The Edge Of Madness

So as I said I've got about the first 1100 issues of 2000AD, the comic.

This is going to be one of those running reviews as I read through them. It started in Feb 1977, and came out at the rate of 1 per week.

I remember reading a couple as a kid, and the only comic I ever regularly bought was Best of 2000AD Monthly, which was a collection of the stories from the weekly comic.

To start with, the major stories so far are Invasion, Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Mach 1, Flesh, and Judge Dredd.

One of the annoying things is that there is no mention on each seperate story as to Artist & Writer. Annoying.

Invasion is a story set in Britain in 1999 (22 years in the future). England has been invaded by a fictional Asian country (where all the members are actually white Europeans). England lost in 48 hours, and one man, a former lorry driver is the head of the resistance. He starts off with a double barrel shotgun, before moving onto a pump action shotgun. And yep, he mows down wave upon wave of Volgan invaders. Pure pulp, but with some interesting bits. One funny bit was a small background image of a sign talking about the Channel Tunnel. This was a few years before it was offically even planned out, which was interesting. But the worst part of this story is the main character, a former lorry driver is now an unbeatable resistance fighter, with reflexes of a snake.

Dan Dare is crap. But the artwork is brilliant. And I recongnised it as Belardinelli, who later did the artwork to one of my favourite series, Ace Truck Co. More on that in the coming months when I get to it. Dan Dare is pretty much a Buck Rogers type comic.

Harlem Heroes is interesting. It's about a type of basket ball they play with jetpacks. Not brilliant, but not crap.

Mach 1 is the worst strip I have ever read. I'm having to force myself to read it. It suffers badly from superman syndrome. The main character is a sort of super secret agent, that has been augmented by biotech. As such he is 50 times faster than any man, almost indestructible, and has a computer in his head working out possible plans of attack. No empathy at all for a character with no enemies.

Flesh is set in the future and the past. And is fairly interesting. 23rd century and they've got time travel. So they've got back in time to harvest Dinosaurs for meat. Pretty cool, it's a western style set in the past. And they kill off lots of characters.

Finally Judge Dredd, who appeared in the second issue. What can I say? I've never been a huge Judge Dredd fan, but the vision described here is brilliant. After one issue you've got a sense of the size of the city, the problems facing the judges, and what a judge can and can't do. And while Judge Dredd is almost a superman, he's not. He misses, he makes mistakes, he collapses from exhaustion.

What's also interesting is reading the letters page. There was an interesting letter there talking about environmental damage especially to the ozone layer, and how we had to start being green....and this was in 1977.

I'm going through them at the rate of about 1 every 20 minutes or so, so don't expect a speedy review. The stories I'm looking forward to coming across are Nemesis the Warlock, Ace Trucking Co, Strontium Dog, Sam Slade Robo Hunter & ABC Warriors. I'll prob post up some short reviews as I go through story arcs.

I have a list of things to buy when I'm rich. It's a fairly short list actually.

• An original Simon Bisley Painting - around £1000-2000. He's a comic artist, and the first time I read Slaine, the Horned God, my jaw hit the ground at his artwork. And the artwork in Batman vs Judge Dredd was also one of my favourites.
• An original Larry Elmore painting. He was one of the major artist for the Dragonlance series, and his painting "Death of Sturm" is still one of my favourites
• A Shadow over Mystara arcade cabinet. Loved that game

Anyway, I was browsing through some of Simon Bisley's artwork, came across a blog post talking about 2000AD, and how the bloke had bought a complete collection on Ebay and was reading through them all. So I decided to take a look on ebay.

And I found out you can actually commision a painting of your choice by Simon Bisley. Now that is damn cool.

To get the first 800 odd issues, it was only around £250. Bargain. So I bought it. Now of course the downside is that I had to drive 3 hours to pick them up....and they weighed 55kg, but hey, pretty cool.

I haven't started going through them yet, stage 1 was to put them all in order. Expect a blog post later when I start reading them.

I'm a member of a car hire club, so it's pretty easy to get a car for a couple of hours. This was the 3rd time I've driven a manual car. I'm actually getting better, only stalled twice. Though I did have a tendency on the highway to drive in 4th all the way, as I wasn't confident about changing through gears to overtake. And Lana had some white knuckle fun whenever I was merging, as I tended to really gun it

Got to the blokes house, good bloke. Had 3 dogs, all rescued from a shelter. Some of those fuckers who dump dogs are bastards. He was telling us about how one was a breeding dog, pedigree, who got dumped as it had one funny coloured eye. And another was pretty badly beaten as a puppy and as such didn't like tall men. As soon as I sat down, the dog totally calmed down.

On the way there, we had seen a bunch of signs for a safari. And with all the time in the world, decided to try and find one. Stopped off for a pee break, and low and behold there was a brochure advertising the safari. West Midlands Safari Park. It was about 3pm, little unsure of when it shut, tried calling, couldn't get through. Decided to head down on the offchance. The following is dictated to me by Lana, as she enjoyed it much more than me

"I thought I was very clever finding this place by following the map, and working out how to get there. But it turned out that Brad wasn't listening to me and pretending that his GPS couldn't find the place. He said he did it to keep me occupied so I didn't bug him. I think he just likes annoying me.

Got there around 5 and thought it was shut. It was open until 10pm, and we only had to pay half price. This was because of the Summer August school holidays late opening times.

At this place you get to drive around and look around at the animals from the car. Most of the animals are just wandering around. Brad was very happy with that as he is too lazy to walk most of the time. You aren't allowed to get out of the car, and for the non aggresive animals you can keep the windows open.

As soon as we drove through the gate I saw a rhinoceros as it was the biggest thing there. I was very excited. Turns out we could buy food to feed the animals, but we didn't realise earlier.

A zebra scared me by sticking his head through the window looking for food. It was very cool, I patted his nose, it was dry.

Saw some wolves. Tasmanian white wallabies. White tigers. Cheetahs. Lions.

There was only one male lion for a bunch of females. Had to keep windows shut for those ones.

The coolest animals there were the wild African dogs. They looked very pretty with big elephant ears, and bright orange black coats. They were very sneaky. A pack of them surrounded a car in front of us, while a couple of them stood in front so it wouldn't drive off. The rest of them pulled off the mudguard and ran off. The guy wasn't happy, but the dogs were. They were playing with it as we drove off.

One of them stood just outside our window, and I really wanted to touch him. But I didn't.

And a reindeer came to our window and licked my hand twice. It wasn't a reindeer, it was a deer, some kind of deer.

Then there were about 5 giraffes. There was a big queue to see them. The car in front of us had a sunroof open, so the giraffe stuck his head through the roof and they feed them food. Wish we had some food to feed them. Giraffes are my favourite animals, so I wanted one to come up to my window so I could pet him. Instead one came to Brad's window and Brad got to pet his nose. Brad said he was very bristly. I wasn't happy as I wanted to pet the giraffe as well.

So when a giraffe walked by, I patted his leg. He got scared and jumped and almost knocked the mirror off the car. And the woman yelled through a megafone at me not to touch the giraffes legs.

And the rhino's scared me, because if they charge at the car, then they could easily turn it over, as they were twice the size of the car which was pretty cool.

After driving through the park and looking at the animals, we went to see all the rides and games they had in the other part of the park. Saw some reptiles and poisonous frogs which looked bright and interesting.

Tried to win a soft toy by throwing a ball into some cups. Sucked so much, the girl took pity on me and gave me 5 extra throws. Still only won a small one.

Saw the sea lion show, which was cool. Only the sea lions refused to jump or do tricks in the water which was funny. One of them was very fat and looked like a worm. He was doing funny tricks on the ground.

It was very cool and exciting. Wish I could have a pet giraffe on my farm."

Yeah, the park was pretty cool. Road was wide enough so two cars could pass by each other, so no real waiting. And due to the fact we went pretty late, it was fairly empty.

So for a random side track on a road trip, good fun. I only wish there were monkeys. After doing some searching found another safari that has monkeys. They do say the monkeys just sit on the car jerking off though, which will be hilarious

Here's some pics taken on my phone, slightly bad unfortunately. As I said, unplanned trip, make do with what you got

Safari Pics

I recently upgraded my blog to the latest version of b2evolution. Mainly to crack down on the amount of spam I've been getting in comments.

And it worked, and the new version is damn sweet.

One downside is that the link on the side which used to say recent search results to my blog is gone. It's available within the management pages, so when I get 5, I'll move that page to the public area.

Anyway, I'll attempt to answer a few of the questions that people have been asking. These are all search queries that have landed the user here.

GOD WEARS A T-SHIRT

He's God, why the hell is he going to be wearing a t-shirt for. And what would it say? I'm with stupid and point at you?

cabin crew fuck in the flight

Man, I don't want to know what airline you've been flying with.

how come guys take off their shirts when they are about to fight?

Because wrestling with another guy is pretty damn homo erotic. And to give you a good show. And if you've watched two guys wrestling that means you're gay. Seriously.

how to built t shirt gun

Man, don't like the government hear about that. We'll all be flying naked soon.

wearing a shirt over a t shirt

That's fairly simple. But the best way is to wear a collared shirt over a collared shirt. The more collared shirts you're wearing the cooler you are. 7 is about right.

pictures of tom hanks without shirt

Hire Castaway. He's got no shirt on there.

turn around time for hsmp

I can answer that one. Since they changed the rules and the court case, it's backed up months.

But if you're in IT and specifically Java, don't bother coming. (This is mainly so my rate remains high )

svetlana kortchik

It's depressing Lana gets more searches for her name than mine. And the sad bit is no-one ever asks any questions about her. Ask some questions, I'm happy to answer them for you.

crossdressing

Wax. That's all I'm saying, wax.

free foxtel

Employees get free foxtel. So go marry one. That's what I did.

revenge "parking inspector"

Here's the best revenge. Don't park like an asshole. And half a metre around my bike please.

+crossdressing +"brad jayakody"

Now this just freaked me out. Who the fuck is trying to find pictures of me cross dressing? And more importantly why? (I suspect Kham is reponsible for this one)

get paid to jerking off at sperm banks

Uni students since the dawn of time have all looked into this. In the UK & Australia you don't get paid. But if you read through a lesbian scene magazine, there's normally guys advertising their sperm for lesbian couples. Don't get your hopes up, it's all turkey baster based, and unless you want to get stung for child support, you're going to have to arrange it through a sperm bank.

wheres my f800gs

In my driveaway. Damn, it's a good bike. Or there's a huge backlog in the factory.

i fucked your mum

And I assfucked yours.

How to move a big screen TV +up +stairs

Carry it?

And finally my favourite

how to fuck a woman

Alcohol. Solves all problems. How I landed my wife.

Only recently I watched "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch. Video is below. Great video, goes for an hour, but trust me it's worth it.

Got me thinking about what my childhood dreams were. Think this is the list I had.

• Be a space fighter pilot. Like in "Wing Commander" the game. Or from the movie "Last Starfighter".
• Get out of school.
• Be a swordfighter.
• Play the flute. This is not an euphemism.
• Write a computer game.
• Ride a motorbike.
• Have some money.
• Write a novel.

We'll start with the easy ones first.

Have some money

While not poor as a kid, money was fairly tight. Now this one is well and truly ticked. Not enough cash in the bank for a life of luxury, but we've got enough hard cash put away, that if we didn't work for quiet a few years, we'd be okay.

Ride a motorbike

Read through the blog, this was well and truly ticked.

Get out of school

School bored me silly. Slight bit of arrogance in the next paragraph, but bugger it. I'm fairly intelligent, and for the most part school bored me rotten. Also I'm damn lazy. My grades were always good, but not great. And the reason for this is I normally could work out what was going on then and there, so I never bothered studding.

99% of the time I never bothered to do any homework, only rarely when it looked interesting. And the few times I got called up about it I'd either bluff my way through, or once twice get detention. And for exams, half the time I'd do the week before cram, and once or twice, I'd rock up to the exam and wing it. And this was without me paying much attention during the school day. I'd either spend most of the lesson time chatting, or reading a novel.

Be a swordfighter.

Borderline ticked. I've done both kendo and fencing. Still get my arse kicked, but I reckon if the zombie attacks comes I'll survive slightly longer than the average joe.

Play the flute. This is not an euphemism.

Dunno why. Studied the vioin briefly. Can play one song on the piano. And had Jimmy's guitar for a while. But that was mainly to look cool (still got a great picture Jacques took of me on the bike with a guitar slung across one side). No process on this one, but now I might just go bugger it and buy a flute on ebay some time.

Write a computer game

There's about 10 ideas of what to write in my mind, and I've started writing about 2 of them. At one point I'll finish one.

Write a novel

I can write(yeah, my blog isn't exactly something I spend a lot of time planning), and as a teenage won a few literary comps. At uni I did try and write a novel, but after reading the first chapter, it was pure trash. This is something I need to push myself into doing again.

Be a space fighter pilot

Right, I have no idea on how to do this one. I've booked in my flying lessons for next week, so maybe after a few of those, I'll shell out to do a jet fighter dogfight. Not quite in space, but getting there.

Compare this to my list of things todo before 30:

• Learn how to Fly
• Get a motorbike
• Buy a house
• Write a novel
• Be a recognizable extra in a movie

House is just waiting until we settle down in a country. Flying is kicking off. Novel is the still to do.

Interestingly, the common stuff between being a kid and adult is flying, motorbikes and writing a book. Now I just need to write a book about a spaceship that's a motorbike, and all boxes are ticked

And here's a pic of Lana with Lorenzo.