More ingredient-free products

A couple of things have reminded me of the version of Going Green shown here.

Firstly, following having my head sprayed with the stuff, we had to buy some more fly-killer. Cuz of cheapness we went with a supermarket own-brand spray this time. Yesterday I tried it for the first time on a couple of those flies that wake up when you switch on the heating. Didn't work. Gave them a wee blast - enough to get them spinning on their backs with the old (admittedly branded) spray. They just carried on bumbling around as if nothing happened. Then at bed time I discovered a queen wasp in the folds of our bedroom curtain. I blasted the hell out of it with the stuff. It did die, but I think cause of death was probably drowning.

The second thing is moths. Went for a job interview last month, but when I got out my second-best suit, it was full of holes. (Cue Momoko moment from Kamikaze Girls. If you haven't seen this film, get a copy, watch it.) And now it seems you can't get proper moth balls like when I was a kid. No wonder we're plagued with the things.

No doubt we'll live longer, but we'll be grubby, sweaty people dressed in nylon and soaked in perfume cuz we smell so bad. But it won't be very good perfume cuz that'll be banned for being carcinogenic, or bad for the environment.

Policy Police: Return of the repossessed #10

As usual, things begin to fall apart before any satisfactory conclusion can be reached. You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Return of the Repossessed.


The "Buster" part of all this, as they say, is based on a true story. There are times when everything goes pear-shaped and victory falls into the lap of somebody who was being sidelined by the original plan. I never did find out if it was Machiavellian scheming that won the day, or just an inability to see the plan through. Bit of both, probably.

The changing face of Faren Gosman

I thought I'd look back over the 3-year history of Policy Police and see how the style has changed and (we hope) my skill has improved.

Here's Faren from the first episodes. Rendered using Paint. Paint is pretty low-resolution and unforgiving of mistakes, but there was something in its crudeness that gave me the space to move on with the story. I felt I needed to get the episodes out monthly to maintain momentum both for myself drawing it and to keep the readers interested in reading it.

The second picture dates from around the 9-month mark.  I had decided to revisit the main characters and tidy them up a bit. I had gotten much more used to Paint by this stage, and the differences between the older and more recent characters was showing a bit. I then went back and "remastered" the whole 8-episode story, "Reaching the LEARNER" to give it an overall consistency.

As the second anniversary of Policy Police approached, I decided to ditch Paint and move over to Manga Studio Debut. It was a bit of a quick changeover, so what I did here was redraw the Paint version within MSD. As ou can see, the main difference is sharpness.

So now it's almost a year later and I've got much more into the flow of using Manga Studio. So, like I did with Paint, I'm looking back at earlier drawings and de-doing them to get greater consistency. This last pic is a sneak preview of a new-look Faren that'll debut in the new year. I decided to go back to my original sketches and source material and start again from scratch. I may well do some more tweaking and stuff between now and then, but he seems to be shaping up.