It's been quite a week in the British courts, demonstrating either an unprecedented confidence on the part of defence lawyers or a new-found tolerance among judges for unutterable bullshit.

First up we hear from a bloke who'd have us believe that he did not kill a girl but did have sex with her freshly-slaughtered corpse, noticing neither her multiple bloody wounds nor her cold, unresponsive state.

Then we hear from a London shop-keeper whose son died in a car crash a while back, along with a girlfriend. You probably didn't read about it. Anyway, this man appears to live in a Britain lifted straight out of an episode of The Avengers, complete with shadow-governments, psycho blue-bloods and secret agents masquerading as television reporters.

However my star is the least-reported of the bunch, a postie in Perth up for drink-driving charges. His defence? Normal rules shouldn't apply to him, because he's a mutant.

It's begun! Homo superior is here! Choose a side! I'm with Magneto!

I'm no computer expert. I can't tinker with the bolier rooms of websites. Java's for drinking, not scripting. I've sat through tuition on Dreamweaver and been shocked by how hit and miss, see if it sticks the whole process of web design is, or at least appears to be. Sure, I can do a bit of html code, but that's as deep as my knowledge goes.

I've just spent the best part of three hours, on two different computers, trying to get an online auction going on eBay. Specifically, I've tried to set a reserve price on a lot. Forgive my old-fashioned thinking, but I don't think an auction is an auction without a reserve price. If you don't care how much you get, you're begging.

Anyway, this most popular of ecommerce sites, a system that children use daily, that cranially damaged spud-a-likes hooked to lung pumps sail through, transforms into a labyrinth of frustation and despair at my fingertips. This happens to me a lot. I have access to a top of the line machine, the broadest of bandwidths and a decent brain. Yet much of the worlwide web is a closed box. I can't post a video to YouTube without it stretching and squashing to the wrong aspect ratio. I can't get my head round Photoshop, Flash or Firefox. I recently found that out neither BitTorrent not iChat actually work at all, except as space fillers on my hardrive. I don't subscribe to any RSS feeds and, as previously outlined, find Facebook unrelentingly naff.

The gap is widening. Within the next decade I'll be the digital equivalent of Adam Adamant, hopelessly unmoored from comtemporary life, hamfistedly trying to ram my usb dongle (and what cretin coined that particular gem, pray?)into the most intimate neural wet ports of a 700 tetrabyte, wah-fuhr theen zMac Ghost or whatever the hell.

Oh, double balls and bollocks.

Did I ever relate the story of how I was approached by the people who were in charge of Howard Marks' publicity, asking if they could develop the "Spliffy the Clown" strip as a recurring feature on his nascent website (Mr Nice had just been published in paperback and was doing well)?



That a bunch of hash heads couldn't see that the strip was, albeit in a pretty asinine way, criticising hash heads and their dated, dopey counter-culture, and were giddy at the very mention of spliffs, regardless of context, in exactly the same way as the 'zinesters the I was mocking, gave me an irony-induced nose bleed.

Oy.

I've been taking advantage of the new machine and making uploads aplenty over at my artwork site (link at left).

Seeing as how it's ten years since I begat the little comic from whence the title of this blog came, I thought I might put some extracts from it in my new, neither fish nor fowl Morgue gallery.



Um, no.

It's bizarre, but one short decade later there's not a single drawing in the whole damn thing I can associate myself with. It's like someone else made it. Don't get me wrong, there where no surprises in there, I remember it all in terms of content, but execution? Yikes. And the humour? Well, it's mostly either warmed-over Evan Dorkin pop culture wise-assery:



Or sub-Jhonen Vasquez cute/nasty:



Schism Schasm was subtitled "A Can't Letter Comic", and by god, at least I was honest. Post-Kubert, where I'd been made to feel very self-conscious about my undisciplined and curly hand lettering, I can see myself going overboard in an attempt to make my alphabet legible, clear and consistent. This results in all lettering being over-sized, and in some cases completely throwing the balance between artwork and language in panels and even whole pages. This phenomenon reaches its apotheosis in the "slice of life" centre spread, which I reproduce here at a small size because it emphasises the over-bearing slabs of grey atop each panel:



That's atrocious. Even today, I struggle to keep my lettering proportional (only by drawing nice and big can I keep the letters as minimal as they really ought to be), but I'm a damn sight better than that. My only defence of that particular story is it did generate a bit of patter that I still hear used by certain people who read it:



As if further proof where needed, the most succesful page- as a bit of cartooning- among the thirty six I did is the least verbose of the lot (and one that weirdly prefigures how large France would loom in my later career):



I dunno, the past is a foreign country... Anyone else care to share past creative cringes?

Kids, if- like me- you have to be stopped and searched under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, try not to have a portfolio of cartoons on you. And if you must, try not to open said portfolio to a page containing something like, oh I don't know, this:



Saves a lot of embarrassment.

The incident happened in Gilmour Street train station in Paisley this afternoon, now red hot with poh-lees since the discovery that "The Doctors of Death!!!" work(ed) at the the RAH. Give the cop his due, he took it in good humour saying "We live in interesting times, don't we, sir?" My name, d.o.b., address and occupation ('cartoonist' rather than 'seditionist') where taken. I was also give a leaflet explaining why such a thing should happen, as is my entitlement, apparently.

Still not sure why I was stopped. He (the cop who looked at my stuff) told me it was random and I wasn't being singled out, yet an item on Reporting Scotland with a senior officer this evening made specific mention of the fact that 'random' doesn't come into their thinking on these- there's always a reason, albeit often no more than an issued profile.

The whole thing was cordial enough, and nothing like the genuine police harrassment I encountered (briefly, before running away like a girl) during the infamous "Show Us Your Tits, Mrs Chief-of-Police!!!" Carriage House Raid of 1996. But that's another story.

NB- This cartoon was done back in 2003, in response to events other than those of the past few days.