Whatever Happened To The World's Fastest Man ?

Kind of broken my own little rule for this blog as this artwork hasn't been created by me ... but I did write the story .. so I'll let myself off .. artwork is in fact by Marleen Lowe.

The reason that I've put the cover image up for our ''Whatever Happened To The World's Fastest Man'' colaboration is that we've now got two reviews ... and both give it 10 (out of 10) ... I can't stop smiling :o)

Pop over to Accent UK Comics website (http://www.accentukcomics.com/) and follow the REVIEWS link from the ''Whatever Happened To The World's Fastest Man'' page (just click on the cover image on the home page) to read the full reviews.

I'll be sending a hidden link page to the full comic to a number of REVIEW websites over the coming weeks ... try to raise its profile before talking to Diamond Distribution about listing and hopefully shifting copies of it.

Right .. I'm off to smile somewhere else in the house now :o)

Three things must you know ....

Last week I saw one of the real benefits for the World Wide Web.

I'd lost contact with a good school friend some time ago and despite joining Friends Reunited I've had no luck tracking him down. OK, I guess I could have tried a few more things but at the end of the day I'd no idea if something had happened to him or whether life just got in the way but I stopped getting Christmas cards and the like some 10 years before.

Then I decided, following a suggestion from a friend at work, to try and Google him. Well .. he did have an fairly uncommon name, I knew he worked in 'electricity' and I knew he was based in the South East of England ... well ... the latter two were true 10 years ago anyway. So, armed with these three pieces of information I tried it.

On the first Google page was a link to a website from one of the major electricity suppliers ... based near Bexleyheath ... OK ... maybe I'd struck lucky.

I emailed the guy with an, 'I've lost contact with an old schoolfriend' email ... and waited.

And didn't have to wait long before I got a reponse.

I'd struck lucky .... he was OK .. his family were OK ... great news all round and a happy ending.

So ... the internet does have it's uses after all.

But with every silver lining is a cloud and now I worry about the livelihood of all those private detectives who used to pay their bills with missing persons cases ....

Hector vs Achilles

I always find I'm laughing to myself whenever I hear the name Hector used to describe a famous Greek hero. I mean ... Hector ... come on ... shouldn't a hero of Greece have a name that ends in 'us' or 'es' ? Wasn't Hector just a dog who lived with a cat and next door to a lady frog ?

I thought it was just me but then having recently watched the Troy film with Brad Pitt and Eric Bana (as Hector) I was commenting to a friend at work on the fact that I actually quite enjoyed it ... and it was he who said ... Hector ... I always think of Hector's House when I hear that name ... so ... it's not just me then ... I was never a true fan of Hector's House but watched a few episodes when I was young and I've obviously been psychologically scarred ever since ...

Depressed Dalek

Had an email through Facebook from Andrew Cheverton ... not really sure what it's all about by Andrew was encouraging us to have a go at drawing a Dalek ... so I quickly pulled this together ... now I need to work out how to respond to Andrew's posting .. with the image included ... sometimes I feel left behind by it all ... sigh.

Granada Trip ....

It's been a busy few weeks, and I didn't really see myself actually doing any drawing until the middle of June. Little did I know however that on accompanying my daughter's class (well some of it) to Granada (Spain) as the responsible male adult (well .. two out of three ain't bad) I would find myself drawing 'Falling Frogs' for Spanish 9 year olds.

The idea of the 4 day trip was to visit a Spanish school, give the British kids a chance to mix and speak some Spanish, by attending a class. So the kids were split into groups of three and an adult (typically a teacher) would then accompany the group and spend the day with them in the class with the Spanish teacher and 30 odd Spanish children. I accompanied three of ours as we were taken into a Year 3 class.

All was going pretty well until they started showing me their English work books. I commented on how good they looked and handed them back after flicking through and picking out the odd word or image in each for special mention. After a while one of the kids pointed out that the teacher from the previous visit had written something and drawn a little rose on the page. It looked like she expected the same from me. Hmmm ... 'Would you like me to draw in your book ?', I asked (in English I'm afraid) .. to which the girl, with a very serious little expression, nodded.

OK ... what to draw ? ... something that I could do standing up .. with school pencils ... Ah .. 'The Falling Frog'. I set to work ... and after about 5 minutes had a decent little drawing for her with the words 'A falling frog' written under it. She seemed pretty pleased and went back to her desk ... I sat in a chair to one side and started looking at the posters etc on the walls ...

A short while later another girl come along with her book and said something about 'rana' which my biology days informed me was probably 'frog', so I set to work in her book. Half way through her little sketch I looked up to check it was what she wanted and was startled to see pretty much the entire class stood in a queue behind her. All with their English work books to the ready .. this must be what it feels like to be a proper artist at a comic convention. Well ... I got the rest to return to their desks, so I wouldn't get in trouble from their teacher and then went around after finishing the drawing I was working on. As I finished each one another child would rush over to get their's done .... I must have drawn about 20 falling frogs in all.

I was tempted to change the drawing to a Robot half way through, but was worried that I much get some of them coming back for that too.

I've no idea what their teacher made of it all ... I guess she thinks all Brits are a little strange now. Probably not too far from the truth :o)

Sat Nav Hal.

This weekend I helped out at a Scout Camp. It seemed only fair that I chip in as my daughter is a member and gets a lot from these weekends camping out, climbing walls and all sorts of other activities. Scout Camps however, are notoriously hard to find. I guess if you can't find the camp then you don't deserve to be a scout ... anyway ... I was never a scout and so I don't have an 'orienteering' badge but what I do have is a Sat Nav.

The Sat Nav didn't let me down and where other people had ended up getting lost down single car width, pot hole ridden, tracks I got there without much of a problem ... OK ... we did have to turn around once or twice ... but no scratches were collected and no parts of my car now litter the country lanes outside Stockport.

Coming home however I had one of those moments when something happens and your mind is taken to a completely different situation. I had decided to try to switch my Sat Nav off ... it had taken me back to known territory, so although not quite home I now knew the way.

It didn't want to be switched off however and kept trying to take me to another motorway. I half expected it to start speaking in HAL's voice from 2001 - A Space Odyssey.

'What do you think you are doing Dave ?'

'I'm switching you off ... I know where I am now'.

'I'm not going to let you do that Dave'.

.. anyway ... I didn't want to stop the car and work out how I could be pushing the wrong button ... there is actually only one, and if it was anything like the film then it would have tried to stop me anyway ... so I listened to it all the way home ... eventually it realised that I wasn't going to go back to a motorway and started giving me the correct directions.

It did get me wondering though ... if we did have to persuade all of our little helpful gadgets to be helpful ... if their programming did fail .. or .. rewrite itself ... we do tend to rely on these things a little too much. A few generations down the track our decendents will be all the more dependent ... and maybe all the more at risk.

The Day The Earth Stood Still .... again.

Back in 1951 Robert Wise made the inspired The Day The Earth Stood Still. It had it all. Iconic robot Gort, strange almost-but-not-quite human Klatu and a message that played to the fears of the time in which it was made. Wonderful.

So why of why did they decide to remake it in 2009 ? I've read nothing good about the new version. I refuse to give any of my hard earned cash to support this sort of thing. There are a hell of a lot of good books out there just crying to be turned into a movie, so why not do one of those ?

I didn't see this at the cinema and now it's come out on DVD I've decided to give that a miss too ... maybe I'll be tempted when it's in the £2 bin.