A Very Happy Unbirthday

Winter, as the Starks - when they're not being deaded - are fond of saying, is coming. I sit down at the upside down cardboard box that serves me as a desk and it's bright sunshine. Seemingly moments later I look up and it's pitch black outside, stars twinkle in the firmament and wolves (or possibly the local winos) can be heard howling at the moon.

Taking advantage of the early nights, me and the girlfriend had a looksie up Roker Illuminations the other day. In addition to being an all round cutie and sweetie, wor lass is a keen amateur photographer and was hoping to get some night time shots of some of the displays. The plan had been to go several weeks ago, but various happenings and doings kept getting  in the way. This weekend was therefore our last chance before the whole thing is moth balled for another year and so we dutifully lugged camera and assorted paraphernalia across town. Upon finding a likely looking display she then spent several minutes setting up her tripod, trying not to get jostled by the streams of event goers passing us by. Of course, this was the point where it was discovered that she'd left the camera battery at home. How we laughed.

Still, it was a pleasant night and Roker Park's a pretty, wee place so it wasn't all for naught. The whole event was themed around Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and mostly consisted of fibreglass mock ups of characters from the book, covered in lightbulbs. There was one fairly interesting display where the fountains in the park lake had been synchronised to Live and Let Die, the jets of water illuminated by coloured lights. Unfortunately the effect was marred somewhat by the fact that, presumably due to noise and nuisance laws, the music was played at such a low volume that it was pretty much drowned out by the splashing of the water. It's fair to say that the whole thing is targeted to family's with young children - who all seemed to be loving it - and was somewhat wasted on the misanthropic thirty something demographic that me and the missus represent. I do think though that it'd be worth making it a biennial thing, perhaps alternating with the similarly but astronomically more successful Durham Lumiere Festival, and using the extra time and money saved to stage something truly special.

As a quick aside, the whole Alice in Wonderland thing wasn't something pulled out the organiser's bum crack. There's quite a number of links between the book and the North East in general and Sunderland in particular. A lot of the culture and history of the area feeds directly into the book's imagery. I would whole heartedly recommend Brian Talbot's graphic novel on the subject named, somewhat inevitably, Alice in Sunderland. I have no idea if this is already common knowledge or if anyone else cares, but, hey, it interested me the first time I heard.

Up top I've added another illustration from Black Hackerty's Windmill, this time from the opening chapter. I've also added it to the text I've got up in the Werdz section of this blog and have vague, but noble, aspirations to keep adding to it until it reaches a state of demi-semi completeness at which point I'll whoop softly to myself and go back to bed. That doesn't mean I've abandoned other projects and I've just completed the line work for another page of Rag and Bone, which I should have up next week. Also, because I'm a swell guy and Halloween's just passed, here is a picture of Dracula and the Wolfman. If they owned a pet shop. And were also in love.

still a better love story than Twilight

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Kill Your Darlings

When I'm not waging a one man war against the criminal underworld, writing and doodling or eating raw onions by the sack load I work a fairly humdrum job at one of the UK's big six energy suppliers. As far as jobs go, it's okay, not exactly taxing or in any way fulfilling, but it keeps a roof over my head and the fridge stocked with onions. A couple of weeks ago the department I work in ran a competition to design a mascot for an ideas box, with a small cash prize thrown in to sweeten the deal. The above is my effort, who I christened Bright Spark for reasons that are so obvious it would only demean us both if I were to explain them. To my never ending surprise I actually won the thing, which was nice. By my count this marks the third time that I've actually been paid for any sort of artistic endeavour - the second being when I got a cash in hand job designing chalk advertisement boards for a Cairn's travel agent and the first when I got a £5 gift voucher for creating a comic based on the wacky shenanigans of Saint Cuthbert. My point being that in terms of writing and drawing I'm very much in the amateur bracket and any sort of recognisable success is a nice little ego boost.

However, it should be noted that I only submitted the above line art. I only added the colour after I'd been told I'd won and the entry was returned to me. The actual colour job on the official design was done by somebody else and was sent to me the other day.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. The fact that the colour scheme's completely different is neither here nor there. If anything they're broadly similar as we've both taken the fairly obvious option of basing it off the company livery. What doesn't sit quite right is that, rather than colouring beneath the line art as I did with the first image they've apparently used it as a template which they've subsequently painted over. This - in my opinion - rather arse face first way of going about things means that they've then had to redo the line work. Given that the line work is all that I submitted there's essentially very little of mine left, despite the fact that it's my name attached to it. Most of the changes are small and, I suspect, almost none (bar the distinct hairline and clip art light bulb) deliberate, but there's a lot of them and it these small things - the position, curve and weight of a line - that I work at and try to get right.

Meh. I'm getting paid, regardless, so there's no point being too much of a prima donna about it, plus I'd be lying if I said I poured my heart and my soul into it. But it irritates me slightly and if I owned a cat I would kick it*.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton


*For the benefit of me mate's mam, who occassionally reads this, this is written entirely in jest. I in no way practice or endorse cruelty to animals, especially kitty cats, each one of which is a little furry blessing

The Dark Knight Rinses

Does anybody else forget that Channel Five is there? I seem to remember there was a time when it was the only place you could see House and in it's very earliest days it was a good place for teenage boys of the pre-broadband era to catch a fleeting glance of a lady's rudey bits, but beyond that the channel has never really provided a reason to switch over to it. I therefore cocked an eyebrow in a manner that was both roguish and quizzical when I learnt that one of the bigger American imports of the year was to be screened there. Gotham, for anyone who doesn't know, is a Batman television show minus the god-damn Batman. rather it follows a young James Gordon as he explores the city's underworld, having times and solving crimes, particularly the murder of one Thomas and Martha Wayne.

Given that the nearest thing that Batman has to a superpower is a trust fund and a willingness to punch bad guys in the throat, when you remove him from the equation what you're left with is pretty much a straight police drama. That said Gotham is hardly The Wire. While it's a million miles from the camp glory of the Adam West show the setting still has to be presented in such a way that cosplayers knocking lumps off each other at some point in the future doesn't seem too out there. A better reference point would probably be Sin City; it's dark and gritty, but its designer dark and gritty; a facsimile of tough guy tropes and detective drama archetypes. Not that this is a criticism. The 90's cartoon, which was the absolute tits, had the same sort of Diet Raymond Chandler thing going on and one of Gotham's strongest attributes is the city that frames all the running around: part 1970's New York shit-tip, part film noir sound-stage, fully realised and wonderfully timeless. It's just a shame the producers get a bit over excited and ram references to the Batman universe in your face, pulling you rather sharply out of the experience.

Ben McKenzie is strong in the lead role. Granted, he doesn't really fit my own personal idea of a young Jim Gordon, but he's got a solid, burly presence and manages to portray a moral idealist without coming over like a naive tit. I'm less enamoured with Sean Pertwee, whose geezerish take on Alfred Pennyworth just seems a bit daft, but it's early days. The child actors don't embarrass themselves The standout however is Robin Lord Taylor's Oswald Cobblepot (or the Penguin if you prefer - which he doesn't) striking a great balance clammy menace, wimpy self pity and the surly bitterness of a dog that's been kicked too much. He's repellent, but the fact that there's something intangibly off about him also makes him fascinating. He's easily the best thing about a pilot episode that is, for the most part, merely okay.

Picture pinched from Paul Hostetler over at Deviantart

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I haven't had the opportunity to read Richard Flanagan's Man Book prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, although I have just finished fellow nominee Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. The plot follows Paul O'Rourke, a dentist who is shaken out of his existential funk when a stranger begins impersonating him online and uses his identity to proselytise in the name of an obscure religion.

The conflict in the novel, such as it is, is between the protagonist's secular and spiritual side. Paul is instinctively and intellectually an atheist, yet he's aware of a gap in his life that aches like a dry socket. He tries filling the hole with various hobbies and ephemera, but ultimately finds that the banjo is no route to beatification. the problem is compounded by the fact that he lacks any sort of defined identity and he blatantly - if unconsciously - covets the sense of place and history that those around him have. This results in him trying to appropriate the cultural heritage of his various lovers. Fine. Until he starts pulling stunts like, apropos of nothing, lecturing his girlfriend's (very Jewish) uncle on the history of anti-semitism.

Cue the mysterious Seir Design, who set up a website in Paul's name, and the Ulm religion of the Amalekites, a religion which seems tailor made for a man like Paul, being both Abrahamic faith whose one and only commandment is that adherents remain sceptical of God at all times and one that provides him with an access all areas pass to a history and a culture that stretches back to biblical times (and an oppressed one to boot! That's like 75 extra points on the whiteliberalometer!). I did wonder if the Ulm religion (discussions of which take up a significant percentage of the book's word count) functions  as a sort of parody of Scientology; a quick and easy shot of significance and theological soothing for those spiritually bereft who also happen to have a lot of spare cash sloshing around their bank accounts). Ultimately though what little comfort Paul finds is not from looking inward, or even outward, but from directly in front of him. For most of the narrative Paul is utterly dismissive of social media (he consistently refers to smartphones as 'me-machines', which gets more than a little irritating towards the end) and cannot wrap his head around the fact that a client (random dickhead)  is willing to dismiss his (trained professional) advice purely on then strength of a vague, ill defined feeling of wellness, the joke being, of course, that he's just as inward looking and self obsessed as those he derides. This all builds to a moment of epiphany where  (OMG! SPOILER ALERT! LOOK AWAY NOW! DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU!) he buys a baseball cap with the logo of a bollocks sports team on it

I'm not surprised Ferris was nominated for the Booker Prize. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is well written, pertinent and, occasionally, very funny. I'm also not surprised it didn't win either. The book is extremely digressive, wandering off into extended faux biblical passages about the history of the Amalekites, which clash with the rest of the text in terms of language and tone and act as a major drag on the narrative. There's also the fact that, as relevant and timely as Paul's pains may be, they're very much first world problems, which results in him come across a bit like Holden Caulfield going through his mid life crisis. Maybe that floats your boat and if it does all power to you, but ultimately To Rise Again at a Decent Hour feels far longer than a 340 page novel should.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Busting Makes Me Feel Good

It transpires that we are under attack. I refer not to any terrorist group or  or nation state, but the army of black eyed ghost children that have apparently apparated around the world, at least according to The Daily Star. The Star is hardly a paper of record. It is a paper for those who get thinky pains when trying to read The Sun. It long ago abandoned any pretence at actual journalism in preference of regurgitating reality TV press releases, creatively interpreting human interest stories from local newspapers (Elvis impersonator skateboards down Snowdonia, that kind of thing) and, when all that's been tried, straight out fucking lying. Therefore National Enquirer-esque stories about the undead are hardly new ground and barelyworth commenting on. What is noteworthy is the way they've been hammering away at it. Over the past fortnight it's been on the front cover at least half a dozen times, probably more.

Although, to be fair, fuck all else was going on during this time

The Not Honking Around Crew

(l-r) portraits by Richard Twose, Thomas Ganter and David John Kassan

The entry's for the 2014 BP Portrait Award rolled into town on Friday. Sunderland, it turns out, is the only English city outside of London that'll be hosting the exhibition, which was rather surprising but also nice. Given that you can't really moan about there being nothing of interest in town and then not bother when something does show up, I had a wander over to the Museum and Winter gardens where it's taking place. Now, I don't know a lot about art, but I know what I like  and what I like is puppy dogs and jelly babies. Sadly, neither of those things were on offer, but the various portraits were very good also. Plus you can totally tell it's proper art because some of the models have got their boobs out. Had a wander around the rest of the museum which in addition to the usual interactive displays and wax dummies dressed as pit yakkers has a couple of pieces by Lowery and a Sikh war turban on loan from the British Museum which, at nearly two foot high, struck me as utterly impractical for fighting in, Well worth an hour or so of anybody's time, so if you find yourself in the area go have a squint.

I Am But a Man

Just a quick post made mainly out of a sense of obligation. Had very many admirable intentions this week, but these have been rendered obsolete by the betrayal of my own body as I once again succumbed to the poorly ills. I am currently rolling around, clutching my head and expunging various fluids, while those around me roll their eyes and tell me, please - just once in my life - nut the fuck up and stop being such a wimp.

Not that I've not done owt.  Of course I have. I lead an exciting and glamorous life. I've been out socialising, failing to break into hospitals and worrying sheep, because that, dear reader, is how I roll. I've also had many deep and important thoughts about how to restore legitimacy to goverment in an era of declining political participation, why it is that cows look forward to getting milked and made the absolutely hilarious observation that ISIS is both the name of a nihlistic jihadi death cult and the name of the spy agency in chucklesome American animation Archer. It's just that I currently lack the energy to write about any of this.

I also fully intended to add another page to Rag and Bone, but due to my mortal frailty managed to complete a single panel (above). I know. You're devastated. But be patient and more will follow. In the interim I'm off to find my enemies and sneeze on them

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

It's Dangerous to go Alone

Dah duh, diddle dee dah, diddle dee dah, diddle dee dah dah dah

I wouldn't really describe myself as a gamer. I mean, I play then. I'm a young(ish) person in the early 21st century. Of course I do. But I rarely stray far from the shallows of general gamer culture and what little understanding I have of developments and issues in the industry comes from a combination of cultural osmosis and knocking around with people who actually do know their Fox McCloud's from their Naughty Dogs. This is partly down to the fact that gaming tends to be an absolutely massive time sink, time that on reflection, I would rather spend doing other things. However, one franchise that I usually will make time for is the Legend of Zelda series, which I have a huge amount of affection for. You could call this the 'dibs' principle. Links Awakening on the Gameboy was the first time I realized that a game could engage you emotionally, that it could subvert your expectations and that it could play around with themes of perception and reality*. By simple virtue of being the first game I ever played that actually bothered to throw in some art alongside the entertainment the series still holds my interest twenty plus years later. A new instalment was released on Friday, which has prompted my ramblings and the above doodles of Link, the game's protagonist.