comic Con in Olympia.
I had my most successful weekend at any convention, partly due to bringing original art pages with me (and, on day one, underpricing them through my ignorance, an error I put right quickly!) and partly due to my highly pro-active caricaturing.
Rather than charge for carics, I do one for free then offer to draw the rest of the family while they peruse my table. This led to me selling more books in a day than I have at any previous event, then topping this off by selling some Dr Strange art at a more sensible price (3 times what I was asking on the Friday - if you bought one then, you got a hell of a bargain!)
Thanks to all the lovely punters I met, whether you bought a book or not, you were smashing. And to my comics pals who I got to chat with. Big up to Ramzee, Andy Diggle, Simon Furman, David Leach, Lew Stringer, Nigel Parkinson, Irma Page and all the new faces and usual suspects that make such a weekend fun.
Today’s AI clown is posting in an AI group, where they all use robots to write their books. How they write with fingers like this (from the AI illustration) I cannot imagine.
Six fingers, attached to the keyboard with string cheese. It’s the future.
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A running joke in our house is that the cat’s food is called As Good As It Looks.
Seriously? Had no one in marketing ever seen the stuff?
We call it As Bad As It Smells.
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July 23 (By-election results) Here we go again.
I enjoy a good election as much as the next person. But how many tropes and cliches are we going to see that I’ve seen 100 times over the years?
The Polls Say - when will we ever learn that the Polls are always wrong when it counts? Does no one remember Brexit? Or Kinnock’s inevitable victory in 1992?
The Death of the Tories - Has no one ever looked at a news rack? Millions of people are “not interested in politics”. That means they’re a Tory. Just cos the politicians are a mess of criminals and idiots doesn’t mean that their voters give a toss.
At least we’re not nazis, like all those other countries. Turns out we’ve always contained a way higher proportion of racists, antisemites, and “otherers” than we care to admit. I expect a lot of battles to be fought along culture war lines.
Remember New Labour? Nostalgic for the days of Oasis and Tony Blair? Yeah, I don’t think this year is like that. To be honest I don’t know what it’s like. Let’s try and not make it boring, eh?
Ha ha! Apparently doing a degree in art like I did makes you £150,000 poorer than if you hadn’t bothered.
I’m so shocked. Said no Fine Arts graduate ever.
Do you know what, maybe AI can have my job after all!
Red Dwarf art, what’s it worth?
Having make a rookie error at a recent comic con, selling some 1990s Marvel art for a fraction of the price I should have charged, I’m trying to avoid doing it again. I’ve found these pages of artwork I drew 30 years ago, the Androids strip from Red Dwarf Smegazine circa 1993-95.
I can show you more, but here’s a shot of just some of them.
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Great news for all my readers - Tales Of Nambygate is back!
In a 120 page collection, now on Amazon, you can have my classic strips Phallas, Sam Shovel, Battler Britten and Nambygate, from Gas & The Damage 1989-91, together again for the first time!
Got your tickets for tonight’s one off performance of Socks Do Shakespeare tonight @bedfringe?
You haven’t? That’s a shame cos…
*blows smugly on fingernails*
My Books and where to get them:
Findlay Macbeth - Amazon - Etsy
Prince Of Denmark Street - Amazon - Etsy
Midsummer Nights Dream Team - Amazon - Etsy
Prince Of Denmark Street - Amazon - Etsy
Midsummer Nights Dream Team - Amazon - Etsy
Shakespeare Omnibus Collection (all 3 books) - Amazon
Richard The Third - Kickstarter runs till August 31st
Captain Clevedon - Amazon
Tales Of Nambygate - Amazon
Eurovision Colouring Best Of British - Amazon
80s Pop Star Colouring - Amazon
80s Superstars - Amazon
2020s Pop Star Colouring - Amazon
Bowie Colouring - Amazon
Scottish Pop Star Colouring - Amazon
Rom Com Colouring - Amazon
Royalty Colouring - Lulu
Christmas Movies Colouring - Amazon
NB: Etsy editions are signed and posted by me, and generally cheaper
