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Pretentious claptrap

Finally got around to making an Author page, aren’t I special?

I have finally become incredibly pretentious and yes, I am now a big deal, for I have my own author page on the exclusive site known as facebook. It’s got a picture of me looking suspiciously like a male Jessica Jones and a lovely backdrop of Chernobyl’s famous fairground (I’ve never been due to the background radiation).
Hopefully I wont become an egomaniac…I AM JESUS CHRIST!!!
That was quick. I put this off for a long time, partially out of laziness, err no probably all out of laziness, but I also didn’t really have all my eggs in one basket last year.
I had a lot of irons in the fire with comics and anthologies and this and that and felt weird about just promoting my own work and or myself, it just felt a little weird and a little self fellatory, and I’m not that flexible.
I always saw these pages as sort of a place for hacks to pat themselves on the back and I’m not fond of that, I dreamed of being one of those secluded writers living in a basement never to be seen by the public. Or like Lovecraft, living alone and eating nothing but pasta in a spooky old house only going out to get more pasta, writing cool stories for people to find when I’m dead and say; “Huh”.
But I recently just felt like my prose stuff is what’s taking up almost all my time/passion/love and it deserves it’s own platform and room to grow and have more eyes put on it and me too. I don’t think I look too bad if I do say so myself.
I just thought it was time to come out of the shadows a little and really put my balls on the chopping block. And maybe if I spend all my time convincing other people I’m some ‘big deal’ I might start believe it myself and become insufferable or I might actually sell a book ha.
So all my blogs and inkitt stuff/interviews/updates/jive will be coming through that page for some reason, oh so you can put a face to this tripe and maybe fall madly in fandom with me.

Peace out.

Oh yeah this is the link ha.
https://www.facebook.com/RykBrinkAuthor/

4

Chapter 6 Smooth Sailing (Raw)

Apologies for the people that follow this blog religiously (all 2 of you I imagine) my ‘internet girlfriend’ came to visit me over christmas (Yeah I met her online and that makes me a loser but I’m getting laid over christmas so fuck you buddy) so I’ve been busy living life like a fucking happy douche in between episodes of Jessica Jones. So I haven’t had time to dream up any misanthropic rants or do anything really creatively destructive, so I thought I’d just post another raw chapter of my fun zombie novel while the next chapter is being edited.
I hope you enjoy this excerpt of the sixth chapter of Green Sunday and as always you can check out the full chapter and the other chapters on inkitt http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507/chapters/6
Roy held the camera low trying to be discreet. Creating a shaky cam low shot of TJ’s front door. A doorbell ringing sound; a cool morning mist starting to creep up on them.

“Who’s there?” TJ’s mom said from an upstairs window, the camera panned to the window as she leaned out in her yoga gear.

“Oh hey Mr’s Kincaid, a lovely morning am I right?” Zed said with a tinny laugh at the end like he was selling Jehova.

“Oh you’re those nice neighbour boys. TJ’s not home right now, he’s out getting milk; he can’t come out to play.”

“Err, yeah, you see… TJ kinda said we could come and borrow some of his stuff for our show, for the internet”. Roy stumbled over his words, his frantic nerves stripping all charm from his voice.

“Oh well he didn’t say anything to me about it. But I suppose since you only live next door, and it’s for the internet you said?” Tjs mom ditzilly mused on what that might mean as she leant out the window.

“Err yeah” Roy said a tired indifference climbing into his voice as he realised he’d been up all night. Was he holding up the camera or was it holding him up?

“The door’s open, his room is at the top of the stairs, Hows your mother doing Teddy? You boys want some green tea and rice cakes?”

“Err no, we’re good, thanks, she’s fine” Zed said, surprised how easy that was.

A brief cut and it was a shot of TJ’s stairs as they climbed up towards his room. All we could see was a POV shot of the back of Zed’s legs as he went up the stairs followed by Roy.

Zed stopped on the stairs and turned to Roy with an odd smile on his face, the camera uncomfortably close to his face.

“Dude why’d you stop?” Roy said behind the camera.

“How much you wanna bet the fat fuck’s a bronnie?” Zed sniggered childishly forgetting the blood under his fingernails.

Another brief cut and we’re elbow deep in TJ’s draws “Where the fuck is it?”.

“Dude I found it” The camera panned impatiently to Zed who stood in front of the closet smirking.

“Friendship is fucking magic” Zed chortled as he spoke. Holding open the closet. Parting the clothes, Zed revealed a secret my little pony poster on the back of the wardrobe. “I fucking knew it”.

“Yeah that’s great, the dude’s a fucking faggot who wants to fuck a horse. Can we get back to finding the weapons now, so you know, we can fucking live through the night?” Roy snapped, gripping the camera harder, audibly creaking.  He span the camera around and it fell on the red toy box at the bottom of TJ’s bed. “Here we go”.

“Yeah I’m betting porn and an inflatable pony”. Zed chuckled in the background as Roy lay the camera down on TJ’s bed. From the angle of the bed we could see Roy kneeling in front of the box. Zed going through his action figures and miscellaneous cosplay, giggling fecklessly in the background.

Roy opened the box looking under the hood “Look at this shit, fucking mall crap, gotta bag this shit up”.

“Then what?” Zed said, some ice closing in on his voice.

“We gotta deal with Gil, if he’s bit, we gotta cut his head off, that bitch too, just to make sure.”

“I don’t know-“

“It’s fucked. It’s so different from how I thought it would be”. Roy sighed as he started to pack the weapons into a naruto duffel bag “Fucking otaku pussy”.

He put his hand on his knee and eased himself off the ground.

Zed sighed, the character he created had crumbled and he felt like a kid. His skin sticky and dry from where he washed off Christie’s blood. “I don’t know if I can do it”.

Roy fumbled the camera as he picked it up the bed and turned it off.

Another cut, the camera seemed to be resting on the edge of a sink, turned on by mistake as if placed there in a hurry.

Scuffling sounds, sounds of muffled whimpering. The camera was out of focus, a blurred figure came in and snatched up the camera. Fumbling sounds of plastic creaking. It was still held low around waist height, there was nothing to see just yet.

“You’ve got to do it”

“Why do I have to do it”

“Because I’m holding the camera” Roy said, a cold smile in his voice as he spoke what he knew was the truth.

Roy raised the camera like a shield in front of his face to put the spotlight on Zed’s pale and drawn face. He sat on the bed in his room, he knew it had to be him. His swallowed hard. Took TJ’s crappy mall sword in both his hands and unsheathed it a little to check it didn’t stick. He hesitated a little “Oh fuck it” he said as he unsheathed the sword all the way. He threw the cheap scabbard across the room and held the handle like it was a machete. The sword wasn’t quite a katana, it was one of those cheap ninja swords with a straight blade and no guard. He grabbed at his knee a little and rose with a jerky jolt of energy and began to march out of his room. Roy struggling to follow him out into the hall.

“Wait up dude”

They got to the inner door of the garage and Zed stood sullen with his hand on the doorknob.

“I thought he locked himself in?”

“He did, but I’ll try the door and then we can go around the front and open the garage door. He might be ok, garage door makes a lot of noise” Zed said, a little steel clacked in his voice.

“Yeah, best episode of zombie stump fuckers yet”.

Zed sneered and a sickly smirked passed over his face. He swallowed hard again and twisted the nob and the door popped opened a crack, with a an uneasy jerk. Zed froze. He stopped breathing and then breathed out. Then in again with a low shallow silent breath.

He began to open the door wider inch by inch, praying for it not to creak. it did, he took a deep breath and almost launched himself into the garage. Roy followed him three or four seconds behind. The camera fell on zed as he swung the sword awkwardly. Nerves and adrenaline making the sword shake in his hands. Creating an annoying rattling sound.

“What the fuck?” Roy said as he panned the camera up with a tense close up on the garage lined with black bin bags. He zoomed out and saw nothing but Zed in his uneven warrior stance, a small pool of congealed blood on the floor. “Where’d he go?”

Just at that moment a clichéd woman’s scream rang out and they both knew where he was.

“Mom?” Zed’s voice broke a he spoke, the sword shaking in his loose grip.

The camera cut again, he must have pressed the button by mistake. He saw that it was on and picked it up with one hand. His grip loose and shaking, Roy breathed in, his breath ragged and forced.

“It didn’t go well, err, he, err, well it’s fucked. It got bit, I took it off”. His voice was quiet and his words fell over each other in a lightheaded daze. The camera jerked to his arm which was missing from the elbow, hacked off unevenly by a blunt knife. “I did it myself with one of those turkey carvers. I think it turned out ok, well I guess if anyone finds this tape I err, oh fuck it-“

The video ended and TJ took the view finder away from his eye and felt naked. Like he was watching a movie and now he he’d woken up on set. All the monsters sleeping in the next room for another big day.

He paused and put the camera down on the side table in the hall. A shiver ran up his spine and he licked his lips swallowing a little warm bile. He inhaled through his nose and began to sheepishly move around and check the lower level of the house. Everything seemed still, the lounge was empty. A little lived in but otherwise normal. A big tv on the wall, a leather couch, pretty minimalist, glass and wood coffee table.

The dining room looked unused, a slight film of dust on everything and the room was cold. The room was sealed off with flimsy glass and wood doors that looked like they’d make a noise if he opened them. So he didn’t. He moved on towards the kitchen.

The kitchen was a different story. The back door was wide open and the wind banged the door ominously like an old horror movie. The wind was cool, the day was getting a little brighter. A warm light coming in from the east, touching the linoleum floor of the kitchen. It stretched over the semi-dry blood stains and turned them a noxious orange colour.

TJ followed the blood, cold fingers crawling up his spine. He saw the turkey carver Roy mentioned placed neatly on the counter. Bits of ragged flesh still clinging to the flimsy blade.

He approached it slow, picking it up like it was a strange artefact from a day time tv show. He looked it over and thought about it, he swallowed hard and depressed the button. It jolted into life making a vicious whirring sound. TJ jumped out of his skin and pulled the plug out of the wall. He tossed it back onto the counter and edged out of the kitchen.

In the hall again he heard movement upstairs. Feet creaking a wood floor. Slow then quick thudding footsteps. An odd scraping metal sound that went right through him like nails on a chalk board. Then the pressure came off the floor boards with a slight inflection and TJ’s heart stopped in the hall. A crash of glass rang out like in an old 1940’s monster movie and the sounds stopped. TJ paused a good five minutes keeping his breath shallow to make sure the sounds stopped. Then exhaled as soon as the coast seemed clear.

Since he hadn’t found any of his weapons and the turkey carver didn’t turn out that well. TJ knew his only option was to investigate the next level. That or take his chances with found garden implements and ramshackle sportswear. No, he’d prepared too long to have all his shit taken at the last minute and it be for nothing. All those mowed lawns and all those chores for were going to mean something. He was going to get it back and put his personal apocalypse back on track. It hadn’t gone to plan so far but it wasn’t over just yet.

He took the first step on the flight of stairs. And of course it made a tremulous creaking sound. One which forced TJ to tense his sphincter like he was trying to create nuclear fusion in his underwear. He stopped to make sure he hadn’t created any dark matter. When he was sure nothing was reacting to the noise he took another step. And then another and then another and he thought he was getting the hang of it. He reached the top and looked back and got a little dizzy, braced himself against the wall. He put his hand against the dry wall and felt something slimy. He put his hand out and he could see it was blood and there was a trail on the wall he hadn’t noticed leading up the stairs.

TJ held his breathe again. He was becoming accustomed to the sight of blood now but this was different. This was still warm.

~

 

0

Je suis Jeffrey

I did this strip which the lovely Florian brought to life after The Charlie Hebdo attacks, obviously because of the play on the famous slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’. I thought it was as good a time as any talk to talk about freedom of speech and the clash of the secular and religious worlds. A controversial subject but I’ll try really hard to put a dick joke in there somewhere.

I’m basically an atheist, I say basically because I distance myself from the mainstream movement of atheism+ and all this political correct feminazi new age atheism that has nothing at all to do with scepticism and is in fact a lot worse than most religious doctrines have at least had hundreds if not thousands of years to hammer out basic principles whereas atheism+ is a clusterfuck of entitled knowitall morons who want to preach their navel-gazing to the world.

So as an atheist a couple of years back I was really anti-religious and I joined all these lame little facebook groups to argue with religious folk for fun and just to sharpen my claws. I don’t really do that anymore because sjws and feminists are much more fun to troll and you don’t really get anywhere with religious people. There will always be religion, there will always be people who believe and there’s no changing that and arguing with them just sends them further down the rabbit hole I find. But feminism and sjwism is a different story, you can’t save the most diehard of the zealots but the people on the outside looking in can be saved, there are undecided people in the soup of the left and the middle and those souls can be directed away from the train wreck of social justice.

In as much as the radical right are laughed at because we on the left dominate popular culture, the radical left are handled with kid gloves. Essentially the moderates on the left by remaining silent, tacitly supporting, or even attacking the right just for being right or the Christian right just for being Christian, gives these ideologues the consent they need to wage their ideological war. Radicals as always hide behind the moderates and the principles they stand for so the extremists on the left will preach the same things as any other liberal, for gay rights and equality and between the sexes and freedom of speech then when your back is turned they’re propping an ideology that runs completely counter to those liberal principles because they’re afraid of being called racist if they don’t.

Yeah you weren’t sure when I was getting to Islam, well there you go, threw you a motherfucking curveball didn’t I? Pow right in the kissa!

That’s right, the problem with the left right now is that they’re too tolerant, to a point where they tolerate intolerance, they will happily attack a Christian bakery for not wanting to make a lesbian wedding cake but they will prop up and even try to justify the religious ideology that is leaving bodies all over Europe.

The cake thing is a great illustration of the differences between an Islamic country and a Christian country, biggest problem gay people face in a Christian country; Have to travel down the road to a different bakery. Biggest problem facing gay people in Islamic countries; trying to avoid being thrown off buildings.

I’m by no means defending Christianity, I’m just stating a fact, if I was gay I would much rather live in America or the up and than anywhere in the middle east.

I’m just so fucking sick of having these atheist apologists attacking Christianity to defend Islam. I see this everywhere, we talk about the violent terror attacks of Islam and they’ll throw stats at you showing that only 5% of terrorists attacks are from Islam or they’ll talk about the Christian crusades. And if you ask why aren’t these non-Islamic terror attacks talked about mainstream media they’ll put on their tinfoil hat and say the media refuses to report on them and instead just focuses on Islam to stoke up tensions. Which could be true but it’s a conspiracy theory, it can’t be proved either way so speculating on it is fruitless.
The fact of the matter is these attacks happen and unlike the crusades they’re happening right now, the difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christianity left the dark ages in the dark ages. Islam is bringing it back every other day.
These arguments don’t hold up, should Christianity be held to account for the crusades in the present and have that example used to justify Islamic violence in the presence. It’s like Jew beating a German to death because of the holocaust and siding with the Jew because at some point his relatives who are long dead were oppressed by the long dead relatives of that German so it’s ok. Or in the past the ancestors of that German were Vikings that burnt down a Saxon village so the English can now burn down Berlin for fun.

We live in the here and now, the use of these arguments are the manipulation of solipsistic sophists who only care about being perceived as on the right side of history but have no idea where right is because of their cultural and moral relativism and complete narcissism.

Political correctness is a shield that ideologies that cannot be defended with logic and reason hide behind political correctness is the enemy of freedom of expression. They use terms like ‘Islamophobia’ to characterise their dissenters not as rational actors reaction to a violent bigoted and hateful ideology but as mentally ill bigots themselves who should be more tolerant of other cultures and stop hating on brown people.
So again for the Ben Afflecks of the world, Islam is not a race, they’re an ideology and like all ideologies they should be put under scrutiny. Muslims are not an oppressed minority; they’re one of the fastest growing religions in the world.
Not that I’m saying in any way that that justifies the oppression of individual Muslims, they’re not all terrorists either, there are extremists in all religions. But I won’t go so far as to be a cultural relativist and ignore something which should be apparent to everyone, there are no jainist terrorists so there must be a problem inherent in Islam and a reformation is sorely needed to bring them into the 21st century kicking and screaming if necessary because as it stands their ideology is not compatible with western values and at the end of the day it’s the moderates who will suffer all round.

Ok rant over. Sort of an incoherent brain fart but it was good to get it out, my head feels lighter.

0

Dexter vs Dexter

As usual I have nothing more than a topic in my head to start this semi-literate ramble brainfart type endeavour and the longer I stay away from fallout 4 the harder it gets to breath. But I really enjoyed the dexter books hence the name of the blog. I also really liked the show and I wanted a somewhat side by side comparison, keeping the spoilers to a minimum.

The first book is called ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter’ and it’s essentially the basis for the first season of the tv show. Which I shamefully admit I watched before I started reading the books because I’m a pleb, there you go, happy now?

I do this a lot in fact, I watched the walking dead before I read the comics and then I read the novels but the comics came first so that doesn’t count. I watched the silent hill film before I even knew they were games, the same with the resident evil series. So all around I’m a big media pleb, ain’t life grand?

After the first season of the show it gets a little squiffy. In the first book it wraps up nicely, ok I lied there are gonna be some spoilers. But in the show it wraps up a little skew because in the show, he kills the ice truck killer but in the book he lets him live and he recurs later on in the fourth and fifth book and becomes somewhat of a pivotal character.

The book is a lot more morally grey since he doesn’t actually have inner conversations with his dead adoptive father Harry and instead communes with a supernatural entity inside himself which he calls the ‘Dark Passenger’. He alludes somewhat to this in the show but it’s done a little cack-handedly in my opinion because it’s brushed off as if it’s an addiction whereas the book goes full fahrenheit/indigo prophecy syndrome with fucking demons and voodoo and ancient Babylonian gods.

… Which I actually rather liked but someone obviously conked that on the head because it never really goes back to that in the book and the show gives it a wide berth for probably good reason, it begs beliefs I guess. Too tinfoil hat, Alex Jonesy I guess, I thought it was fun but I guess that was a rabbit hole that might have taken the books up the garden path and since I really liked the following books and I’m still reading them into book seven tells me it wasn’t all that bad.

The first things you notice between the books and the show, in the show he’s this bad ass judo serial killer who kicks the entire ass all the time for some reason. It was cool but in the books he is less John Wayne and more John Cusack… in con air, the film where he didn’t do much.
It’s not that I don’t like him being more vulnerable but I feel like a lot of the time he doesn’t get to be the hero of his own story and after like the tenth time he’s faced death but been saved at the last minute it gets a little annoying.
I mean I don’t begrudge it for using a device like that, I try my fucking damnedest to avoid that ‘ooh he’s about to be killed but then someone saves him at the last minute’ thing, but it’s like literally an unavoidable tension building device. I can’t really think of one of the books from the series where it doesn’t happen except the first now I strain my brain.

Another massive difference is the scope of the book, in the show we follow all these other characters like Batista and his sister Deborah as they have their own arcs but in the book it’s a first person narrative from Dexter’s perspective so these characters become window decoration. And this may sound like a criticism but when you’ve got a TV show about a blood spatter expert by day serial killer by night, I don’t really give a shit about how his friend’s love life is going unless it somehow connects to the serial killy stuff you know, it’s just fluff, useless TV show filler nonsense and the book cuts through it like crate paper to get to the good shit.

That being said the structure of a TV show meant that he had to kill someone per episode and the show handled that quite nicely, a little like the freak of the week supernatural/Buffy style. But in this case the monster was human. But even supernatural couldn’t keep that up and the books don’t even really try to have a murder per however many chapters. On average he’ll killer around one or two people a book, which is perfect because it really allows for a lot of emotion and tension and it really gets into the right frame of mind, it’s deliciously descriptive without making you want to gag like American Psycho levels of gore. It’s subtly macabre, casually sick and twisted, I love it ha-ha.

I think the biggest difference is that Dexter’s kids are fully fleshed out characters… somewhat in the book, whereas in the show they’re just flaccid annoying extras, in the book they have inner workings of their own. And spoiler alert, although there evil father isn’t in the books, what he left behind inside them is enough to make them interesting as they turn out to be just like Dexter. That being said, Lindsay hasn’t really gone into that aspect of their characters yet. Dexter has promised to ‘show them the ropes’ but he never seems to get around to it. He’s always so wrapped up in himself and his work and his ‘other work’ to really take the time and I can’t help empathising with that I guess.
Dexter is an animal and he deals with things as they come I guess, his own self interest and self preservation will always trump training his foster kids how to murder people.
In terms of where the story is going I think that’s going to be a big future problem because spoilers, his brother, the ice truck killer seems to take a keen interest in the kids and there may be a clash of who’s wings they’ll be taken under, Dexter being discernibly the lesser evil.

I genuinely love and get swept up in these books, I suppose in a scary way I and Dexter (Jeff Lindsay the author) have a similar inner voice and I love his style and his wit and the more and more I read the more influenced I get by his dark wit.

That’s fangirling enough for one blog haha, thanks or reading/.

 

0

Ham on Rye

First I must apologise for my absence to my readers (all three of you), I’ve been deathly ill with some unknown pathogen and haven’t been capable of doing much more than playing payday 2 endlessly and coughing up chunks of lung.

With my return I decided to share one of my older Dahmer and Greg sketches, this was a guest piece by the guy who does the art for 3 Ring, the one and only Mike (Now Ike, there was already a Mike Golden in comics) Golden. And use it to address a current trend I’ve noticed or maybe it’s just me.

It’s become quite ‘trendy’ so as to say mainstream or socially acceptable to mock Christianity and creationism and Catholicism and all that jazz. This is not to say I have anything against them being mocked, quite the opposite as you can see from the strip, I did it myself.
I feel any and all beliefs should be rife for scrutiny and parody at all time without exception.
I personally consider myself an atheistic Satanist but that’s a long story in regards to why I don’t call myself an atheist anymore, which is tangentially linked with this but a bit too much of a digression, don’t want to hurt that flow.

I think its fine and necessary to mock all beliefs and anything that isn’t nailed down including and especially atheism, which is why Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park will always be heroes of mine for leaving no stone unturned for parody and having the balls to carry it through.

I think I may have touched on this before when I talked about the Isis cake thing, but I do think there’s a reticence in the left or at least the social justice left to criticise Islam when they’ll happily mock Christianity and get a million retweets on twitter.

But if you criticise Islam you’re instantly a bigot and a racist and you deserved to be hounded off twitter. If you criticise feminism you’re a misogynist, if you criticise blacklivesmatter you’re a racist again. All these labels are just there to squash discussions and to not have to debate their points logically.

But that’s not really what I’m trying to get at, the overall point I’m trying to make is that mocking Christianity has as a result of it becoming socially acceptable it’s become boring and meaningless, oversaturated. It would be like making a pedo priest joke, everyone’s heard them all. There’s not bite anymore, I guess with this new wave of social justice warriors I’ve garnered a new found respect for Christians. I don’t in any way believe in objective morality but after seeing the depravity and solipsism of moral relativism, I can appreciate the goal of seeking moral objectivity despite it obviously being impossible.

I think to myself if I had kids who would I prefer them to be brainwashed by a feminist or a Christian? I come up with Christian every time. I mean there’s not a lot of difference really, both will tell them they’re broken pieces of shit that need this overbearing force in their lives to get right with. Both will tell them only through them can they be saved and both will say anyone that disagrees with them is an idiot or a bigot. But the Christian will at least instil them with some sense of morality even if it’s for a completely ridiculous reason when the feminist will just ask mindless obedience to whatever scattered ideal they have at the moment.
Maybe if you gave social justice and feminism a couple thousand years more it would be a better or a more solid religion than it is but right now it’s all over the place.

I think that’s way with all culture to be honest, once it becomes mainstream and socially acceptable is the point it stops being edgy and it stops making the point it made before. Christian beliefs if you truly believe them literally are silly, let’s face it but allegorically they’re not that bad, a lot of the book is pretty inconsistent and is relative of the time for most of the bullshit about justifying slavery, I’m by no means being an apologist for Christianity but moreover the most radical of Christians are just fucking annoying, they don’t blow (usually) blow your shit up or cut your head off on camera or try and get you fired from your job and destroy your life for disagreeing with them on the internet.

So to me hating them seems like a waste of energy, I don’t agree with them, I don’t support them; I just think it’s better than tumblr. The bible is better than tumblr there I said it ha-ha (I’m full of shit, I’ve never read either). I just can’t summon the energy to hate them when there are forces amassing in power that are far more insidious than some 2000 year old Jew zombie cult. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, like someone smacking an old donkey. It’s like how it’s sort of socially acceptable to be racist and sexist towards white guys, even among white guys, these people, these sjws think they’re counter culture. They think they’re not mainstream, they’re edgy and hip, they couldn’t be more wrong, they couldn’t be more mainstream, they are the establishment and the sooner people realise that the sooner they’ll fall apart.

Forgive this dazed sickness induced rant, just been rambling incessantly from one abstract point to the other incoherently and I must put it to a stop right now and get back to trying not to die.
Peace out!

0

Welcome to Bat Country, breakdown of the first issue.

I wanted to do a breakdown of the first issue of Bat Country, try to make some sense out of the whole mess that is Bat Country, try to lay that whole twisted bag of snakes out, and if you’ve read any of it, you know this is going to be a long one.

If people would ask me what I wanted to achieve with this book, I don’t really know if I could sum it up in a few words. But I guess the closest thing I could say would just be a fear of open spaces. I wanted to cultivate and exacerbate my fear of the outside world. That’s basically what the title means; the world is full of carnivorous flying rodents that want to suck your blood.

Basically I’m just trying to make excuses for why this comic makes no sense ha-ha. It’s told from the perspective of someone who can’t see in straight lines, everything enters his brain differently and since he’s the narrator of his own story, the narrative is unreliable.

So the first page I get my sneaky twin peaks reference in to Big Ed’s Gas farm (I’ll look a right twat if that’s wrong now ha-ha) and get into my thing about sugar, I’m sure if I was some hypersensitive writer for the guardian I’d call it ‘sugarshaming’ ha-ha. But since I’m not I tend to think people associate lots of sugar with childishness, as if growing older means you no longer see a reason to enjoy ‘the sweet life. I wanted to introduce Ransom as a character that relished in his childishness and was almost petulant in his reaction to people trying to shame him into conforming to their own way of thinking.

TLDR: Motherfucker like his coffee sweet.

I think maybe a year or two ago, I began this strange fascination with cooking shows or just food shows in general. I watched come dine with me just to watch absolute cunts sit and try to withstand each other for a few evenings in a row, talking shit about each other in the backroom. There was something delicious about uncomfortable silences shared by complete strangers who had never the less grown to hate each other over the course of one evening ha-ha. English people like myself have such an acquired taste for awkwardness.

Then I started to watch Man VS Food, for those that haven’t watched it, it’s basically a show about a chubby American fellow going from town to town taking up eating challenges. Eating a giant burger or a colossal omelette or something, or a really hot curry. I really enjoyed it for the food (I love food) and the competitive nature, it was just a fun show.

But this was when I was little more social justicey, so I started to spin my Marxist (did away with those thankfully away, just a nice empty space now ha-ha) and it made me think this show was everything wrong with America. It was decadent, ‘people are starving’ I said to myself as I watched this pudgy American stuff his face with a hotdog the size of a skateboard.

I was both in awe and disgust with America and the American way, a fine line between love and hate indeed.

One of my many fantasies is that of walking the earth like Cain in Kung fu, I’ve often thought about just walking, getting into some adventures and just travelling. Then to hit the ground realising I have no money and my shoes are made from inedible canvas. The realities of it were just too glaring, how would I eat, how would I make enough money to travel and survive? But then I realised that in America those two things could coincide. In the wondrous USA you can be paid for eating, so something that could have been just a throwaway piece of plot filler became almost the crux of the story.

On a whole the basic joke of the story is that it’s almost as if to America thinks it can reach enlightenment through eating. Purely by how much they eat and how much of science they honed of gluttony.

This was going to by my satirical comic poking fun at the American dream, the hypocrisy of modern culture and capitalism and religion and all that good stuff. But after a while those things started to bore me and realised that trying to force people to think like me through a comic made me as bad as the assholes I was critiquing, so I cut that shit out. Now I just want to make people laugh and make them think and deliver something so fucking out there, they’ll never forget.

Diagnosis love is another reference to Twin peaks, well the first season, which is my favourite. It had this soap opera running in the background of the occasional episode, the story of which was cheesy but was a mirror of what was happening in the show. I really liked the feel of it and how it added another layer to story, making it seem self aware. I initially was introduced by this; I don’t know what you call it really in Max Payne 2. The idea that you can’t tell if you’re mimicking the art or it’s mimicking you. Obviously Max Payne must have copied it from Twin Peaks.

I suppose in a way a part of me wanted to mock most other webcomics where this type of storytelling isn’t intentionally cheesy and ridiculous ha-ha. It’s there to contrast the goings on in the ‘real world’ but mirror them just enough to seem relate-able.

It’s choked full of odd references, Night of the Hunter, Wild at heart, dune, Beetlejuice, I want to get across to the reader that outside to Ransom is literally an alien planet, these diners in the middle of nowhere are like ‘safe spaces’ from all that nature trying to get him.

Liberty or the cowboy is another matter all together; I guess he’s a reference to the Big Lebowski in a way.

The first issue that makes me cringe is the dialogue; yeah my own dialogue makes me cringe. I wanted to copy the style of Max Payne, Address Unknown and Twin Peaks, so essentially I wanted the dialogue to be as cheesy and as hackneyed as possible. I want it to feel fake and strange and just wrong, like a 90’s TV show. And gradually if people keep reading that’ll fade away and it’ll grow with the reader. It’s very much, I hate to say like Natural Born Killers (I hated that movie), the style, the critic of American culture. That niggling feeling that all that freedom and all that space gives you. I can’t help feeling that that feeling is intoxicating and addictive and the reason for all the evil in the world and all the good.
People can be so free they feel trapped, they have all this power to do whatever they want but they stay where they are, pacing back and forth in a cage of their own making. Or they toss it all away like Ransom and burn out rather than fade away. That’s conflict we have here, that’s what I think American culture is, ultimate freedom driving people mad, I don’t think it’s a bad thing, quite the opposite in fact.

Now the second part of the story, some paranoid people are actually being followed. Now I can’t hope to hide this, this entire scene was inspired by my favourite scene in Mulholland Drive, the hitman scene. I thought that scene was so funny, I couldn’t resist. I really love that film and I feel robbed that it wasn’t turned into a full TV show as it was intended, I would have really loved to have seen more from that bungling hitman. I can’t help feeling if Netflix existed in the 90’s Lynch would have been even more popular than he is and not this cult god we admonish him as now.

This scene where the henchmen are going through his apartment is a back story hint, the story of Bat Country just like Twin Peaks starts in the middle. The reader will have to work back as the story moves forward to understand why Ransom is on his journey and who he’s running from.

I got a lot of influence from Silent Hill 4 the room. That game really stuck with me for the voyeuristic nature, and its dreamlike interpretation of agoraphobia. Despite it bombing I found it really intriguing. Another influence is Oldboy, but that might be too spoilery ha-ha.

I was listening to the new Nick Cave album when I wrote this scene and for some reason I decided to put lyrics from Higgs Bosom Blues directly into the scene, don’t ask me why.

Ransom is on a journey, he’s trying to find the American dream and these two bumbling killers are following him.

He wakes from his dream for a minute then he’s back in it again harder than ever. The idea for this comic sort of came from the idea of the idea of the hero. What is a hero? To me a hero is a normal person who has no regard for themselves whatsoever, they’re not afraid of pain, they’re not afraid of humiliation or getting things horribly wrong. And that’s what Ransom tries to be.
I wanted the combat to be real and disgusting and brutal and just… messy and Florian really delivered with this scene. He really captured the brutality and the inelegance of an actual fight, no kung fu bullshit, no gimmicks, just blood and cuts and tooth and nails.

…and then it ends as abruptly as it started. I wanted the first issue to be a snapshot, a glimpse into this dream world, something that would make someone want to dig deeper and discover the underlying meaning. But shit, I’ve rambled enough.

Just go read it already ha-ha.
http://tapastic.com/series/Bat-Country

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Ghost Harassers

This isn’t necessarily about Ghostbusters or even feminism really, it’s more about labelling or branding or signalling I guess.

It’s become apparent even more so recently at the time I wrote this sketch that feminism is ‘In’ now, what do I mean by that, I mean all the airheads of Hollywood and all these American hives of scum and villainy and really really fucking white teeth have adopted this ‘mantra’, for lack of a better word.

And I understand why, it sounds nice right, if you’re a woman it means you support women’s rights yada yada yada, if you’re a man it means women think you’re sensitive and you get more pussy as if guys in Hollywood need more pussy (maybe with the exception of Will Wheaton, I know he has a wife, I just don’t think she’s smart enough to work her vagina, I’m not even sure he’s in Hollywood).

It’s just like when celebs open charities or politicians have photo-ops to make them seem ‘hip’ or ‘in touch with the people’ it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just branding, you’re trying to package yourself to a demographic you think wants to hear this load of bullshit that makes them feel good and in turn makes them feel good about you.

That’s not to say that some don’t care about the charities they work on or they don’t genuinely believe feminism is beneficial to mankind. I’m not trying to say it’s all about attention or getting people to like you, I’m just saying a lot of it is that, because to declare yourself a feminist has to come with a lot of caveats.

Saying you’re a feminist, really doesn’t mean a lot because there are so many different kinds, it’s like saying you’re a christian, well that’s great but what kind of christian are you?

What I mean by it taking a very surface level involvement is that they hear feminism is about ‘equality’ and who isn’t down for equality? You’d have to be a complete asshole to have a microphone and a camera shoved in your face and tell people you don’t believe in equality. It’s like someone puts a gun at your head and says “Are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”

I’ve seen a lot of this, it’s as if an ideology has gone through a viral marketing campaign, where they’ve given it a bit of a makeover and are now shoving it into people’s faces for some reason.

“Nazism, it’s about protecting the purity of the white race, through cuddles and NUSSING ELSE!”

Because on the surface it’s all rainbows and sunshine and ‘equality’ and happiness and fair pay and all that good stuff, but below that its’ very different. So when someone comes up to you on the street or if you’re a celebrity they stick a microphone in your face and say ‘Are you a feminist?’ what they’re actually asking is ‘Are you or have you ever been a shitlord?’

And to the average person they’ll say ‘no’ because they’ll think of it as this activism movement that you actually have to be a part of like the communist party and you’ll have to wear stupid shirts and die your hair green. But the definition in this new marketing campaign has become so broad you and your dog are now feminists. People who are dead are fucking feminists posthumously. They couldn’t wait a day after Leonard Nemoy died before they cited him saying something nice about women somewhere and claiming him as one of their own like Mitt Romney baptising his dead father in law into mormonism in the basement of his creepy mormon church in a pool of yaks piss under a statue of a gold bull or whatever. It’s that fucking weird.

It’s trying to grow by obscuring the facts, by spreading the ‘dictionary definition’ very thin and with shitloads, I mean fucking bucket loads of no true Scotsman fallacies to cover up all the nasty pr disasters that occur in their name.

And they love to trot out this dictionary definition and say it means ‘Equality’ well it doesn’t, we already have a word for that, it’s called ‘Egalitarian’, feminism actually says equality for women but since we’re going by dictionary definitions.

Communism

[kom-yuh-niz-uh m]

noun

1.

a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

Doesn’t sound too bad does it, if you side step the mountain of corpses.

North Korea, according to the ever so insightful and reliable wikipedia, it officially states that North Korea is a Democratic People’s Republic, hmm.

Islam is a religion of peace, christianity is about love, scientology is about… err something good, you get the picture, it’s almost like these things are not what they appear to be on paper.

It’s almost like something can be different than what it ascribes to be, huh??

The reason they use the blanket term is because it’s so general, there’s no way you could disagree with ‘equality’ you can’t it’s impossible, you’d have to be fucking Skeletor living in a castle made of dicks to say you don’t support equality even a little bit.

So using that false definition and this sort of social pressure bullying they cast a net and try to force this dogma into the mainstream of culture, I’m not saying it’s not mainstream; it certainly is on the surface level. They tout their wage gap myths and their rape statistics and their number of female directors and all this confirmation bias and nonsense and it gets some nodding heads and confirmation bias is shared by all, everyone who doesn’t want to think about it is happy go home. But if you don’t agree well then twitter is your deathbed buddy, you then become Skeletor in the confines of the internet, burn the internet, because everyone fat woman with blue hair is Heman on anti-depressants.

I don’t even know what I’m really trying to say, I guess I just like thinking my own thoughts and having my own opinions. The idea that someone can just shove an ideology in your face and then brand you a bigot for just not wanting to associate yourself with something that comes with so much unseen baggage, is ludicrous. It essentially comes down to ‘Agree with me or die’ which is pretty much the stance of every conquering religion ever devised.

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Blue Velvet

It sounds more and more pretentious every time I say it but one of my biggest influences when I write right now and in the creative process in general is David Lynch.

Which is odd to say it’s pretentious because Lynch’s work, I find remarkably unpretentious, so distinctly odd without necessarily trying to be, just unrestrainedly uncommon and intriguing. Every one of his films and Twin Peaks is almost like someone took the idea of film making or a tv show and handed it to an Alien and he made his own interpretation that was like what had come before but so drastically but indescribably different. Something you just couldn’t put your finger on but it was rolling around in your brain itching in the corners of your eyes and just couldn’t get it.

I’m not a lifelong fan, I had seen the Elephantman and Dune but I think I was too young to have been caught up in Twin Peaks at the time of its release and those two movies are probably the worst ones to watch in retrospect. Both films are constrained by one being true and the other being based on a sci-fi novel.

So he slipped through the cracks, while I was quite happy with my Tarantino’s and my Scorcese’s and whomever else grazed my adolescent movie palate.

Until I saw a film that really struck an odd note with me that sticks with me even now and no it wasn’t actually by David Lynch *plot twist* it was by Jennifer Lynch, his talented daughter. The movie was called Surveillance, a really haunting off kilter thriller, I love even to this day. But what really stuck with me was the sound track.

The music was haunting and jarring and really something else, I couldn’t help tracking down the soundtrack and finding my favourite song from the film which was called ‘Speed Roadster’ written and performed by… David Lynch.
Who was this alternative/electro/country sounding singer I’d never heard of but couldn’t get enough of; oh what he’s the director’s father? And he’s a writer/director (/among other things, painter/actor) as well? Wow.

Then rather ashamedly I started to put together the dots and I had heard a lot of talk about I think True Detective and how it was ‘like twin peaks’ which in some respects is true. It does capture that haunting sorrow of the unavoidable nature of life and the boundless horror of the unknown (a little Lovecraftian in that respect too, despite it being based on the Yellow King mythos). I may be rewriting my own history here, I can’t be sure, so instead of watching True Detective I watched Twin Peaks (And then eventually True detective) and I was captivated, a little bored/confused at times but I had to keep watching.

There was just something about it, something that made me want to laugh but also cry bitterly and it held me in this state between sorrow and a drunk sort of happiness and each emotion seemed to feed off the other and deepen, the depths of the humour dug larger holes for the sorrow to hide and when the credits rolled over Laura’s face you remembered why you were here.

Frankly I was amazed that such a compelling show could be written about one murder, I can hardly concentrate long enough through an episode of csi or the walking dead where the cast drops like flies.

It was amazing that one fictional person’s life could touch so many people in so many different ways and although she wasn’t technically a character, Laura was the show.

So I initially got into David Lynch not even knowing he made films or tv shows, I just thought he was a weird old guy that made cool music. I loved introducing my brother to Lynch because we watched all his films together and I can’t remember if we watched the Twin Peaks movie Fire walk with me first or not but he hadn’t seen the show before watching. There’s this bit where some weird shit happens and my brother turns to me expecting me to know what the fuck it means because I watched the show and I was like; ‘Dude, I don’t fucking know’ and it was pretty funny.
I was told it didn’t matter if you watched the movie or the show first but I’m glad I watched the show first because it completely depicts Laura’s murder, something I think should never have been done.

In the classic Poe style mystery, the greatest mysteries are the ones that go unsolved.

But producers and ratings and money and bing bang boom, they ruined the whole mystery and then the show limped on after until it eventually keeled over with the help of Billy Zane??

Season 2 in my opinion is a complete clusterfuck, I hold out hope for the reboot, but I intend to keep my expectations as low as possible and coddle myself in the warm embrace of my favourite Lynch films, Blue Velvet being one.

The thing that separates Lynch from any other of my influences is that I not only learnt a lot about story telling from him but also about the creative process in general. I think it’s in a Tom Waits song (Of which the name escapes me) where he says David Lynch told him that he had to sit in a comfy chair and close his eyes and wait for the big one to come along.

Although he may have been alluding to his transcendental meditation woo of which I am not subscribed (I can sit in a chair with my eyes closed without paying like ten quid a month to some swami or whatever) as a fan of Lovecraft this struck a chord with me.

There’s a part of me that is deeply sceptical of woo, all things woo but there’s another part that believes that stories are located in a river in a different dimension and when we close our eyes and concentrate we can catch the odd big fish.
All stories are essentially the same in structure but the core principals of the story come from somewhere else, they’re pieced together from dreams and movies and conversations and some ultra-terrestrial other or just plain pulled out of your ass.

But sometimes I can’t help feeling that I’m not creating stories, I’m just uncovering something that was already there or giving life to something long dead and that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, despite it most likely being bullshit it gives me a nice Lovecraft boner, like I’m in my own story and some ungodly horror is going to burst into the room and tentacle rape me.. what was that noise? On the stairs, it can’t be…*gasp* my eyes, my ey..*indiscernible screaming*.

Check out more strips at Jeffrey Dahmer and Greg the comic strip
And my Lynchian mystery comic here Bat Country

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