The race is on amongst Private Eye Magazine cartoonists to be the first to draw a "St Peter Pearly Gates 'Don't tell him your name Pike'" cartoon.
Update: Turns out "Pearly Gates" and Ian Lavender are trending on Twitter. And I thought I was being so original. (I posted this about 3pm I think)
Feb 4: Doing my regular scour of the “Dogman shelf” yesterday I, too, spotted that David Walliams had joined the market for kids graphic novels. There were also a clutch of new all-comic-strip titles I hadn’t seen before, most of them reprinting dog US titles from the last decade (Rollergirl was one). I just hope this market hasn’t got saturated to collapsing point, just as I’m hoping to break into it. (Says the guy who got into Marvel in the 90s just before its bubble burst, and was in the final issues of Oink, Warrior and Sounds)
Feb 2: This morning’s rabbit hole: There was a US sitcom called Hot In Cleveland whose writers included Laura Solon (Sitcom Trials 2002) and - and here was my surprise takeaway - Rachel Sweet.
Recognise the name? Rachel Sweet was signed by Stiff records when she was 16, and had a one off hit with BABY in 1979.
Which obscure one hit wonders from your childhood have you discovered the surprising thing they were doing 45 years later?
Jan 31: Oh dear, Traitors Australia, what did you do to yourself?
Just watched series 2 ep 1 and it’s totally lost it. Series 1 was great, with a great range of characters and a good sense of humour. This time they’ve modelled it on the naff US version and packed it with reality stars and OTT “look at me” influencers, actors, wrestlers and other not-real people.
I fear we won’t be watching episode 2. Can you imagine having said that after an episode of the British Traitors?
It’s our local bridge and we’ve been enjoying spotting what’s changed since then (circa 1967 we’re guessing).
Feb 12: I was today years old when I discovered Uncle Colm from Derry Girls was the comedian I saw doing his brilliant slide show with owls in a pub in soho 40 years ago
Feb 16: Things I learned today: classic single cover (& ad in the NME which is where I saw it) was based on an obscure advert.
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Feb 5: Aaah, just discovered that Steve Brown, aka Glenn Ponder from Knowing Me Knowing You, has died.
He is commemorated in our house whenever Strictly is on. When they cut to Dave Arch and the house band, we chorus "Glenn Ponder!" Not interesting, but true.
In praise of Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning.
If you ever need to compare two films who've tried to do the same thing with wildly differing results, might I suggest Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning (which we watched this weekend) vs Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny (which we watched a month or so ago, and which I roundly criticised at the time).
Both have a central maguffin that is entirely irrelevant (a key and a dial, respectively); both feature car chases in the middle of busy cities, with our heroes (a male female couple) in amusingly small vehicles, which have among other things to drive down steep staircases; and both feature big fight scenes on trains.
It's almost as if Mission Impossible saw the Indiana Jones effort (which they can't have done, being made & released at the same time), shook its head and said "no no no, THIS is how you do it".
Where Indiana Jones had palpably unconvincing CGI stunts throughout, Mission Impossible pulled off the trick of making you genuinely believe the events were happening before you. Or at the very least leaving you asking how did they do that?
A lot of this is down to the extensive use of genuine stunt actors and explosions, coupled with Tom Cruise's famous attempts to do as many stunts as he can (obviously not all of them but, let's face it, more than octogenarian Harrison Ford could be expected to).
It's also down to attention to detail, especially when it comes to the internal logic of the scenes and the stunts. When Mission Impossible's characters fight on top of a train we are regularly and skillfully reminded of the dangers of being up there, whereas Indiana Jones, at one point, just stands there and stares up at the sky, ignoring all oncoming bridges, as if to double down on the whole "we're only in a studio, you know" vibe of the movie.
The humour is another big success of Mission Impossible. Christopher McQuarrie, the director and writer, knows that the film's premise is silly and that its set-pieces are, well, impossible. So he kind of hangs a hat on it by making the characters complicit in their understanding of the ridiculousness of it all, without undermining the drama. Indiana Jones tried to be funny and ended up seeming witless.
Oh and the Orient Express sequence is one of the best comedy drama stunt set-pieces I've seen in a movie in recent memory. It's right up there with the stunts in Spielberg's early Indiana Jones movies and Jurassic Park, for the originality of the ideas and the meticulousness of the execution. I think I even detected a sly dig at Christopher Nolan's Inception which, if I'm right, was a nice reminder of how much better this film is than that one too.
The only downside of Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning as that someone made the disastrous and hubristic decision to call it "Part One" and to make it part of a pair of films. Given that it under-performed at the box office, having been conceived in the glory days of pre-pandemic film-going and released in the post-pandemic desert of the streaming world, this has doomed its successor to always being referred to as "Dead Reckoning Part Two, oh..." when viewers finding it on TV and streaming realise it's a movie they can't watch without seeing its predecessor, so don't bother.
Very highly recommended indeed. You're welcome.
If you're a school, library, festival or art centre who had my Comic Art Masterclasses in 2023, then this new book should be of interest. It's called Poopy Doo Doo Heads and comprises 120 full colour pages containing every single comic cover I drew with kids in my classes from Jan to December 2023. It costs just £12.99
lulu.com/shop/kev-f-sutherland-and-kev-sutherland/poopy-doo-doo-heads-kev-fs-comic-art-masterclass-annual-2024/paperback/product-v8k9wd6.html
I released a version of this in December (called The Killer Children) through a different publisher, which cost nearly twice as much. This new version has come down to as cheap as I can get 120 full colour pages to be.
Feel free to double check with me whether your comic covers are in there before buying, but they should be. (The previous version also had a lot of copyrighted characters removed so I could sell it on Amazon, but this has every Peppa Pig, Shrek, and Thomas The Tank Engine in there intact).
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