and a Happy New Year. Yes I’ve been watching The Box Of Delights.

At a loss for Christmas present ideas for the Whovian in your life? Of course you are, because there’s barely any Who merchandise out there (sarcasm). However, you should definitely pick up SFX’s Doctor Who: The Fanzine, because in addition to more Time Lord related shenanigans than you can shake a… er… Dalek sink plunger at, there is also the latest instalment of our comic strip Arthur “Dies Daily” Darvill Vs Murderous Moffat. 

Now if SFX ever want to do a Star Wars special I have a great idea for a story about Sheltay Retrac and Don-Wan Kihotay.

So we were at Leeds’ fantastic Thought Bubble Festival. Now twice as big and twice as long (snarf snarf), it continues to be the most fun event on the UK comic book calendar. Judging by everyone I spoke to and all the reports I’ve read, a brilliant time was had by all and I’m sure everyone who went is looking forward to the next one as much as I am. Would it be too much to ask for two Thoughtbubbles a year? Or three? Make it happen, Obama!

As I mentioned (moaned about) previously, my copies of Hope For The Future 14 had not arrived from the printers on time, but even with this potentially disastrous mistake, we still managed to enjoy ourselves thoroughly. I felt it was necessary to have something new  to flog, so I did a bunch of sketches of various comics characters (and not, as I had threatened while at my lowest ebb, a series of pics of cock and balls). People seemed to like them anyway, so much so that I struggled with the number of requests I got. The lesson we can take from this is clear: charge more money for them!

I accidentally got up an hour early due to drunk alarm setting and a poor grasp of the concept of time, but for once I was prepared and remembered to bring such essentials as a pen, some change and a bottle of vodka. I’m getting better at this conventions lark. What I haven’t mastered yet, clearly, is the art of going in for the kill, sales wise. Our fantastic brand new comic Pizza The Action, drawn by Award Winning Artist Andrew Livesey and written by me, was available for a reality shattering low price of 10p – officially the lowest priced comic at the convention (I decided). Look, I’m sure there was stuff being given out for free but this comic is actually good. I should have been screaming this at the top of my lungs every second of the weekend in order to publicise it. I would make a terrible prostitute.

The nearest I got to any cool creators was surreptitiously taking this photo of the top of Woodrow Phoenix’s head, and staring creepily at Peter Milligan from across the room. Never meet your heroes, kids. Especially if, like me, you are incapable of forming a comprehensible sentence at the best of times, let alone in front of someone whose work you admire.

There are always plenty of cosplayers at Thoughtbubble. I never tire of seeing stormtroopers. They look brilliant even if most of them are too short. At one point I passed The Joker at a urinal, which really isn’t something that happens enough in my life. Talking of which, this Harley Quinn was so perfect she could have sprung fully formed from the pencil of Bruce Timm. Mr J would be happy.

If you don’t want to cosplay yourself, you can always dress up your kids. I saw a mini Jedi and a mini Han Solo. Why doesn’t anyone dress their kid up as an ewok? Or Grievous?

Far too late on the second day I realised that we were opposite the bar prompting me to tell people Come over, buy some comics and get pissed! By this time, everyone (including us) was recovering from a hangover, but I reckon if that had occurred to me on the first day we would have sold ten times as many comics. Other ruses that we missed were procuring an endorsement from someone famous, and getting hot girls to pose for photos with our merchandise.

Contrary to my carefully constructed image of a socially inept curmudgeon, I did actually speak to some folks over the weekend. Apart from everyone who came to our table (hello), I had a chance to catch up with some old friends. Lee Carter’s a brilliant illustrator who’s currently doing some truly jaw dropping stuff for 2000AD. I knew him when he had long hair and listened to Steve Forbert. John Welding‘s a good pal and is currently doing some wonderful artwork for a new comic for kids called The Phoenix (incidentally, if you’re a fan of his work, he once drew a story I wrote in Hope For The Future issue 4). I hadn’t spoken to Terry Wiley for a while so it was good to bump into him. I say it all the time but his Sleaze Castle was a massive influence on my stuff and his new comic Verity Fair looks total aces. Also big ups to my convention chums and Twitter pals Jason Cobley (whose Frontier: The Weird Wild West collection is soon to be published in hardback) and Richard J Smith (who gave me a copy of his new opus Dino-Might, the everyday tale of a luchador who may or may not be a dinosaur). I hope I didn’t forget anyone. If I did, tell me off in the comments!

I dunno what my highlight was, but being mistaken for a student was up there. Or maybe when my new comic arrived THE VERY NEXT DAY! Argh! Ah well, there’s always next year.

More pictures over at Flickr – get taggin’!

Holy Guacamole! There’s a new issue of Hope For The Future! Check out this thrilling (and misleadingly coloured) pic -

Hannah is determined to work out what’s been going on in the series up to this point, and who can blame her? In order to find a connection between various secret societies, murders, hauntings, genetically engineered monstrosities and demonic incursions, she takes a trip to the coast and ruminates on an adventure from her early life in which she kicked it with some friendly talking animals, became a wizard and hunted monsters. Also features some guy getting abducted by aliens, but there’s a chance he’s lying about it.

It’s currently available from our friends at Indieplanet. However, you won’t be able to buy it from us at the ThoughtBubble Festival, in beautiful Leeds, on November 19-20th. Bit weird, I hear you cry. Well, the comics are currently at an unspecified location, somewhere between New Jersey and Leeds. If you see them, let me know, yeah.

We’ll still be there, in the stately surroundings of The Royal Armouries Hall with smiles on our faces and songs in our hearts. And a merciless desire to sell you comics. Not the new HFTF, obviously. I can describe the plot to you in person, but I suspect this is a poor substitute. We will, however have all three collected editions (collecting issues 1-12), issue 13 (screaming ghost monkey cover), issue 12 (sexy goth girl cover) and loads of skanky old back issues that we are selling for pennies. Bargain!

In addition we’ll also have something brand spanking new, yet heavily redolent of the past. Thought Bubble will see the debut of our new all ages, all action, all fun old school minicomic PIZZA THE ACTION! Drawn by Flying Monkey Comics’ very own Andrew Livesey it’s our attempt to revive the days of scratty photocopied black and white A5 comics at a recession busting price of 10p. You can’t afford not to buy a copy for you and all of your entourage. Check out these awesome  and totally out of context preview images!*

*complete with non sequiter, non final dialogue, for added intrigue

Of course, by “My Book” I mean “a book”. Written by someone else. However, I did draw the cover. Check this bad boy -

Why not truck on over to Amazon and pick up a copy (or maybe just to read the “About The Author” section, for more crucial information as to the identity of the enigmatic Mr Ross)? I can assure you that, based on the two and a half chapters I read of the original manuscript, it’s a proper laugh.

There’s more changes to the Star Wars movies on Blu Ray and certain parts of the internet are blowing up with outrage. Most of these tweaks are pretty inconsequential (as ever), aside from one, namely at the end of Return Of The Jedi when Darth Vader finally turns and pitches The Emperor down one of the Star Wars Universe’s many bottomless shafts, he bellows “NOOOOO!!!”, seemingly a cut and paste of the audio from the heavily memed and much hated ending of Revenge of The Sith. If you’re going to do a callback to something in a movie series that’s mostly awesome, why go for something so risible? It’s exactly the same as Chewbacca in Sith reprising his Tarzan roar from Jedi. Yeah, like that was anyone’s favourite bit.

I'm not sure about some of these changes to the Star Wars movies on Blu Ray

It’s a pretty ridiculous change, and undercuts the epic nature of the scene, where the music tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on in Vader’s head. And I got a little depressed about it when I first heard about it. This just seemed so baffling a choice that it sent my tiny nerd brain into a tailspin. I’ve never really had a problem with the changes in these movies, and ultimately, none of them change the movies or make them worse, but none of them were necessary. Adding extra stuff in is just gilding the lily, or as I believe it’s called in modern parlance “Vajazzling”.

After reading a ton of tiresome “Lucas raped my childhood by changing the movies again even though I hated every version of them for the last decade” style invective, I came across this measured and thoughtful article on GeekPlanet, and it got me thinking about choice. We have become so accustomed to having every possible choice presented to us, when limited choices come up, we tend to lose our shit. People want the original versions of those movies, and it’s a pretty reasonable and understandable point of view.

Leaving aside what you consider to be the original version (even back in 1977 there were two different sound mixes of Star Wars in circulation), or which version you grew up with (for me it was a recording of the first showing on ITV in 1981 or 82, complete with ads for Bisto and Allied Carpets, not to mention a different voice for Aunt Beru and the presence of the line “Close the blast doors”), I think people forget that we live in a privileged age of unlimited on demand entertainment. Listen carefully younglings, because this crazy old man’s gonna teach you a few things about the past.

A long time ago, in the 1970s to be precise, there was one Star Wars movie and it was called Star Wars. Darth Vader was some asthmatic dude who killed Skywalker senior, The Emperor was just some politician who got lucky and people didn’t allow droids in drinking establishments. Luke still never really had a chance with Princess Leia though, even though we thought he did. There was no video version. The only way to own a part of that movie was to get reels of “selected scenes” on super 8 film. They were silent and in black and white, but if you were willing to fork out the price of a small house you could get them with sound and in colour. I dread to think what the quality was like, but the very idea of it was so far out of my reach, it seemed an impossible fantasy.

Years later (many years later) the films were available on video. I won The Empire Strikes Back on Betamax in some competition or other. It had trailers for The Cannonball Run and All The Right Moves (featuring a pre Scientology Tom Cruise), and in the actual film you could clearly see the plains of hoth through the snowspeeders. That tape withstood several hundred plays, and that suggests to me that audio visual nerds are right when they say Beta was the superior format. Incidentally, why did they name it “Betamax”? Isn’t that automatically dooming it to runner up status in the format wars? They should have called it “Alphamax” at least.

I remember reading about the Laserdisc collection in the early 90s. Not only did it have the movies in a digital format that would never degrade (like a CD!), it had – gasp! – bonus material like documentaries, photo galleries and audio interviews on something called “alternate layers”. The very idea blew my fucking mind! But again, this was something I could only dream of, surely only millionaires owned such a thing as a laserdisc player. With actual LASERS!

Yet more changes to the Star Wars movies on Blu Ray

When it comes down to it, if I want to watch Jedi without that weird outburst from Vader, I can just watch the DVD. And if I want to watch Jedi without creepy old Hayden Christensen’s head pasted over avuncular old Sebastian Shaw’s (Star Wars FACT: Sebastian Shaw had a long term relationship with John Peel’s mother), I can watch my bootleg versions of the original trilogy (dubs of the laserdisc versions). If only I’d waited a couple of years I could’ve bought them legitimately as Lucasfilm went ahead and released pretty much the same thing in 2007, although I think mine were put together by someone whose love of those movies is a little more casual than mine, as the case of the first movie reads “The New Hope”. I have the choice to watch whichever version I choose.

Those bootlegs aren’t perfect of course – a source of fan rage is that they want HD remastered versions of the original versions of the movies, presumably unaware that once you remaster anything it can’t be considered to be “original” anything. They are however, perfectly watchable  - better than the video versions I had growing up (when the shield generator on Endor blew up in Jedi, the tracking always went mental), but the DVDs aren’t perfect, and guess what, the Blu Rays won’t be either. In a few years we’ll be watching everything in Super High Definition that will make HD look like dogshit  (or, more probably, it will be ever so slightly better if you look closely).

People will continue to bitch, loudly proclaim that they’re not buying it, and make fan edits. Fair play to them if they want to painstakingly piece together their preference as to what those movies should be (a bit like one G. Lucas seems to do every few years – everyone’s gotta have a hobby), but I have no interest in watching some ridiculous version of The Phantom Menace with both Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd edited out. I bet that makes sense, and after all the original is ridiculous enough (HEYOOO!)

Being surprised about Lucas changing his movies after the fact is like being surprised about all the porn on the internet. He’s being doing it ever since the first movie, and will keep on until he becomes a force ghost. The biggest change he ever made was making Darth Vader Luke’s father. It’s pretty clear they were unrelated in the first movie and by including that plot twist in the second (and the full explanation in the third), it changed the meaning of the first movie and the whole shape of the saga. And yet I don’t recall anyone ever complaining about that.

My heroic fundraising run is fast approaching, and, while I have every confidence that I will finish the race, I am uncertain that I will be able to do so with my dignity, not to mention my bodily functions intact. This occurred to me after I watched Emmanuel Mutai finishing the 2011 London Marathon – legend! And let’s not forget Paula Radcliffe’s performance in 2005, even though I’m sure she’d rather we did.

To this end, I have formulated a brilliant plan, ensuring I can complete the race in style. I recently watched Iron Man, and while I realise that movie is science fiction, it’s three years old, so I bet most of what is presented onscreen is now possible. My scheme involves creating a pair of robot legs that will be fitted with shock absorbers, a built in MP3 player (with skip feature enabled) and some kind of turbo boost for the final stretch. Although my experience in engineering, electronics and coming up with a cool colour scheme is limited, how hard can it be? I am almost certain that I can make it work without the mechanism trying to put one foot twenty one miles in front of the other, at any rate.

Of course, there’s a slight chance that this might not come to pass, as some of the parts I’ve ordered take a maximum of 28 days for delivery. If that happens, I will have to revert to the original plan and tackle the race au naturel. Either way, I would appreciate you sponsoring me.

EDIT: Well, I did the race and finished it in 56 mins and 12 seconds. Not bad until you find out my official finishing position was 675th. All done without the aid of robot legs because, well, that was just an idiotic joke. Sorry to ruin the illusion. Next time I’ll just run faster. However, you may, if you wish, still sponsor me.

So the new London Comic & Small Press Expo has been and gone. The attendance was fairly low, which I had put down to The Central Line being shut down due to works (because apparently The Olympics next year just has to fuck up every aspect of modern life). Hopefully if they do one next year a lot more people will come along, because it was a very enjoyable event with a friendly atmosphere. We arrived late, because it’s us, although this is also partly due to the fact that whilst waiting on a train we were told by staff to run across the platform to the opposite carriage no less than four times because they couldn’t quite decide which one was supposed to be leaving first. Fun!

We sold out of HFTF Book 1 a while ago, so we have a brand new edition printed by our friends at Print X. And a jolly good job they did too. It has a new cover, and the interior pages have been cleaned up, so all the blacks are actually black rather than a washed out fuzzy grey. Spelling errors, bad grammar and plot holes remain, so as to be as old school as possible. As always we met some lovely people, did some sketches and said “Damn, that felt like a sale!” every time anyone spoke to us but didn’t buy anything. We are nothing if not traditional. To those of you who bought stuff, thanks. Those of you who didn’t, it’s not too late, homes -

Once again I didn’t get around to taking many photos, but here are a few:

Lovely!

After selling a complete set of books to a lucky consumer he asked me to draw in his sketchbook. I was just about to doodle some half arsed nonsense when I had a look through the rest of it. He had drawings in there by some proper artists, far too numerous to list (the two that I particularly remember were Scott McCloud and Roberta Gregory). If I was to have my work alongside such illustrious company I would have to up my game. So I proceeded to draw something that ended up looking like some half arsed nonsense. I guess if I claim to be an artist, I will automatically lose my ability to draw for the rest of the day. Luckily Andrew was on hand to ink a sketch I did for someone else:

I was invited at the last minute to participate in a panel, but my memories of it are pretty hazy. I’d had a few drinks by that time, so I apologise to anyone I may have inadvertently offended (the only thing I can remember saying to the assembled throng is “I love pretentious people”. Quite what I was talking about, I have no idea).  If there had been more people in attendance I could have been crowned the idiot savant of small press comics, held aloft by a cheering crowd, and then sacrificed at this year’s Thoughtbubble in a giant wicker Garfield. Ahem.

We sold a fair bit but not tons – about normal for us, but from the sounds of it nobody exactly made a killing. What this tells me is that as a rule we don’t sell enough shit. In fact, Oliver and Andrew said that they sold more stuff when I was away from the table making an idiot of myself. I need to get to work on my pitching technique! Always Be Closing!

More reports here, here, here and uh… here. Who’s that creepily smiling halfway down the page? Oh yeah!

For some reason I blagged my head into thinking it was at the end of the month, but apparently The London Small Press Expo is next week. I need to get ready! But I will be there, so if you have the urge to meet Leeds’ most iconoclastic comic book creators (Andrew’s so unconventional that he hasn’t drawn a comic since 2006), come along. We will have the new (to London) Hope For The Future issue 13, and er… some other stuff… possibly (if it gets delivered on time). And all the usual crap. If you ask nicely we may even draw you a stupid picture of Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon BECAUSE WE CAN!

By the by, Sandman cover artist and all round genius Dave McKean will be there. I dare you to go up to him and ask for a sketch of Gen 13.

EDIT:  COOL STUFF ALERT

Yes, we now have prints

Usually, when it comes to charity, I leave it to others to actually do stuff, and I maybe bung them a couple of quid to assuage my own guilt. However, I have decided to change that and sign up for the Beverley 10k Run on Sunday 8th May. And by “decided to” I mean my brother in law “volunteered” me. Now I am uncertain whether runners who do not complete the course within a particular time are ritually killed in the manner of a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, but I’m not taking any chances. I’m getting into training, bitch! And by “training” I mean “made a playlist”

So if you want to support the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, and you have ever enjoyed any of the comics on this site (or, more probably, you have made your way here by accident while searching for “sexy teenage Saruman porn”) please sponsor me, either on My JustGiving Page, or on the Team’s Virgin Money Giving Page.

You’ll notice that on the team page, I am listed as “Dr Simon Perrins”. I feel it is my duty to inform you that, like Dr Fox, Dr Who and Dr Funkenstein, I’m not licensed to practise medicine.