Waffle

I woke up this morning with a headache. I'm trying to fight it with paracetamol and coffee (my coffee consumption has slowly crept back to the level it was before I tried to quit, so having gone a whole weekend without it resulted in renewed withdrawal symptoms) but it's taking me some time to get the brain into gear again.
I want to draw five Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan episodes this week, write a new episode of Floor and update my financial records, so I could have used a better start to the week than I have had. If I spend the day posting new items to the blog, that means I won't have got myself in a fit shape to write and draw — but it's better than spending the day in bed with a splitting headache.

Hearing about the genocide in Darfur has always made me despair. What with the UN hidebound and toothless, the EU unwilling to even use the G-word and the US and its most powerful allies having their hands full in Iraq (would that they had spared their guns for Sudan, a continuing hotspot of islamic fundamentalism, religous/ethnic warfare and ethnic cleansing whose leadership is thick as thieves with Osama Bin Laden), it really looks like the world is just going to let the killing happen. Johann Hari, looking at corporate complicity in the genocide, argues that there is at least one thing that citizens and organisations can do: force the corporations that provide Sudan with the means to kill its people to divest from Sudan. This may seem over-optimistic, but he notes that it has worked before:

...the only group that has effectively lobbied against the genocidal regime in Khartoum has been the red-state Christian evangelicals in the US. They lobbied hard for an oil embargo against Sudan, so US dollars were not used to slaughter their fellow Christians. Uber-moralistic religion clashed with raw amoral markets, and - incredibly - the Bush administration sided with the evangelicals against the oil companies. As a result, since 2000, no US oil company has been allowed to operate within Sudan, to their fury. Peace [in that area, at least —RD] has finally prevailed. This shows what can happen when the Sudanese government is subject to serious economic penalties for its crimes.

The US is lobbying hard for the UN to impose similar international oil sanctions to stop the genocide in Darfur. (The evangelicals are much less worried about slaughtered Muslims, but they believe the chaos might spill over into the south). This is being flatly opposed by China - which receives a quarter of its oil supplies from Sudan - and Russia. These two authoritarian governments are vandalising any attempt to deal with this genocide through the United Nations.

It seems nobody is prepared to choke off the corporate fuel for the holocaust in Darfur....So what do we do - lie back and watch the first genocide of the 21st century scythe through Darfur unhindered?

There is an alternative. Professor Eric Reeves is an expert on the murder of black Darfurians. He explains: "The only way to stop this genocide now is for a mass campaign to force multinationals to disinvest from Sudan. During the apartheid era in South Africa, the divestment movement was an immensely powerful force in breaking down this system of racial discrimination. We can do the same today."

Through our pensions plans, our universities and our stock portfolios, we in Europe own most of the companies providing the hard cash for this genocide. If our governments fail to act to end genocide, the responsibility falls to us. Go to www.divestsudan.org to find out how, practically, we can act to deprive the Janjaweed militias of money and arms, just as we throttled apartheid.

The downside to this approach is that, as people remember from the end days of Apartheid, it takes a long time, during which the killing will continue. But if there's no hope of defeating the Sudanese dictatorship through military means or official sanctions, it's up to ordinary citizens to do what we can.

I don't read superhero comics as a rule (I've been looking at a few Batman titles provided by a studio-mate, because he's a visually and psychologically appealing character when done right — but even in my studio-mate's selection he's rarely ever done right. Coincidentally, Alexander Danner asked about Batman on the Modern Tales mailing list just as I had finally broken down and asked my studio mate for some of the best Batbooks), but I'm sure one or two readers of/contributors to this blog will be interested in reading this review of The Mighty Thor #80-85 at The Hurting (scroll down to read the review). Thor is another potentially appealing character who's rarely done right. Hell, any Norse God would be a good superhero character, as would many Greek, Celtic, Egyptian or Elder gods. And it looks like the series's current writer knows it:

Thor is probably the hardest character out of the classic Marvel pantheon to do well. Just look at how many mediocre-to-bad Thor comics have been published in the many decades since Kirby left Marvel. Walt Simonson’s run is almost twenty years old. I am happy to report that Michael Avon Oeming and Andrea DiVito have produced the best Thor story since Simonson left the book all those years ago.

The key to their success has been a whole-hearted embrace of the icky mythological elements that compose the character’s backbone. Instead of playing up the superhero aspect, they chose to accentuate the character’s cosmic fantasy elements. That, as much as anything, grants the character a semblance of dignity that many of his peers could never hope to evoke. Sure, most of the fantasy elements in Thor are silly on the face of them, just as with the superhero elements – but when done well, they carry the imprimatur of Kirby’s indefinable cosmic grandeur as well as the source myths’ historical pedigree. Tellingly, this story stays closer to the actual myths than most Marvel interpretations of myth, including some of the gruesome depictions of Odin’s trials and death.

Via Father of the Earth-Pig Born:
Something Fell is a long series of reviews/critiques/summaries of Cerebus starting with book 1 and slogging through all the books through to the end. Lacking in critical depth, but full of detail, and good enough to serve as a kind of Cliff Notes for those of you who'd rather skip the Torah exegesis.

Blogging has been light lately because I've been trying to get ahead on ROCR again while at the same time drawing a page of Floor, the sixth of the fourth season. Drawing Floor always takes me a lot of time because it requires more careful work than ROCR does.
Oh, and teaching. I did a two-hour workshop on Wednesday, and was pretty useless the rest of the day. I had some paperwork to fill in, but even that was too hard in the state I was in, so I got a deadline extension.

The Floor page turned out rather nicely, though. Easy on the eye without being dull. There's a strong Robert van der Kroft influence in how I draw the buildings in those two panels, and in the poses and proportions of the characters.

Funny how a drum solo could seem fleeting in 1970. Funnier still how time flies except when you're listening to that same drum solo 34 years later.

--Ian Anderson, in the sleeve notes to Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. I won't be buying this one until it becomes a lot cheaper, but I thought I'd let the Tullies in my readership know it's out.

Eric Burns of the fantastic Websnark posts a long and devastating critique of the recent storylines in General Protection Fault which raises some concerns that I also have about my own comic, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Pinpointing the start of what he sees as GPF's decline, he writes of the storylines "The Flood" (which I read at the time) and "Surreptitious Machinations" (which I'm afraid I still haven't read):

(more...)

A KRO contest picking the greatest Dutchman ever returned Pim Fortuyn yesterday, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the not completely stupid. But wait! There were some problems with the phone lines, and apparently a recount including late-arriving votes has returned William of Orange (the first, not the guy who married the English chick) instead, Radio 1 reports.
We'll hear more tomorrow, I'm sure. We're a bit short on Important Issues to Go Into a Murderous Rage About lately.
For what it's worth, though, the votes counted before the end of the final TV show make up the official results. Those gave Fortuyn 115,000 votes to William's 111,000 - a very meager mandate. The unofficial count is William 161,000 - Fortuyn 130,000.

For comparison: in similar contests, the British picked Winston Churchill and the Germans Konrad Adenauer. Surely those will have been the subject of heated debate, but they do indicate that our neighbours haven't taken leave of their senses yet.

For the next two weeks or so, Dangerous and Fluffy goes bi-weekly, updating both Monday and Friday with big difficult comics. In other news, Timmerryn is godly. Enjoy!

Judging from the responses in the forum and on IRC, the good Professor Rásdondr and the stories he's tellin' as part of his testimony are quite popular! Myself, I'm in two minds about him. He's fun to write, his stories come out funny, but writing him makes me feel a bit hypocritical: I've repeatedly decried the use of the Mad Scientist meme on this blog, and while Rásdondr doesn't in fact Meddle With Things Man Was Not Meant To Know (indeed I imagine him as being a well-respected authority in his field and initially wrote in some more stuff about him working in such important areas as the Heron Improvement and Breeding Program, before scrapping it due to space considerations), he's clearly daft as a broom in his own unique way. I apologise; mad scientist characters are just too much fun to write!
So now one reader in the forum is asking for more of him, and for a look at his half-elven assistants. The bad news here is that it's all I can do to keep this monstrosity of a story from eating me alive already, and the only way I can allow any deviations from the general outline is if I have panels to fill on a page before an obvious cliffhanger or punchline.
Not only that but I am now actively looking for things to cut from the existing archives. I am also looking for things to insert (a good overview of the city between the first two chapters would improve the story's sense of location tremendously) and things to tweak (bits of dialogue that are misspelled, badly lettered word balloons, visual continuity details that need to be fixed, drawings that are just plain ugly), but I now think that the existing material can do with some tightening. I'm specifically thinking of the scenes in the jail involving Spig, Bonfire and Clydesdale - those are moderately funny but were primarily added to interrupt the Jodoque/Green Knight sequences, in the hope that that would improve the pacing and build suspense in serialisation. Right now, I don't think they were succesful at that.
Of course, one or two moderately important things happened during those scenes, and it remains to be seen whether the story as a whole can do without those.