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.

Manga Jiman done

In the post this afternoon. I can stop thinking about it now. My son asked me, "What's the story? What happens next?" Short answer is I dunno. I still haven't worked out properly how we get from where the Policy Police are now to the new place I've started up. Well, I know the big things. It's the pictures and words I don't know.

Policy Police: return of the repossessed #9

Phew. Here at last. It's been put on the back burner while I progress my entry for the Manga Jiman competition. By chance, this episode lent itself to much reuse. I think the pigeons are the only wholly new bit. I hope it works... You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Return of the Repossessed.

The Manga Jiman entry is almost there. A tweak here and there, the odd continuity error to fix and I'll be there in time for the November 1st deadline. Still need to do some hard thinking about where Policy Police goes next year. I've got a vague idea of themes and direction, but nothing concrete yet. I've also been thinking about a whole other comic, entirely different subject matter in a 4-koma (4-panel) style. But how that will fit into my life I really don't know.

Progress of sorts

I've got 7 of 8 pages pretty much done for the Manga Jiman competition. I'm pretty pleased with the results - in fact I'm so pleased that I may well go back on my original promise to let it sink without trace if I don't make the cut. It's opened up a future for these comics that I'm quite looking forward to pursuing. So I guess I will, anyway.

A more immediate future is what happens after Christmas, when the current tale comes to an end. It's all a bit vague at the moment, but I did have one stroke of luck...

I was in the dentist waiting room a couple of days ago and there was this 15/16 year-old girl there who said some things that amused me so much I had to write them down. Since then she's grown into a fully-fledged Policy Police character in my head. She's certainly helped - caused me to think up some new snippets of dialogue, and she seems to be the sort of character I need to make things happen in the story. Anyway. I'm very grateful for the help.

A second immediate challenge is the next episode... All I can say is look out for plenty of reuse in this one.

Manga Jiman update

I said way back that I was going to enter this competition. Now it's the last day of September and I've got 3 pages of 8 done. So it's not hopeless. A bit less than a week per page. But it'll probably mean another late Policy Police this month. I'm quite pleased with how it's going, though. I also have been thinking about where Policy Police will go after Christmas. Beginning to get ideas to fill what is an enormous void right now.