Are you prepared?

Are you prepared for the Coming of the Red Hood? Avatar of Edenax, one of the Seven Dragons of Virtue, spirit of cleanliness. Have you been clean and tidy? If so you might get a nice surprise under your bed! If not, a nasty surprise in your bed awaits you.

The Missionary Page 11

The Missionary Page 10

The Missionary Page 9

Yes, we're going to Coleridge via Frankie

The Missionary Page 8

Lockpicking skills are always handy.

The Missionary Page 7

What is the correct ettiquette?

The Missionary Page 6

Now see what you have gone and done...

It's always someone else to blame.

The Missionary Page 5

Page 5 and the first nudity of this story, I guess that's the whole decompressed storytelling thing. 

The Missionary Page 4

The Missionary Page 3

The Missionary Page 2

The Missionary Page 1

The first page of the new series, finally done.  23 more to go.  I'm going to try to stick to a page per week,  but let's see....

Professor Mancheeks, bathing

That scandalous fellow, never one to miss an opportunity to purloin one's garments, seems to have also seized up my iconograph and taken this image.

El Serpiente and Innocent

Three months I spent in that wretched jungle, thinking myself the only civilised being on this world with only a savage boy for companionship. It came as something of a shock to realise that Venus was teeming with visitors, from our world and from others. The fellow who calls himself El Serpiente sounds to be a Spaniard or perhaps from the New World colonies. He has thrown his lot in with the cruel commanders of the Martian Empire and one shudders to imagine what diabolical debaucheries occur on their flying saucers. But one is forced to imagine nonetheless.

As for that strange fellow he travels with... He calls himself 'Innocent' and claims to be the reincarnation of a pope, both of which claims are equally preposterous. He seems to have suffered some great indignities at the hands of the Martians but, worse, seems to have thrived in that environment of cruelty and domination.

From Professor Mancheeks' Almanac of the Astonishing.

The Venusians

When I beheld my first Venusian it was in silhouette, against the morning sun and I wondered perhaps if my day of judgement had come. At narrow range their reptilian features became clear and I realised my angelic visitor was more profane and bestial in truth. They possess a kind of savage intelligence and are fine crafters of tools and surprisingly elegant fabrics made of native fibres that withstand the harsh conditions on this wretched world.

In a crude inversion of civilised society it is the women who go off to war with other tribes, leaving the men to raise the eggs and fledglings and also to tend and decorate the homes. The harpy women are seldom present, and spend most of their lives on flying korsair ships, raiding and plundering. In the absence of natural families, the men share a certain companionship among themselves. It is my duty as a scientist to investigate these strange rituals of intimacy that this exotic culture shares between menfolk. In the name of science.

From Professor Mancheeks' Alamanac of the Astonishing.

The Martians

There is some evidence that this race of colonists and explorers have visited our own Earth in the past and I can imagine what some poor medieval yokel made of them. While certainly intrepid and scientifically advanced, they are a rough people who remind me all too much of our neighbours on the continent. They have the warlike nature of the Prussians, the craftiness of the Dutch, the greediness of the Swiss, the viciousness of the Sicilians, the libido of the French and the rampant hairiness of the Spanish. Venus seems drawn to them, as a fly toward honey, which cultivates much disappointment in him.

From Professor Mancheeks' Alamanac of the Astonishing.

Where is the Elmore Leonard of porn?

I've not been posting much recently as I have been writing. The next installment of Crooked Sabre is a full comic length story and I've been trying to concentrate on writing, as odd as that might seem. Criticising the plot of pornography is trite, but it is also a bit weak to pretend that storytelling is irrelevant and porn must always just fall back on cliches. Thinking about this got me thinking about Elmore Leonard

Leonard's ear for cracking dialogue transformed many a dull and cliched scene, first in westerns and then in crime fiction. He can take a dull, by the numbers gunfight (usually with the kind of “you're going down”, “you'll never take me alive” nonsense) and turn it into a witty exchange of quips which, crucially, grounds us in a feeling of reality and tells us something about the characters. Of course Quentin Tarantino famously 'borrowed' this style in Pulp Fiction, but his take was less character oriented and more about pop culture references, but again this style can disrupt our expectations, make us see a scene we've seen a hundred times in a different light.

Happy belated Valentines to all, except the Australian government

A heartfelt if extremely late Valentines wishes to you all.

I've been struggling with the new chapter of Crooked Sabre, and working on this picture I've figured out why.  Chapter 4 is about Raul, a young missionary who comes to the land of the Ix seeking converts, but you can guess what happens instead.

My problem is this.  Raul is young, probably late teens early 20s, definately over the age of consent (for what that means in a fantasy medieval world!!) but Australia's censorship laws are so fucked, that if someone viewing it even THINKS he's under 18, it is a criminal offence.

Yes I know, he is a drawing, he doesn't actually have an age...

They've even ruled that small breasts in hetero porn amount to child porn.  So you can see how hard it is to draw a guy who is young and substantially smaller than the other characters (cos they're not human, duh) and not have some censorship fuckwit somewhere decide this is really some kind of child porn.   And even with the best arguments in the world, you aren't going to get a fair trial once you've been charged.  

So yeah, I'm feeling pretty blocked about the next chapter.