20th Century Fox have a rich and growing ability to give their genre films bad and excessively complex titles. They couldn’t call the second Alien vs Predator movie Alien vs Predator 2. How could they, when they could call it Aliens vs Predator: Requiem? One title says “sequel to a WWE match masquerading as a movie”, whereas the other says “class, and forethought, and most of all dignity - we didn’t just pull the word ‘requiem’ out of a hat, you know - well we did, but it was a smart hat with big damn words”.

This comic drawn after watching: Eyes Wide Shut.

This comic drawn while watching: Timeline.

Many thanks are due to the fabulous Russell B. Farr for the loan of a scanner. A tip for anyone starting their own webcomic: don’t start it up and then quit the job that had a scanner you could use at the same time. It results in not being able to upload a strip for over a week. If you’re glad I’m back and you want to express some gratitude, you could do worse than check out Ticonderoga Online and read the latest issue.

This isn’t the last of Bernard from Legal. Due to popular demand (well, OK, Scot) he will return in due course to extract his revenge.

The other big Peter Jackson-related news this week is that his production company Wingnut Films have purchased screen rights to Naomi Novik’s increasingly popular Temeraire novels - which are about the Napoleonic Wars only with dragons. These could be potentially very cool, if about 45 minutes too long each, which seems to be the problem with Peter Jackson’s films of late. He’s now joining that special elite group of directors too successful for any producer to dare edit. After all, would you want to be the guy who forced the Oscar-winner to cut half an hour from his film and then have it fail at the box office? If that happened, you know that the senior execs aren’t going to blame the guy with the Oscar in his hand who wanted his movie to be 30 minutes longer. It’s a syndrome that’s affected Jackson pretty badly, and Steven Spielberg as well, not to mention authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling.

Editing is important. It’s a good form of quality control. If someone was editing this comic, the first joke might have taken a little bit less than seven strips to complete. The next installment ends the saga of Bernard from Legal. For now, anyway. Knowing my obsessive love for continuity, I can’t guarantee he’ll stay away forever.
This comic drawn while watching: The West Wing, “Celestial Navigation”

I really hope people don’t do that again today, as some kind of “five years on” memorial action. I don’t think that’s what the victims of 9/11 deserve. I don’t think they deserve partisan television propoganda like the currently-airing The Road to 9/11 either. I think the victims deserve some questions, and some people bold enough to ask them loud enough and forcefully enough that people will actually calm down and listen. Why did this happen? What did we learn? What are we doing to do, asides from blowing up half the Middle East and disenfranchising every Islamic citizen of the developed and developing worlds, to make this world a better place?

We live in a state of fear. We’re trying to fight a “war on terror”. The Bush administration is vocally comparing anyone who argues against their rhetoric to Nazi sympathisers. And as anyone who’s spent any time on an internet news group knows, the first person to mention the Nazis loses the argument.

What a group of terrorists did on September 11 2001 was horrific, callous and evil. What our governments have done since has let those terrorists win. We can keep fighting our “war on terror” for as long as we want, but we lost the battle the moment we started to terrify our own citizens.

Today’s comic drawn while watching: The West Wing, “He Shall, From Time to Time…”

The Shield and Boomtown never gained much popularity in Australia. Boomtown didn’t get much popularity anywhere, and got cancelled six episodes into its second season. The Shield is a dirty, sleazy, violent police drama about a corrupt anti-gang taskforce in South Central LA. It’s not a nice show by any means, and its protagonist would be the villain in anyone else’s series, but a combination of great scripts, great actors and very NYPD Blue-esque camerawork makes it a winner for me.

But to be honest, the gem of the three is Boomtown. It only lasted a year and a bit, but there is some amazing television in those 30 episodes. It’s ostensibly a police drama as well, but each episode focuses on the District Attorney’s office too, and the paramedics, and even the criminals and the victims. Most importantly, the episodes aren’t played out in a linear fashion. The show jumps back and forth in time, revealing crucial plot points and then flicking back two hours to explain how and why such things happened. It’s a clever show, less visually slick than 24 or The Shield but better written and better acted than both of them. Plus it feels like it’s set in a real Los Angeles: not stylised and pretty like 24, and not the grimy warzone depicted in The Shield. You can get all three series on DVD, although if you want The Shield beyond its second season or Boomtown in any season you’re going to have to go to a Region 1 online seller.

Three great TV shows about Los Angeles. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about them this week, but I have - and they’re bloody brilliant.

Today’s comic drawn while watching: V for Vendetta

Australia took a tremendous blow to popular culture today with the deaths of television presenter Steve Irwin and children’s author Colin Thiele. Irwin I’ve been talking about all day - both online and off - and while I’m slightly ambivalent about his passing, it’s Thiele I’ve actually been quite sad about. The author of 80 novels, including Australian classics Storm Boy and Blue Fin, Thiele left an immeasurable imprint on the youth of many reading Australians. He was 85 years old, which is an age when death no longer quite seems so unfair or so tragic, but he was a major, wonderfully talented author.

Plus he was a South Australian, like me. I’d dedicate today’s strip to him, except he was worth more than a single installment of a cheap-gag webcomic.

Some people tell you that ‘you should never go back’. They suggest that revisiting childhood favourites is only going to lead to disappointment and disillusion. I can’t ever resist the temptation. I have to know. Sometimes an illusion is shattered - it turns out that Filmation’s Masters of the Universe cartoon really was a crass attempt to sell 10 year-old boys action figures - but sometimes a childhood favourite can become an adult one too. The 1980 Astroboy’s a good example of that. It’s still a classy show, and still eminently watchable a quarter-century later.

Starchaser turned out to be, well, odd. It’s a Star Wars pastiche, of course - what 1980s sci-fi cartoon wasn’t on some level? It boasts some surprisingly solid animation as well, and moves along at a fairly entertainment pace. What struck me as so weird was how adult some of the dialogue and innuendo was. It was weird that what I remembered as a kids-only cartoon had sexual innuendo at all. Apparently the film was originally released in cinemas as the first-ever 3D animated feature, but I’ve only ever seen the 2D version. Just as well - 3D cinema irritates me intensely.

I kind of wish I had a definitive statement to make about all of this. If you never saw Starchaser as a kid, I honestly don’t know if it’s worth your tracking it down now. If you did see it, you might be somewhat surprised. Better yet, why not track down a childhood favourite of your own. Rip off the band-aid and see if it’s good or not.
Today’s comic drawn while watching: Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

When I came to writing the first strip, I thought long and hard about how I was going to introduce the Executive Bunnies. Then I realised I didn’t need to. They’re pretty simple: they are three rabbits. They are powerful studio executives. That’s pretty much all that there is to them. The tall, skinny one is Perky. The rotund one is Binky. The one with the bent ear is Flopsy.

The Executive Bunnies first appeared as a back-up strip in The Angriest Video Store Clerk in the World, which is what we old folks like to refer to as a ‘print comic’. You know - the kind you have to read off paper. When I decided to make the plunge into doing my own webcomic, I thought long and hard about simply creating an online version of the Video Store Clerk himself. He’s served me well, starring in his own award-winning comic for six years, headling two plays and heading up an ultimately unsuccessful television pilot for Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (or SBS). In the end, the appeal of the Bunnies was too strong to ignore.

I mean, let’s be honest with each other. You’ve seen the same Hollywood movies that I have. You’ve asked yourself the same questions: how the hell did this get made? Who let a script this bad get into production? Why is actor A a major star while actor B struggles in obscurity? Wouldn’t it all be more understandable if the studios actually were run by idiot rabbits? Wouldn’t it make sense?

I know that these things are supposed to run to an advertised schedule - every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, or every Sunday, or something - right now I have no idea what that schedule will be. It’s all an intriguing mystery that will hopefully settle down sooner rather than later.

That’s it - enjoy it or don’t. Spread the word or don’t. Leave a comment. Ignore the rough edges and unfinished bits on the site - I wanted to get things up and rolling as quickly as possible, and I’ll sort out the rest of the place as I go.

Today’s comic drawn while watching: True Lies