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Shameless Flaggotry

I know I’m a little late to the party with this and I sort of already touched on it, well a lot late but I’m running out of comic strips while Florian is taking his extended holiday and I need to blog about some controversial shit. I’m trying to come at it from a different angle at the very least.

I don’t really believe that someone had an Isis cake made when the confederate flag was banned from that shop, I mean I could believe it, America is that dumb. I mean I could see some person making a cake and not knowing what the Isis flag is or what it means and just making a cake thinking it’s for a bar mitzvah or something. The Isis flag doesn’t say Isis on it and it doesn’t have pictures of decapitated heads on it, its just words no one can understand.

So I’d forgive someone for mistakenly turning it into a cake.

What really annoyed me about this issue and what really annoys me to this day is the way Islam is coddled by the left. I don’t really identify with any political movement but I’m definitely left leaning and I’m not religious. To me the way the left treats Islam it’s almost like an abusive spouse making excuses for their abuser. An Islamic attack occurs and they’re the first to shout, ‘he/she didn’t mean it, I was asking for it/I know he/she loves me really’. But as soon as it’s a white guy all white guys are guilty, suffering from a case ‘toxic masculinity’. It’s become socially acceptable to hate someone as long as they’re either white or male. Not just socially acceptable, almost lorded.

I have no idea what point I’m trying to make, just seem to be rambling but I just can’t logical inconsistencies and this constant barrage of ideologies trying to claim an event and use it to propel their own sense of moral authority.

This whole thing with the flag is silly, the people on the left want to take it down because it offends them and they believe it’s a symbol of racism etc and the right want to keep it up because why the fuck not, it’s history. To be perfectly honest I have to agree with them, I personally wouldn’t march down my road in an ss uniform but I’d like to live in a world where someone was free to that without some asshole chiming in saying they were offended. I don’t want to wear an ss uniform I just think it’d be nice to have the option ha-ha.

The idea of banning the flag is ridiculous to me; it’s like going into a museum and asking them to take down the ancient Egyptian exhibit because the Egyptians enslaved Jews. It’s just history and regardless of whether you think the flag is racist or not, you don’t care about what the flag means to other people, the people that like it so why should they care what you think it means?

So a guy who shot people liked the flag, so what, people who like the American/UK/Israeli flag shoot people daily. It doesn’t mean we should ban the flag. It’s no different to me than when Jack Thompson tried to blame the columbine shooting on doom. People just use shootings to propel their own pet project. They just find a shooting and then just savage it for titbits to take out of context or twist to push their particular brand of moralist fascism.

This week it’s a flag, banning a flag, will that stop racism? No, so why do it? I’ll tell you why, because this is just a tug of war, politics has become a petty point scoring, mud sling off, where each side just tries to one up the other, maybe it was always like that and I only just noticed. This flag is just a slam dunk; it’s just a way to piss off the right while the left can remain morally self-righteous and snooty about it, which pisses off the right two fold.

It’s not about racism, a racist person can own the confederate flag but the majority of people that own them I imagine are not racist. There’s a difference between a neo-Nazi and a person that collects ww2 memorabilia. You don’t need to hate Jews to read Mein Kampf, but we live in a culture of witch hunters these last couple of years and guilt by association is their favourite game. If you’ve ever brushed past an anti-semite on the train you’re Adolph Hitler’s cousin, if you’ve ever not liked a post on Lizzy the lezzy you’re a transphobic misogynist racist.

Merely owning a confederate flag makes you suspect, you’re guilty until proven innocent in the court of public opinion.

To quote the wise words of Ben Affleck ‘Eww that’s racist’. Islam is not a race you numpty, nor is it oppressed; it’s the most rapidly growing religion in recent history.

It’s ok for feminists and sjws to hate white men but to criticise Isis would be problematic, and this is the state of moral relativism we live in. We can’t shame terrorists because that’s not trending.
So what should be done in regards to the Isis flag, should we ban that, or would that be racist? If you even have to ask there’s no hope for you, how about we just leave all the flags alone and call it quits?

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

0

First knife review; Tora tora tora!

I was a little hesitant to write a knife review, mostly because what the fuck has it got to do with writing? Nothing really, I just like it and I know what you’re thinking; ‘Oh so you’re a school shooter?’ I can’t tell you why I like knives any more than someone can tell you why they like collecting stamps.

It probably ties in with my obsession with the zombie apocalypse, of which I know isn’t coming, but at one point I sort of did. I haven’t always been sane and don’t really claim to be now, or even that there is such a thing to cling to. A little Lovecraftian? Yeah maybe.

Nevertheless I still fantasise about zombies ravaging the world for some reason. I wrestled with this a long time, I know it’s a little sad and childish but I did really fear that it would happen and I started collecting knives preparation. I literally almost breathed a sigh of relief when I bought my first cold steel gi tanto, so sad ha-ha.

But I remember when I had a dream about zombies and I started to realise that what I really needed was a crossbow or a gun or something but then I realised that that would take all the fun out of it and also be more than I was willing to pay. I realised that I realised it was just a fantasy and I didn’t really think it would happen because otherwise I would get a crossbow or learn to use a bow or something but I didn’t. I just wanted to collect cool knives and display them. It was a way of using cognitive dissonance to justify my collecting of something I liked, like I wasn’t just collecting shiny things like a magpie, I was assembling an arsenal to survive.

I used to watch these shows like doomsday preppers and I realised I wasn’t like these people, I didn’t really think it was going to happen, my brain wasn’t as broken, I didn’t feel the need to horde food or learn to eat bark or something, it was just a hobby not a way of life or an actual reality.

But it still intrigued me and wanting to understand and satirise that mentality is what drove me to start writing Green Sunday, not another zombie apocalypse story but one that tried to get into the heads of the people that actually want this. I didn’t want to write another zombie story as just a framing device for some pointless drama, I wanted to get into and satirise the minds of people not too dissimilar from myself and try to understand the fascination with zombies and more broadly the end of the world.

Ok rambled enough, bullshit ceased, now for the review for the;

Tora WW2 1/2nd Battalion Kukri

This isn’t my first Khukri/kukri/Khukuri? Fuck it, big shiny leaf shaped knife! I was kind of ambivalent towards them since being a zombie film lover I’d see their love affair with the knife and being a little contrarian hipster fuck I naturally rejected them and samurai swords and anything else lots of people liked and poopooed them. But then someone bought a samurai sword and I fell in love with Khukris after watching an episode of ultimate warrior and I’d been going through this phase and still am of loving anything WW2 related that can be used to hurt people. Pretty much anything that resembles something that killed Nazis interests me. I would collect some Nazi stuff too just for balance but it’s either a tacky replica or a ridiculous expensive antique, there doesn’t seem to be a happy medium of knife makers making quality replicas, could be the stigma I guess, guilt by association or some such silliness.

So I shopped around and I skimmed through condors and your cold steels and all manner of KLO’s (Kukri like objects), my brother has the cold steel Kukri machete and it’s functional but nothing special. I hovered over the condor and kabar but I kind of wanted something really authentic so… I bought a Khukri house. Now I know if you’re a seasoned knife collector or a Khukri lover that was probably a punch line. But I liked some of their designs and they had great prices for knives that were actually handmade in Nepal, not china or Taiwan or America, actually from their country of origin.

When I got hold of it, I quite liked it, it was a little heavy for a ten inch knife but I liked it, seemed nice and tough, I thought, ‘shit if it’s blunt I could just throw it at them’. So I was happy with that. But after a while I stumbled on Tora and realised what a twat I was.
And now holding a tora in my hand I understand the extent of my twattishness. When I first picked it up, it felt like I was picking up a piece of a downed alien space craft, made from some eldritch unknown metal. It was so unbelievably light for a twelve inch ww2 replica kukri. I was amazed by how light and agile it was.
It made me realise how pointless the Khukri house knife was in terms of its use, it’s over built with the full integral tang and the thickness of the blade and it makes it cumbersome to a point where it becomes almost unusable when you go above ten inches. Those two features are purely to sell it to American tourists who want some big knife and see the tang when really having the tang visible all the way through the handle doesn’t denote the quality of the knifes construction. So I’m not trying to shit on Khukri house and as a collector they make handsome knives and I will definitely buy from them again because they go beyond the standard replicas and make their own styles which I love.
But if you want real quality replicas, a real Khukri made to the specification of world war designs of authentic Khukris I’d go with Tora.

The blade came fairly sharp but to be frank, Khukris are like axes in how they chop, it’s all leveraging of the blade angle, it doesn’t need to be hair shaving sharp to cut, but I appreciate a little bit of an edge. The mirror polish is lovely, the sheathe is very nice quality, well stitched, I remember with the Khukri house one I could see where it was glued but it’s still functional.

The blade feels great in the hand; it has a partial tang, so the handle isn’t bulky like the Khukri house Kukri. I think the wood handle is a slippery and it takes a little practice to get the edge alignment right for cuts. But as you can see I’m a weirdo who likes ruining his expensive knives by wrapping the handles in masking tape, I’m just too lazy to use paracord and I think tape works better and I think it looks cool but I’m a retard so don’t listen to me ha-ha.
Overall the knife is great quality, I noticed a bit of a bend at the hilt but it’s to be expected from a handmade knife, it doesn’t really affect the knife; it just irked the perfectionist that lies within.

I think what amazed me the most about the Tora is something that just caught me off guard and that was the point; it actually has a functional point. Which is something I had come to expect was not something you could get with a Kukri, which is why most of them don’t come with hilts or any form of guards because they’re not knives that are meant for thrusting (Which is sort of interesting since most people seem to think they originate from the Greek kopis which has a really extensive guard for stabbing… yeah it’s the 300 sword… philistines ¬_¬).

I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually quite pointy, I’m sure it’ll come quite a shock to those hapless pumpkins.

The only negative points I could say about it is the waiting list, you have to wait quite a while to get hold of one because they make them in batches and also they use parcel force, I think it was, and they’re about as useful as an arsehole on your knee. I’d have preferred something like ups or FedEx but as it stands I’m very happy with it and I would recommend it to anyone.

I haven’t actually taken it out and whacked a tree with it and I don’t plan to (well I hacked the shit out of the box, but that’s because my daddy didn’t hug me enough as a child), but it makes a beautiful addition to my collection and I hope to get many more, salary willing.IMG_20150922_112518IMG_20150922_112521IMG_20150922_112525IMG_20150922_112537IMG_20150922_112603

3

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.

0

Green Sunday Chapter one ‘No Pussy Blues’

I’ve been trying my hand at writing prose recently and I thought I’d use this place as a bit of a sound board maybe, up my content at least, I’ll be posting it on Inkitt too, so these posts aren’t too long, and it keeps the chapters in order the link is at the bottom. Thanks for checking it out, I’ll post chapters intermittently throughout the month. Cheers.

The wind blew through the cherry blossoms in the Sakuragoaka gardens. Musashi knelt and cleared his mind, letting his cares drift on with that wind that blew the trees. He saw without seeing as he closed his eyes, his mind clacking in the dark of his dreams, sparking silently as he smelled the fires burning in the distance, food cooking in the town over, dogs’ barks travelling over the mountains, whispers in the cool afternoon air carried by the silence of the coming night.

The ground he knelt on was soft and grass stained his dark brown robes, he hadn’t washed for days or combed his hair. Cleanliness had become a pretence he didn’t much care for.

Suddenly the air became tighter and sharper and pin pricks of air hit his skin. His eyes cracked and let in some light as his mind came soaring back like a demon raking up the pits of hell, as it hurtled into this world. A foot touched down on the grassy earth and sent shockwaves through the ground and then another and another and another and another and another.

Three sets of two, his eyes closed again as he listened, three men or one six legged demon, he’d know only when he cut it, they’d only exist when his blade touched them and then only for a moment after.

He took a deep slow inhalation of breath as they approached, steel breathed out sharply as their swords loosened from their ramshackle sheathes; the air took on the smell of iron and copper; they approached from behind as Musashi meditated; their steel quivered as the light hit the blade; he could see it in his mind’s eye, feel them slowly oxidising.

With each step their hearts beat faster and lost more ground to his own steady beat; his heart beat like a leather drum of a mighty ship approaching a certain destination.

His attackers could feel it in the ground as they got closer to him; the vibrations through their feet made them feel numb and light headed, they lost the tip of their swords to a strange feeling of giddiness as they got close to the kneeling man.

His breathing remained steady and smooth; he breathed in deeply, taking in the last of the sweet smells of the cherry blossom tree; the pink petals fell and swayed on the wind. Musashi brought his sword forward in his waist wrap and turned the blade in its scabbard pushing out his bottom lip as he did. His grizzled lower jaw cocked to the side as he felt the greasy stubble on his face with his other hand. He sighed a little as he turned the blade up in his belt and slowly pushed the hilt, gently popping the blade from the sheathe with a slight jerking motion from his thumb, the blade sticking with the coming cold of the autumn months.

The blank figures flapped slightly as the sails of a ship in a changing wind and their nerves were caught on a wire, cutting deeply as they sprang into life having come too close to turn back. Their fear pushed them onto this mortal stage to face blood and sweat and bone and will in an afternoon showing only the sky would be far away enough to enjoy.

They tense their legs and took stances each similar and dissimilar from each other, trying to gain strength from the earth that bore them vagabonds. They swallowed and took their pride up like an iron flag and bound towards the old man resting his eyes in the cool breeze, listening to the gears of the world slowly turn, smelling the sweet and tart smells of the grass and the blossoms mixing in the dying evening over the hushed voices of careless people.

Their swords were heavier than his and they bolted unsteadily forward shaking like they were held together with string, his sword was that of a dancing feather and cut through the air like a blossom from the cherry tree. His hand had barely touched the sword; his grip was light and nourished the blade with his will; it stayed straight and did not falter in the wind; it moved with it, flowed on it and cut it like a ship parts waves. A natural exhilaration of what was meant to be; men travelling towards their destinies, whatever that may amount to.

The men set up on him, their movements that of men underwater encountering a great eye seeing all their movements but recognising them only as insignificant shapes in the dark depth of a boundless ocean. His mind only thought of cutting, his blade sharpened by his burning will, a searing desire to be seen by the ambivalent god of the moon and stars.

They scattered like leaves; their bodies wanted to be cut; they were made complete by his blade, a cut for each and each in place; not a drop of blood fell until it was ready to fall and Musashi sheathed his sword once more.

Suddenly as if from the sky itself a crack appeared and Musashi felt a foot on his shadow, a tightness in his chest as his guard had been penetrated by some unholy force; he quickly drew his sword again; it was already halfway out when he heard it’s scream tear through the heavens, a star falling with the force of the earth itself, eclipsed him like an insect in the wake of a great mountain.

“TJ STOP SCREWING AROUND IN THE YARD AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH!”

“MOOOM, I’M FILMING FOR YOUTUBE!”

“-AND YOU BETTER NOT BE PUTTING HOLES IN MY FENCE WITH THAT SWORD!”

“NO MOM”.

TJ sighed heavily as he looked at the jagged cut in the water cooler bottle he picked up on his way home from school; it bled out on the unevenly cut grass as his fantasy faded into the corners of his mind. He scratched his neckbeard as he looked at his crappy mall katana sticking out of fence that ran around the back of his back garden, still twitching from the force of the swing. He must have let go when his mom called him.

He looked into his digital camera and sighed audibly into the vacant lens.

“Hey fat ass” A nasally voice rang out from over the fence and TJ turned like Michael Jackson in thriller.

“Yeah you, neck beard, over here” His neighbour leant on the fence that parted their gardens like a crow with a superior sneer sitting atop his pointy douche bag goatee looking like a hipster Ming the merciless with a pair of poser shades dangling from his fingers over the fence.

“You better watch it son, you almost put another hole in my ass with that pig sticker of yours, hommie doesn’t play that, my exit hole remains an exit hole feel me?” His neighbour flailed his sunglasses in his fingers and tried to sound like a black guy for some reason.

“Err Wut?”

“What are you doing man? No one wants to see some fat re-re in his mommies yard cutting up bottles with a butter knife when they can see handsome motherfuckers like me and my associates chopping on some real meat with some big… mmm weapons!” He smiled and motioned with his sunglasses at TJ’s camera set up and his bottle massacre, sneering and preening in one self satisfied breathe.

“We’ve got over sixty thousand billion subscribers nigga, wut chu got, like one-two thousand maybe? Some tight fisted jackers fapping their flaccid nubby dicks over fat retards getting sweaty in black extra large tees.”

TJ averted his gaze as he attempted to jossle his sword free from the fence, his pits were wet and stinging, shame and anger swelling as he said nothing and shook his head from side to side trying to get his emo black bangs out of his sweaty face, he just took it.

“Stay off my fucking youtube asshat, and keep that mall sword crap in your pants.” He hopped off the fence laughing.

“Now where the fuck were we? Oh yeah” He said as he turned to the camera as it focused on his goateed smug face, putting his sunglasses back on; He slicked his floppy black hair back on his head.

Thanks for checking it out.

You can read the rest of the chapter on inkitt.
http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507

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Breakdown of the first issue of Three Ring and some Reviews.

I wanted to blog about the first issue of Three Ring Samurai and Bat Country in more detail but I think I’ll tackle them separately and talk more broadly on how I feel about first issues because I find I feel quite strongly about them.

To me the first issue of a comic is like an introduction to an essay or a film or anything of that nature, it sets up the plot but it also has to stand almost on its own. I read so many indie comics who see the first issue as almost a hurdle to be jumped as swiftly and as neatly as possible to get to the ‘good bits’ but if you have ‘good bits’ why aren’t they in the first issue people will see?
You have to give people a reason to want to get to the ‘good bits’, I’m not going to read your entire graphic novel and then decide whether or not it was worth my time at the end. I’m going to see what the first issue is telling me and decide from that moment whether to keep reading or not.

So in my mind the first issue should almost encapsulate everything you want to say or achieve throughout the entire comic. It’s not the start of a story, it IS the whole story. I read quite a few comics that start at the beginning despite nothing really happening, and slowly building to that point.

A comic is not like a novel, you have to grab people’s attention as soon as possible or you’ll never have it. I’d structure it so it started at or after the inciting incident and work backwards, it’s a common device but that’s because it works and if you think you can’t make a common device work for you or you can’t make something like that fresh and exciting or scoff at cliché’s you really shouldn’t be a writer. Because that’s all we do, nothing is original, nothing is new, everything is a cliché, we’ve been on this planet for thousands of years as a species, we have to keep recycling and keep mixing things up to keep… LIFE interesting. It’s not what you write about, its how you write about it that makes what you do interesting.
Now my post apocalyptic diesel punk samurai clown epic, Three Ring Samurai, if I may be so modest has an oddly modest first issue in comparison from where the story goes. I see the premise, and the elevator pitch alone is incredibly flamboyant and done by anyone else it would too silly, too wacky and just wouldn’t work. I wanted to go for a more anime like feel, where there can be silliness and there can be wackiness but you always understand that there are real world consequences and life and death and it’ll be at its core a serious story because in my opinion those are the stories I like and want to tell.

I think seriousness and sadness and humour work off each other well and in some instances deepen eachother. It’s like twin peaks, again; you have all this wackiness going on in the episode but by the end you have to remember that Laura is dead and that’s what the show is about, it’s a comedy surrounding a tragedy and only the end can truly define where the pointer lands.

So with the first issue I really wanted to undersell it and be as subtle as I possibly could so that I could contain the bombastic title and concept and really blue ball the reader, as well as giving them a little something that would make them want to read the next issue (which is still being drawn) and give them a feel for the tone of entire series.

I really had to restrain myself because the concept is so rich and so fucking explosive, it’s almost too tempting to take it and run and just burn yourself out. But I wanted a really plodding and structured approach. And I know I said I hated comics that took a long time to get going but I think this comic had enough momentum behind it in terms of interest with the unique subject matter to cut me a little slack if just for the first issue. To be a little mysterious, a little enigmatic even in a comic that is so tongue in cheek at its core as this.

So the first page, I read that and I hear Ron Perlman’s voice saying ‘War, war never changes’, and I just can’t resist, the zoom out on the post apocalyptic setting, I really wanted to give a feel of scope and loss with the idea that people were still clinging on to something which is Fallout at its heart.

We’re introduced to these two kids, like the wastelands answer to tin tin, two innocents bounding onto some dark strange discovery and this is how we’re introduced to our hero. I tried to use this to set the tone in terms of the fact the kids didn’t find it strange to find a dead body, the light normality of death being so prevalent in a harsh wasteland.

Pookie is almost like an alien or a baby or a fish wacked on the head and brought back to life. With the scenes of the shack, I almost wanted a sleepy feel, a sort of cool peace that fell on the wasteland at dusk in contrast to the chaos of the day.

I had a lot of fun with the kids, sneaking in exposition and building up to the character of Pookie by essentially mocking him in this cartoony anime sort of way. I want him to be this figure of fun, a silly character that can fall on his ass and make a fool of himself because he’s not afraid of being a fool because he knows when it comes down to it, he’ll have the last laugh.

The grandpa character is a sort of wily comic relief, someone to bounce weird jokes off the kids (fuck just noticed a spelling mistake haha). Someone who plays dumb to lull people into a false sense of security but secretly knows more than he lets on. And then we can have this hushed voices real talk between him and Pookie, nods and gestures of two people in tune in some way.

The dream sequences are something I plucked directly from the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Elephantman. I wanted something surreal but also very silly, and I really can’t get away with genuine serious surrealism. I’ve always been more drawn to comedy surrealism like Luis Bunuel and to some extent David Lynch, I find he takes his surrealism (besides possibly Eraserhead, that movie freaks a lot of people out but I found it quite silly and funny in a way) very lightly and with many pinches of salt.

I think if I remember correctly, the reason I made it elephants is mainly because I loved the way Ike (The artist) drew the elephant on the opening page and then I took the opening sequence from David Lynch’s Elephantman, which is a pretty fucking weird intro and ran with it. I’m pretty sure it’s an elephant rape scene, or that’s at least what he’s hinting at, I wouldn’t put that past him to be fair, he’s done weirder shit than that.

I shamelessly stole the Musashi joke from Champloo. I have no shame, it’s just too funny and I read the book of the five rings before I started writing this, so why the fuck not?

We’re introduced to Pookie in earnest, I always like characters with silly names, it almost makes it twice as amazing when they do something incredible, I almost wish I came up with it but I think that was all Ike as is the original concept.

Only 11 pages in do we get to the meat of the story. Pookie has been robbed and the natural imperative of gramps is just to let it go, some stuff isn’t worth your life and Pookie is injured, but Pookie is not like them. Someone takes something from him, he gets it back. He is almost an alien, dropped into a dog eat dog world with an inordinately large set of teeth. This is where I like to think I injected some of the Cain in Kung Fu elements I wanted to bring forward. A lone wanderer, from a strange culture, a warrior with incredible skill plucked out of a fantasy; an almost mockery to human potential, an anime character walking Deus Ex Machina.

The main purpose of this issue is that Pookie was essentially destroyed, his life, his past. He was killed, reborn and everything he knew stripped away from him. So now he has to find himself, he has to decide who he is in this new world, without the world he’d come to know. The first thing he’s drawn to is his sword and violence because that’s all he’d known all his life.

In a lot of ways this is a coming of age story, someone thrown out of their old life like Kung Fu and thrust into a strange new world, forced to make sense of who he has to become to survive.

This whole issue is essentially about Pookie’s rebirth (fuck that’s pretentious), he’s trying to establish who he really is, because for so long he was one thing (no spoilers); it was his whole world, his identity and in one moment it’s taken from him and now he has to re-establish his identity and who he is as a character. As a writer it was and is a tricky character to write for because he’s almost forming himself with every page, piecing himself together like Doctor Manhattan.

I’m oddly proud of the sword, a sword with a handle like one of those cheesy laughing boxes Jack Nicholson joker has at the end of Batman. He always gets the last laugh even if he dies. I sort of wanted to mock the idea of swords in general.

A katana is as clichéd as you can get these days, so saturated in popular culture. I wanted to make his sword out to be some ridiculous piece of joke shop crap, a silly show piece, a gimmick for laughs, a sword that laughs for a man that doesn’t need to.

It’s also sort of homage to my early knife collection. I bought this crappy machete from Doncaster market when I was like 13 I think. It had a dragon or lions head handle with glowing led’s for eyes that lit up when you pressed a button, jesus what the fuck was I thinking?

The combat I wanted to keep as theatrical as possible, death is a show, it had to be fairly flash but also brutally inefficient. He’s a monster, a vicious killer, who expects applause for his butchery, someone shaped by the brutality of the vicious curiosity of a bloodthirsty crowd egging him on to further heights of gut-wrenching violence. To him violence and killing is a parlour trick, it’s almost a joke, like hitting someone in the face with a custard pie.

That’s how I wanted to capture this element of silliness in this very grotesque and ultra-violent package. I really wanted to hone that feeling of 80’s action movie ultra-violence, like Robocop. Someone is torn apart in this ridiculously over the top death sequence but it’s wrapped up in this really silly camp vibe that makes it all the more sinister and weird.

Ok maybe the ending with the cheesy ‘see ya around kid’ was a little too much but I couldn’t resist. I wanted to end it in a way that made it uncertain where he was going, he was just going somewhere, anywhere to forge a new Pookie, one that followed his own rules and didn’t need no stinkin’ circus.

Well how did I do? haha. Fuck I waffled on like a man possessed, if you read this far through I commend you.

All in all not a lot happens but I think it’s a tight and tidy package, I’ve got a handful of positive reviews for it under my belt already and I feel confident it was a solid first issue. but it gives enough, succinctly I think, to grab the attention for another issue or two.

Reviewses!

http://comicsgrinder.com/2015/08/26/webcomic-review-three-ring-samurai/

http://madness-inc.tumblr.com/post/127810697999/review-three-ring-samurai

http://www.comiccrusaders.com/webcomic-wednesday-review-three-ring-samurai/

Well I hope you like it anyway, I’ve rambled enough for a lifetime, as always you can check it out for free at; http://tapastic.com/series/Three-Ring-Samurai

Thanks for reading, peace out.

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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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Cluster Fuckers

Not to be Debbie-downer over here, it’s not the best subject for a comic strip, but after the Charlestown/ton (I could google the right spelling but I don’t give enough of a shit) shooting, the scrambling all over my facebook page was just too delicious not to comment on.

As a not well known giver of fucks, I was happy to write off this shooter as the Gilbert Grape (Yeah I can’t remember if he was DiCaprio’s character or Depp’s and I don’t give a shit, you know what I mean, the retarded one, google it, fuck!), inbred looking motherfucker he was and just say; the kid was a few coconuts short of a spongecake and be done with it. Shuffle the deck, say something reassuring to the people and then go on our merry way pretending this would never happen again.
Of course it’ll happen again, crazy gonna cray’, it’s like trying to stop the tide coming in. We’re little insects shoving each other into these little roach motels, trying to pretend that every human being on earth has their own individual worth. To paraphrase fight club really badly; we all think we’re going to be rock stars and movie stars and we’re gonna fuck super models and drive flashy cars, but its bullshit.

And when people realise how insignificant they really are they want to prove themselves wrong and do fucked up shit like this, to feel powerful, to let everyone know and even themselves that they were indeed alive.

I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s ‘society’s’ fault and I’m sure as shit not gonna blame masculinity or racism (not to completely discount them) and then slap on some voodoo hoodoo snake oil instant fix, a la ‘get rid of guns’ or something else that wouldn’t work.

I just felt like I needed to point out how fucking carnivorous our culture is today that when some lunatic, some idiot, shoots innocent people, the first thing people try to do is blame it on something that propels their pet project.

‘Oh I really don’t like the confederate flag, I think it represents *insert negative connotations here*, oh this crazy guy had it in a photo and he shot people, I can use this to ban it’.

‘What about all the people that have photos taken with it, that don’t shoot people, which are definitely the majority? Look I found a picture of him with a my little pony poster in the background’

‘Wut are you some kind of white supremacist capitalist shitlord??’

(I wait with baited breathe for the day a bronie goes on a killing spree)

I’m not saying the confederate flag doesn’t represent racism, I’m not American and I don’t give a shit, it could be Michael Barrymore’s bath towel for all I care. As far as the interactions I’ve had with it, it seemed like a fairly quaint and idealized symbol of southern American heritage and I associated it with country singers and impractical cars and caravans and terrible hairstyles that defied time periods.

I took it for what it was; just another outdated signpost that didn’t really mean anything until someone wanted to push some agenda.

I have nothing against taking the flag down because I don’t care, what I really have a problem with is this culture of hashtagtivism that just does… stuff. It’s just this opinionated blob of entitled placenta propelling themselves with their own brainfarts to push some bullshit agenda and make their balls/clits swell feeling some modicum of power by combining their butthurt and getting something/anything banned for the ‘THE GREATER GOOD’. As if these nuanceless fucks would know ‘good’ if it slapped its balls against their foreheads.

It’s why I didn’t support the gay marriage thing, I’m not against it, I just don’t give a shit, these movements become less about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ and more about getting your own way and telling everyone how ‘progressive’ you are while you do it. This whole culture has become a fucking toddler who looks for every opportunity to stomp it’s feet and hold it’s breathe until it’s provided with cake and ice cream. (Yeah I get that’s what I’m basically doing, no fuck you, I saw it first)

And this to me was another example of that.

My facebook feed was just a constant stream of white knights prostrating themselves as if this retard represented all of us and we’d all been complicit and needed to apologise and get ‘I’m not racist, really’ tattooed on the side of our heads. Another gripe I had with the gay marriage thing was the prostration of people on facebook with that fucking rainbow profile pic thing, just  a massive sign on your facebook page ‘I don’t hate faggots’, no one said you did asshole.

Side stepping that, the point I was trying to make was, that this shooting was caused by racism, if you completely lack any sense of nuance at all. If you take out context and any sort of nuance you can look in his room and find a NIN album and blame it on that, maybe he played candy crush and the black candies enraged him. The Christians were saying it was an atheist attack on the church, the gun haters were blaming guns, the race baiters were blaming racists, the feminists were blaming all men, it was a clusterfuck of stupid assholes all chomping at the bit to claim a killer to push their own nuanceless agenda. And it solves nothing but to give these opportunist assholes more power and more money.

Because when you’re trying to push an agenda, you need to focus on that one thing, it can’t be race and mental health, it can’t be toxic masculinity and gun control, it has to be one thing so you can push a solid narrative and get people on board because people en masse don’t like nuance. Having to deal with more than one issue is just too complicated, he couldn’t have been racist and crazy because that stigmatises people who lie about being mentally ill because they claim to be ‘random’ or ‘quirky’.

But hey ho when a gay black guy shoots two white people it’s suddenly, ‘He was mentally unstable’ yeah we know, he shot two people, not many sane people do that. We don’t turn around and say it was because he hated white people or straight people, it could have been the case but I think any sane person would agree it was because he was fucking crazy. He’s not a ‘misogynist’ because he shot a woman; he’s not a ‘racist’ because he shot someone of a different race. He’s a fucking nut job because he shot two innocent people for no fucking reason. And yeah maybe if it was harder for him to get a gun, he’d be a slightly more frustrated crazy person that killed them with a spork and that would be much messier.

What’s the moral of the story? I know I hate this because without actually raising a solution I’m just whining and that makes me no better than social justice whiners hashtagtivist slacktavists but there is no solution, there is no problem. Any student of history can see people are not these docile cow like beings that just chew cud and mill about, we’re vicious little cunts and we’re just settling in to being somewhat socialized, the most benign of domesticated dogs can sometimes bite, a church going mother of six can drown them all in a bathtub.

This is a fucked up world and it’s the people that try to convince you otherwise that think anything can be done. Nothing can be done, because there’s nothing wrong, people have been killing people since they discovered rocks were heavy and brains were squishy. Despite that the murder rate has been the lowest it’s ever been and it’s decreasing, will it ever be zero? No. Would less mass shootings be nice? Yes, would an ice-cream covered unicorn at my birthday party be awesome? That’s just impractical.

There’s nothing that can be done, look at it logically, what solution have people posed? Remove a flag. What will that do exactly? Will it decrease racism or piss off real racists and people who just like the flag? Will it stop shootings or will it profile people who use the flag?

I know this makes people ‘feel’ good, like they’re making a difference, making the world a better place, gives them a raging boner and a little surge of power like they aren’t just sacks of meat on sticks on a ball of dirt, their actions are recorded on twitter for a whole hour. But for the realists like me, the world is and has always been a steaming pile of shit and we are the lucky insects squirming through that mound of warm universal dung savouring all the sights and sounds and smells rushing towards infinity and with that sophistic bullshit I am done.

Also I imdb’d What’s eating Gilbert Grape and DiCaprio’s character was called ‘Arnie’, I dare anyone to say this blog isn’t informative, fucking haters. Peace!

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Walk the Earth like Pookie in Three Ring Samurai.

Forgive me in advance for the rambling nature of this blog, I really don’t have a plan, I just have two words ‘Kung fu’.

For those not familiar with it, Kung Fu is a tv show with David Carradine playing a half Chinese half American boy raised in a shaolin temple after both his parents are killed by a tyrannical Emperor.
The story is based around his travels to seek out his family in America after his master is killed he must flee china wanted for killing the emperors son in an act of hot on the spot vengeance for the unwarranted killing.

He travels America looking for his family, evading the snare of the emperor and getting into scrapes and adventures, meeting interesting people along the way. With each new adventure a piece of his teachings is called upon to assist him and make sense of a world he’s only just coming face to face with.
Secluded all his life Caine is as a child with the fighting skills of a shaolin priest, through a series of flashback his past is brought to light to help him overcome and decide on certain courses of action to aid him in his adventures.

~

I initially watched the show out of the blue, maybe as some form of research for 3 Ring, I know I definitely shamelessly ripped a lot off for the issue plan, I borrowed a lot of ideas and I in an upcoming arc and I decided to completely parody the montage of Caine’s training in the shaolin temple and make it Pookie’s ridiculous clown training, I just couldn’t resist.

I really, really loved the style; the way the story was structured in the first season was perfect, calling on back-story applying it to current plot. It worked really well because you learned more about him every episode in a way that felt very consistent. And every episode you learnt a valuable and somewhat touching lesson.

It padded the main plot nicely as we learned about Caine throughout his various adventures and then kept us interested in the search for his brother and the threat of the Emperor on his heels and for a guy that had never done kung fu before kung fu David Carradine isn’t half bad as an actor or a fighter coming from someone who knows kung fu. He wasn’t amazing and he did use a stunt double in season one I believe but ditched that for his own stunts in later seasons.

Long story short I loved the show and I wanted the same feel for 3 Ring Samurai, I wanted every arc to be a self contained movie, something that engaged people and had action and drama and suspense and just enough thread of main plot to keep people reading but not enough to overwhelm them.

Sadly the second two seasons of Kung fu really fell short for me and I must admit I almost breathed a sigh of relief, I’m not proud to admit I take pleasure in the downfall of other but I think a lot of people feel shadenfreud a lot more than they’d like to admit. I was relieved to see the show fall because to live up to that, for it to continue at that level of quality would have rendered my endeavours to emulate it seem futile.

I don’t blame the show for this, I blame the times and the idea that writing staff are disposable, they chose to change the writers for season two and with the nature of television in the seventies I feel like they had to make it more consumable for people to watch as re-runs.

Tv wasn’t like how it is now with netflix and the internet, you couldn’t choose to watch a tv show whenever you wanted, and watch them in order, you watched them when they were on, in the order they were on and if you missed an episode you had to watch it in a rerun. You couldn’t just buy the boxset on dvd.
So each episode had to be standalone and almost interchangeable in terms of the timeline of the story so someone could watch any episode in any order and still keep up and enjoy the show.
This change of writers and restructuring of the show is a noticeable decline in cogent plot and although I watched each season through it didn’t measure up in any shape or form to season one.

I don’t know why but my mind keeps drawing back to Twin Peaks and the dire mistake of revealing the mystery around the death of Laura Palmer half way between season two which without a doubt killed the show. Lynch himself said he never wanted to reveal the mystery and I and Edgar Allen Poe would have agreed that the greatest mystery is one that goes unsolved. It was the fault of the producers of the show that forced him to reveal the mystery and then have the show limp on to the end without much a hook to keep the show going.
It’s almost amazing to even think that an entire tv show could be framed around one murder or one person’s life like Kung Fu. But it can because people themselves can be unsolvable mysteries.
And every time the credits rolled over Laura Palmer’s picture I would feel a pang of sorrow for the mystery of her life and even more so for the tawdry reveal of that perfect mystery and then the shop bought replacement mystery awkwardly wedged in its place.

I think if Kung Fu were re-made today it would be an incredibly feat but also a really rewarding one, (Note to self, call Keanu Reeves ;)). This is the golden age of television where the possibilities for stories and budgets and scope and acting talent are virtually limitless and at a time where there is so much pressure on the structure of films and now games it’s really necessary.

So please forgive the faux fanboy ranting, I just wanted to give some perspective to the narrative structure and style of 3 Ring, think Kung Fu meets Fallout 4 haha.

Peace out people.

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