Step right up, step right up everyone. Whether you’re good or bad, happy or sad. Whether your an emotional wreck, or a blissful speck in this back hole of an existence we call ‘life’. Step right up and witness something you’ll be soon to never forget. Feast your eyes on the most exotically impressive work I have ever created. The horribly wonderful bastard child of Kevin Smith’s ‘Clerks’ with the pure unadulterated awesomeness of ZOMBIES!

I do apologize to everyone at the 2010 Supanova Melbourne convention two weeks ago for the delay, but it’s finally released. Free now to wreak it’s havoc upon society.

In case any of you are wondering what inspired this… my mate Chris Booth has long been a fan of B-Grade horror movies. So it should be no surprise when he mentioned that I should do a comic involving zombies walking into a 7-11, that it was immediately obvious to me that it should be set in the universe of Clerks. His idea was essentially that Zombies could be much less of a plague and more of a hindrance upon society. It’s never been done. At least not that I can tell.

In every zombie movie as far as we’ve both seen, Zombies are always portrayed as an outbreak, an uncontrollable mass that destroys society in a matter of hours. What if it wasn’t so rapid? What if they roamed around aimlessly? Never talking. Never dying. Just moaning. Hordes of the dead just standing around. On street corners. Under bridges. In parks. Seldom ever attacking people, and even then most people can easily avoid them. They’d become part of everyday life. Normal.

Sure some people might simply ‘kill’ them. But if this happened in real life perhaps some people wouldn’t want them to be exterminated. After all how could you KNOW for sure they didn’t remember being alive? They feel hungry. They can remember the word for ‘brains’. How could you know that they wouldn’t feel pain? In short I think this would be an awesome movie if it were done in a style similar to District 9. So if there’s any interested directors, feel free to write me!

Well we’ve had another long, tough haul to get here to another completed Shinyverse issue and let me tell you it’s been hard on the whole team. I mean how many times can I nag, prod, push someone into getting the next issue done when they don’t even have their own home internet atm?

Yup. That’s right folks. The troubles of the last few years have caused the team to spread right across the face of the earth in order to get decent paid employment in order that we can afford the internet. Though after spending some time here in Japan I’m once again disgusted with the flagrant price gouging and under-servicing we are forced to endure in Australia as a result of the non-competitive, modern business model whereby one company only introduces improvements to it’s customers in the event that their competition has already gone and done it. Which they will almost never do.

But I didn’t start writing in order to rant.

Let me tell you about this Japanese guy i’ve seen around here in Tokyo on rollerblades wearing cosplay and dancing in the streets. But wait there’s more. That’s not the full extent of his depravity. Oh no. It’s about the cosplay. You see, he’s not just in regular Otaku cosplay. Rather he’s cosplaying as a maid. No not as a butler. I do know the difference between a butler suit and a maid dress. No this guy is standing there on the street side in broad daylight and lamplight (he’s there at night too), with rollerblades and maid cosplay on, hairly legs protruding beneath the short skirt and all doing the twist, the watousie, the bird, you name it he’s dancing it. What’s worse though is that he didn’t even have the decency to wear a Kamen No Maid Guy mask. Bleeeagh…Oh the humanity of it….

Now let’s move onto something less disturbing.

Ah who am I kidding, I’ve got nuthin’. Other than some cool cosplay ideas…

See you all next time Risky-Sama can manage to finish a strip.

It’s 4 a.m. and I’ve only just finished my latest comic after nearly nine months on hiatus. Normally after such an arduous task I’d immediately save my progress, shut-down my computer, and go to bed to crash. The weird thing is that instead of doing that I feel like drawing some more. It’s a very hard urge to resist, and I wouldn’t if I wasn’t so tired. I’m having to tear myself away because I can’t WAIT to start on the next comic, and not just because it’s got zombies in it, or that it’s got the guys from clerks in it, but because I have these awesome ideas for how the comic will look.

Normally my comics are pretty strait and narrow, nice a sharp edges, each panel completely independant or the other, with only the words intruding on the black space. The idea is that instead I’m going to experiment with torn paper edges, something I’ve never done before. I’m going to try, at least in part, to echo the raw textures in Left 4 Dead 2, and give the comic a more desperate, earthy appeal.

I’m not at all understating this when I say it’s quite a challenge. Due to the lack of words in the comic I have to rely almost entirely upon my artwork to convey the message, which could be quite a tricky mark to hit. In addition to this I feel like trying to draw the characters for this more realistic, more like the style of a western comic by Marvel or DC. I don’t usually have this kind of focus on a project, or zeal for trying new stuff, or impatience to start on the next project immediately after I just finished the last. I’m having force myself to get some sleep. I am only human after all.

Well I’m ranting again which can mean only one thing….. Risky has made some progress =D. Though i don’t have any real subject matter to talk about I’ll see what i can do…

PROTOTYPE has and still continues to take up a portion of my time doesnt matter how long I play the novelty of such stupid power and senseless destruction of life and property is just greatly entertaining for me (and I like to jump around NY like a tard) though the storyline line is a little schyzophrenic as you jump between Alex’s utter confusion and merciless rage It plays out rather well. Unless you played no attention to your ‘Web of Intrigue’, in spite of my fist impressions of him being a little whiny, has bullied and butchered his way to one of my favourite anti-heroes worth a play if you dont mind running back and forth across a city for a few hours.

On another unnecessary note just today, Risky has put me onto this program used to view celestial maps, which is very cool (though im not going to link, you can ask Risky =P) and I’m currently playing with, only half focused on ranting, so excuse my distaction.

The other somewhat important thing to me at the moment is trying to obtain a copy of Syntactic Structures. It’s a linguistic text written by Noam Chomsky, though it’s not hard to find, so finding one my ultimate goal, particularly a first edition, although it appears to not exist. I’ll most likely have to settle for a second edition, that or continue to look for a little while longer… wish me luck.

PS: anyone that knows where a 1st edition of Syntactic Structures can be found let me know ^_^

Sorry for the delay in the new Dr Who comic everyone. Me and my partner haven’t been terribly well these last two weeks, and as we all know it’s not very easy to draw comics while sniffling, suffering headaches, and holding back a torrent from a runny nose. Fortunately though we’re starting to feel a little better, so hopefully I can get back to drawing soon and it shouldn’t take me much longer to get it done.

It’ll be good, because when I’m unwell I tend to just play games for hours. The problem is that playing games can only distract me for so long, before I have to move on. So, in a desperate effort to escape feeling crap, and despite my earlier doubts about it, we decided to give the new Star Trek movie a shot and went to see it.

In a few words it was absolutely fantastic, only if you were able to excuse the needlessly silly plotline. It’s a given that I’d agree with the other fans and say the choice of actors was brilliant, and that the brand-new look they’ve given the starships was also good, because for the first time ever in Star Trek they actually looked huge. So would I say that the movie gets a perfect 10 on its review? – hardly.

This could be considered nitpicking, but my problem was with the bullshit ‘Red Matter’ element. As a fan I can forgive the fact that it couldn’t really exist because, afterall this is science ficton. But the thing here is that I’m a story writer too, and I maintain the opinion you shouldn’t needlessly create something unscientific where something perfectly reasonable would do just fine in the same storyline. I mean sure, a WHOLE planet getting crunched in a black-hole looks very spectacular, and that might be very good for the box-office, but there was no reason why it couldn’t have just been a large asteroid, or even several, thrown at Vulcan instead – it was a mining vessel afterall, and it certianly would have been just as catastrophic. 

That might sound like a bit of a winge, but I was hoping that would finally change things and remove the ‘tasty cheese’ smell that every Star Trek series and movie has shared. Given that warp drive is in fact theoretically possible, and given that they spent such a huge amount of time making the scenes look super-real, and given that they spent a huge effort making the actors look and act uncannily like their older counterparts, I was hoping this would extend into the standard Star Trek storyline. Unfortunatly as it seems this has been neglected yet again, it’s a real pity because they could have done something amazing here. But a truely earth-shattering (no pun intended) storyline has once again been missed, in perference of more drab nonsense.

Aside from that it was great – nice job Mr Abrams.

Once again I find myself cleaning out more of my stuff, and it shocks me to find that I have gathered so much useless junk over the years, but in this pile of odds and bobs I found a rather pleasant surprise a box of old games from my first two years of high school, needless to say I quickly abandoned my grand ideas to feverishly install them on my PC.

A few days of nostalgia and sleep deprivation later and I was a very content gamer to be playing through some of my favourite old games,  Afterwards I was compelled to track down one game that I had owned but could not find in the cleanout a copy of Age of Mythology and The Titans expansion. There is something very few people know about me (and now more will know I guess) but the reason I play very few RTS is I get very addicted very quickly and so surely enough for the last week I have been playing it only venturing out for work and showers, and this is not good.

It has been a nice change though from my time (life) consuming addiction to World of Warcraft >_< so I’ll enjoy this while I still can, because in the end it is very hard to ignore the things you have to fork out money for. So,  the moral of today’s rant look back and try those games you enjoyed when you were younger and dumber (or smarter like me) you might be taken by surprise and really have fun.

Perhaps this is the most common thread of argument running between the hardcore fans of science fiction over the last 30 years, and I wish to launch my opinion on this matter into the foray of geekdom.

First of all let me say that I have no particular allegiance for either side of the fence here. I did grow up with a fundamentalist bias for Star Trek, and still maintain the opinion of Star Wars such that any universe with people that can cross the galaxy in a matter of hours, with the incredible level of science required to do that, and the energy required, while at the same time solving all their problems with primitive violence, believing in the magical religion of the force, and carrying special ‘laser swords’, is quite absurd. In addition to this, the incompetence of it’s creator George Lucas, only adds to my intellectual distaste for it.

I’ve since come to conclusion that I dislike Star Trek for the same reason. It’s a universe based on an interplanetary version of tribalism. The peoples of earth blindly follow an ignorantly proud philosophy, believing themselves to be “enlightened” beyond the ways of the 20th century “stupidity”, and vastly superior to humans only a few short generations previous. It’s a universe in which humanity lives in a global dictatorship, a planet-wide government that runs everything, that sees everything, and knows all. An unquestionable and unanswerable Big Brother to it’s people. Sure, it might be cool when you’re flying around the galaxy in a starship on an endless adventure, but I wonder how the guy driving a Federation dump truck feels about it?

I have to concede that Star Wars is more compelling, and although I shudder to think this to be true, I can’t help but agree that one has the clear upper-hand in any honest comparison. Even if you take something incredibly powerful like the Borg from Star Trek, and place them squarely in the Star Wars universe, there is no real competition here. Sure, they COULD drop out of trans-warp right on top of the Empire, they could manage to launch thousands of boarding parties before the Empire reacts, they might even manage to get hundreds of thousands of drones on board the Death-Star, but even if you grant several years before this event for them to prepare, any tactic no matter how good from the Star Trek universe, is certainly doomed to failure.

The reason here isn’t one of which you prefer, or circumstance, it’s simply a matter of technological achievement. Most of my fellow geeks simply fail to notice, but the two simply don’t share the same level of technology. Arthur C Clarke managed to explain this as four distinct levels of technical achievement. The first being a species only capable of controlling chemical energy, the second is the energy of the atom, the third an whole star, and the forth being an entire galaxy. While Star Trek describes a people that sit comfortably on level three, the Star Wars universe looms overhead at level four. Any incursion may allow Star Trek to win battles on a one-to-one basis, but any true honest confrontation, even if successful for Star Trek in the short-term, would surely mean annihilation in short order, by the overwhelming force that the Star Wars universe contains. 

My only remaining thought here is to guess why they took Firefly off TV… I still can’t believe it.

With the release of Sims3 looming I find myself wondering if all things in the world eventually become corrupted by money. Sure, Sims was extremely popular, increasing the female gaming population greatly. It was then followed by Sims2, which has taken what Risky has dubbed ‘playing dolls for grown-ups’ to the next level.

Don’t get me wrong, I myself am a huge fan of the game. The problem as I see it is that this new release is merely a money milking device. The advances between the original Sims and Sims2 were amazing. Graphics were greatly improved. Interactions between characters were increased and there was the addition of wants and fears for each character, making game play both more challenging and more goal based.

The major change though, the one which had everyone talking was that your characters no longer lived indefinitely and the children of your in game persona would now age and progress through 6 different stages of life. This effectively allowed you to now play through generation after generation of your families, increasing their empire and wealth along the way in true rags to riches fashion.

These changes and advances made the $90AU you paid for the game when it was first released well worth while and got me back into the game all over again. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Sims3. Everything I read about the new game is vague and very quick to gloss over the advances for the new release. Their biggest selling point seems to be that you can now walk from lot to lot, but really, who wants that? Even if you were interested in it, the novelty is hardly worth another $90, plus all the money for the expansion packs that are sure to follow.

The result is this quite a few of my friends, along with myself, although avid fans of Sims2 have now decided to boycott the new game. If they had anything worthwhile in this new release it would be all over their advertising, as it was with the second version. In conclusion, Maxis would have been better off to simply release more expansions and item packs for Sims2. This is merely my opinion but seems to be support by many Sims fans I’ve spoken to. If we’re right, I’m ashamed that a game which I like so much has been overcome by the corruption of money to release the waste of time that is Sims3. If we’re wrong, well, let’s just say it’s a pity that the advertising campaign for what could have been the next big thing for a lot of female gamers is severely lacking and that in itself is a disappointment.

Every now and then I manage to stumble across something I simply need to share with you all. Those of you that are familiar with Dante’s Inferno shouldn’t need to read much further, because this is not just your average book-to-movie conversion. This is something unique, a brand-new update on a very old Latin classic from the early 14th century. It tells the story of the author ‘Dante’ descending into the underworld, guided on a tour through the nine circles of hell by the spirit of an ancient Roman poet Virgil, witnessing the punishments, and discussing the various themes of sin and the irony of divine retribution. 

This new production by the legendary artist Sandow Birk, in collaboration with the gifted puppeteer and political satirist Paul Zaloom, has somehow managed to meld the style of an apocalyptic live-action graphic novel with the charm of Victorian-era toy theatre. It’s scary, intricate, subversive, and darkly satirical. They’ve been very creative with it too, and retold it with hand-drawn paper puppets and miniature sets, without the use of any CGI effects, taking the viewers on a tour through the corrupted “hell on earth” waste of a Californian suburbia. Needless to say this was a knockout favourite on the 2007 film festival circuit, and I think Dante Alighieri would be very pleased with it.

Just a quick warning too, because this might be NSFW (not safe for work), as it has quite a lot of  explicit material, language, and images… so abandon all hope on entry here: <link>.

FINALLY this Christmas/New Year season is over we can all go back to the way it should be mindlessly pushing along in our lives with no relief in sight.

At the risk of sounding like a Scrooge I hate Christmas not because it’s a Hallmark holiday these days (that’s its only redeeming feature to me) but because family puts pressure on you to do things you might find distasteful like spend time with them. But this year I did something different I spent Christmas day alone, It was great I didn’t have to get up at 6 in the morning to open present with extended family I didn’t have to drag my semi-conscious corpse to the north side for lunch. I was able to just sit around and relax after a hard night of binge drinking Christmas Eve. That aside I did spend Christmas night with my parents and sibling so it was the best Christmas I’ve had in a while.

New Years Eve who doesn’t enjoy a huge party and enough alcohol to sink a boat? I would rant more about my evening if I remembered more of it. I have given up on the New Year’s Resolution because the strength of my will is matched only by my caring both are almost non-existent. Anyway here’s to a year gone, here’s to making it to the next one.

Good luck in this year’s endeavours.