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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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We can’t stop here!

Bat Country is back hombres and hombrettes!

Yeah you have no idea what that is, well fuck it if I’m not gonna be happy about it.

Bat Country is the culmination of my fevered imagination trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t even try to make sense. This world is so strange and full of contradictions and bullshit that we just let wash over us like steamy farts from landwhale in the mobility scooter in the front of the queue at McDonalds.

Bat Country tries to tie all those loose ends together and make a whole lot of spaghetti. I originally started it before I knew about this whole ‘social justice movement’. When I wanted to write comics about social issues and dun dun dun ‘change the world’… with comics ffs.

Needless to say I was and probably still am a complete retard. Trying to force your opinions on others in the form of prose or a visual medium like comics is just really polite brainwashing and after I saw all this cultural Marxism go down around me in terms of comics and games and… err shirts. I realised that comics and any medium in general should never try to make people think like you, they should just make people think, full stop.

Bat Country is at its heart a story of a misfit, someone who doesn’t fit in, even in his own head, someone so completely alien to this world, it keeps trying to spit him out. Ransom is a normal guy who sees something he shouldn’t have seen and after a long period of time he realises the world just isn’t a good fit for him so he locks himself away for a number of years with the help of a shadowy backer with the mind and the money to keep him quiet and hidden for the rest of his natural life.
But in the mean time Ransom starts to build his own plan, to escape the cage of his own design and go out of this world with a big bang and really bad indigestion.

He plans to go on an adventure, walk the earth, travelling a long stretch of nothing populated by obscure eating contests until at the end reaching spiritual and gastric awakening, opening the third stomach or whatever.

But there are people trying to stop him, troubles he gets embroiled in, other people’s stories crossing with him and mixing up the spaghetti even more.

Dreams and fantasy mixing in real time, 4th wall flimsier than crate paper and ultra-violent eroticism tickling the corner of your eyes… maybe??

I was just standing in a coffee shop one day and I realised how fucking out of place I was just standing there… trying to be a person, what the fuck was thinking? I could barely talk, I just wanted to use the toilet but I had to buy something, so I bought some coffee type thing, it came in a little cup and they asked if I wanted milk and sugar and for some fucking reason I said ‘no’ and changing my mind seemed like the hardest thing in the world. Like I was Hitler and someone asked me if I wanted to kill the Jews or give them all sweets and I said ‘Kill them’ then changed my mind but they already started so it seemed rude to change your mind so you just had to ride it out.

It just made me think about what a comic book character like that would be like, someone just unequipped for life, so much so that life itself is just trying to eat them and just by existing they’re barrelling forth to their own misunderstanding of a self-destruction event.

At the time I was reading noir, I think the Maltese Falcon and that was cool, I’d been a big Raymond Chandler fan when I was younger and this wasn’t as good as that but it was cool and I thought, ‘shit I should write something like this’. Then surreptitiously I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right after and I realised a freak like me could never write something that cool and I should just stick to being the weirdo lizard bootlicker that creates cool by mistake as a by-product of just being fucked in the head.

The reckless abandon and freedom of madness is what I wanted after reading Fear, and coincidentally I had been barrelling down a Lynchian path with Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and I knew I had to capture what I loved about that and pass it over.

There was something so haunting and cheesy I couldn’t not rip it off.

So I started to write a story that was about stuff but really wasn’t about anything, it was almost a sarcastic salute to the human race, beautiful and flawed and all huddled on a little ball of dirt hurtling through space sniffing each other’s farts in little metal boxes in the sky on long haul flights from Cleveland or wherever.
Calling people out on being a virus with shoes but also marvelling at their ingenuity and cruelty and tenacity, I wanted to change the world and that was dumb, I know that now, all you can really do is make someone say ‘Wtf’ and that’s enough, a smile, a nod, a little chortle and you’ve done your job, you haven’t changed the world but you did something, something invisible but very real.

Now if only they’d give me some fucking money haha.

Oh yeah fuck, I almost forgot the whole point of this fucking blog, the next chapter of Bat Country is coming soon, new pages released on a weekly basis and you can read the whole first issue free on tapastic, until I can be bothered to move it somewhere less shitty and hipstery haha

http://tapastic.com/series/Bat-Country

Peace.

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Indie comics, clown samurais, post apocalyptic swashbuckling in very used cars.

Read issue one for free.

I work on a couple of indie comics; I’d say each is a little piece of me, each with its own life. This is sort of a dark reflection of my love of anime and bastardised Japanese/Asian culture.

3 Ring Samurai is a diesel-punk clown samurai revenge story. It’s basically like Caine in Kung Fu if he was a clown and… err a samurai and not a Buddhist monk… or bald..or a clown??

Pookie is left for dead and discovered on a pile of trash by some scavenger kids who with the help of their creepy grandpa nurse him back to health so he can begin his long road to revenge and trying to find some shoes that fit.

It’s based in a world a kin to fallout, but instead of the brotherhood of steel, an order out of the military applying Knightly codes to a post apocalyptic world to bring order out of chaos, the focus is on a group applying a circus code on the wastelands bringing entertainment and blood to the wastes.

The circus is like a travelling Show-gunate (get it? Right yeah killing myself, I’ll stop, just unsee that) bringing justice, a literal bread and circus circus, where criminals are put to death by the code of the circus entertainers trained to murder in really interesting ways.

But teh’applecart has been upset and Pookie has been cast out, accused of a heinous crime and now he’s to be hunted by his ex-brothers in arms for a crime he may or may not have committed.

Terrible overview over, this comic came about when I was trawling those hapless comic sites on facebook, where people huddle around the digital equivalent of a trashcan fire trying to keep their creativity warm while working for a living as a barista giving out double mocha handjobs or whatever.
So I squeezed my way around the garbage fire and threw out a few of my short stories and some of them hit home and I caught the attention of Mike (Now Ike, there was already a Mike Golden) with a weird clown story of my own about sexy killer clowns and electric kitchen knives and menstrual blood and that’s enough of that.

We bumped into each other again in a grindhouse style facebook group talking about commissioning some little grindhouse stories that never got off the ground (as is the case with most indie shorts) and in a few other debilitatingly depressing comic groups where people try to rub their creative spark between their fat middle age thighs hoping it’ll catch fire and pimply teens with ‘gender issues’ write the most banal tripe that would turn a donkey to Braille.

So of course as in love with me as Mike was (;)) he jumped at the chance to work with me again at which point, I was like, ‘Why don’t we just do our own thing?’ since we were both tired of being let down by the flakes of facebook. We connected over a similar work ethic and a love of all things martial arts. Him being into those fancy named Filipino arts with sticks and sharp sticks flailing about and me with my taekwondo and kung fu and fencing for all those years.
We thought we could put something together that would blend post apocalyptic punk tongue in cheek fun and classic kung fu movies and samurai flicks into one odd package.

So I set forth on a journey of rediscovery, I’d done kung fu for a number of years (4 to be exact) and taekwondo since I was about 12 but oddly I was never that into martial arts movies. The only one at the time I watched more than once was Romeo must die and that’s only because it came with our first dvd player so it was the only one we had.

But maybe a year or two ago, I started getting into obscure 90’s rap for some reason and I find a nice niche in the Wu Tang Clan which lead to a fascination with the RZA, being a fan of some of his scores from movies like ‘Ghost Dog’. I felt obliged to watch his attempt at a classic kung fu movie ‘The man with the iron fists’.

Needless to say it was fucking atrocious, and I never want to see a movie with Russell Crowe in it ever again. But I fell in love with the style and I wanted to explore that more. So I started watching movies like ‘Fist of the white lotus’ and ‘Five Deadly Venoms’ and my personal favourite ’36th Chamber of Shaolin’ (Or anything thing with Gordon Liu in it tbf) and I couldn’t get enough. The style, the fights, the minimal yet effective stories.
Then I watched ‘Kung Fu’ the tv show with David Carradine playing Caine the stoic shaolin monk and it was sealed. That’s not to say that I don’t see why it was cancelled, the last two seasons are awful but I don’t blame the show for that. It was made in the wrong time I think, each episode was designed to be easily consumable on its own, like a mini movie for the purpose of reruns, so you could just watch a random episode and enjoy it without having to know the context leading up to that point (Whereas today you have the internet and netflix so you can have a flowing story and watch the episodes in order to keep up with a consistent plot). And because of that it lost its grasp on a main plot and then when it tried to rekindle that, it fumbled it horrible.

But the first season I found spellbinding and I realise if I keep going on about it, this blog is going to be three times as long as it has to be. So I’ll wrap it up by just saying, I found every episode of the first season emblematic of everything I want to do with 3 Ring; Punchy and fun and enigmatic, with a strong mysterious story that clings to a tight back story slowly unfolding episode to episode filling out the character of the hero and propelling the story forward in a way that keeps the reader/watcher coming back for more.

that keeps readers wanting more and more.

See you…

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