Adventures in Airports

Let us review just some of what happened with our travel last week:

• The flight from Charlotte to New Orleans was supposed to take off at around 14:30. No plane turned up
• Ground staff told us that there was a plane “in the hangar” and it would be coming out soon
• A few hours later, that changed to “it’s in the queue to come from the hangar and we’re trying to find people that can bring the planes”
• After a fistfight down at the gate desk, a plane did arrive sometime around 21:00 or so
• We boarded, the heavens opened, and the crew timed out, meaning we all had to get off the plane
• We were told that another crew was available and they were on their way
• The flight was cancelled five minutes later
• With no chance for another flight out that evening, we were rebooked for a flight the next morning
• But due to the storm, there would be no returning of gate-checked luggage. Which included our buggy and car seat
• So our choice was to sleep in the airport overnight with a baby or somehow get to the provided hotel
• We don’t want to talk about the taxi ride to the airport ever again. but let’s just say that being in the back sear of a car driving at 90mph in aquaplaning conditions, holding a baby with no car seat is a harrowing experience
• (the people at the hotel were lovely, taking care of us when we came staggering into reception in total shock)
• The gate agent forgot to add Maeryn on the rebooked tickets, so we were pushed to one side on boarding and nearly denied the chance to get on the plane
• New Orleans was really lovely!
• The captain of our flight to Dallas (we’re never going anywhere near Charlotte again) cheerfully announced that the plane was broken but a crew was fixing it
• The short flight was delayed over an hour
• We arrived in Dallas ten minutes before our connecting flight left, but American refused to hold the flight for us
• We were rebooked for a flight four hours later
• That plane got hit by a bird just as we were boarding
• Thankfully, Dallas did have another plane in the hangar and somehow even managed to get it to a gate, but delayed us another two hours or so, turning a leisurely late afternoon arrival into a nighttime one
• A tornado thunderstorm ripped through the Cincinnati area, meaning that Tammy had to drive us home through rain coming down sideways

But…we made it back. And I’m not leaving the area again for at least a month (though the back half of the year is likely to have more travel than I anticipated…)

Last week of paternity leave coming up! The to-do list is laughably almost still as long as it was at the start, but I’ve mostly made my peace with that. If I can play about with a new version of FAISS this week and get my Irish citizenship application underway, I’ll be pretty happy…

A Week In Which A Decision Is Made

Ask me whether I made the right one in a couple of years. Or three months.

We’re now at the half-way point of paternity leave. And much of my list isn’t going to get done, though there are reasons for dropping a bunch of it that aren’t “just couldn’t be bothered”. Still, only three weeks left, and a large chunk of that is going to be “surprisingly in New Orleans” in seven days’ time.

Otherwise, not a lot going on this week, though the advent of another issue of so good magazine has got me thinking in a confectionary mood again for the first time in a couple of months…

Week Two

Well, that was a week, right?

This week, I have been mostly crashing up against the shores of the impossibly long list of things I want to get done, the leaking of the SDXL weights, and a bunch of other things. Part of which was watching Jonathan Meades documentaries and then staring at this video and wondering “Los Campesinos! could just never catch a break like that, could they?”

Next week: more things. Hopefully including that long-promised park visit…

Notes For The Next Stop is Lewknor Turn

The Next Stop is Lewknor Turn is actually the second comic I’ve released into the world. The first, made in 2002, and gladly lost to the the dark corners of the Internet, was given this stellar review by an eventual comics giant:

For god’s sake, Ian, just ask her out.

— Kieron Gillen

I came very close to putting that on the back cover as praise for earlier work¹.

Drive Time

The idea for Drive Time came from a Bleeding Cool ‘article’ a while back with a Twitter round-up of people complaining that a comic had too many repeating panels within its pages and thus didn’t represent good value for money. After I had finished rolling my eyes, I thought it would be funny to write a comic where every panel is exactly the same. After reading a bunch of M. John Harrison short stories, it morphed into ‘what if you were listening to Dave Pearce’s drivetime show at the end of the world?’ The horror, the horror.

Page 1: Anyway, the fixed view point inside a car, a classic Eddie Stobart lorry, and everything is fine. The mundane as an entryway to the haunted.

Page 2: Honestly, part of me would have loved to spin this descent out to a full 22 pages, but I also didn’t want Nicolás to go crazy drawing the same thing over and over and over — I did have other stories for him to draw, after all! I was also concerned about things getting a bit boring…although that’s part of the point of the early panels. Which is why there’s a bunch going on in every panel - there’s the view out of the car window, the radio, the car dashboard, the conversation our ‘main’ character is having.

Page 3: You can’t beat a bit of vague 70s family acting odd by the roadside. I hope you all noticed that they continue fighting in the rear-view mirror.

The time discrepancy on panel 4 was intentional, but I think I made a mistake; it’s supposed to add an extra layer of oddness onto the page, but although it is somewhat called back to at the end with the reveal (and that time must have been acting oddly anyhow), it doesn’t quite work for me on a re-read.

Page 4-5: And now things go off the rails. Weird sigils everywhere, ‘Containment’ signs, cars on fire, communications lines failing, and ‘let’s go outside, which seems to be a terrible idea, judging from everybody we’ve seen out in the open so far…

Page 7-8: The big twist! She’s been in the car all along! Were you shocked, dear reader? Things fall apart some more, everything starts to turn into flesh (one of my guiding lights for this story was also Chloe Maveal’s demand a while back to see more ‘wet’ horror in comics. I did my best!), and it all ends badly, with no real explanation. Sorry.

…but not too sorry. One of the things that initially drove me nuts during the pandemic when I was working my way through Harrison’s work is that I’d often feel that I’d reach the end of a story without ‘getting it’. As if I re-read it enough times, things would slot into place. Or I was just too dim to see the obvious resolution that wasn’t quite spelled out for me. Then I actually read some of Harrison’s critical work, discovering that he hates puzzle-box stories and his stories are meant to be like that…which made me feel less stupid, and also partly vindicated on my boredom with puzzle-box stories in general. So, no answers, I’m afraid…

The Next Stop is Lewknor Turn

The reason that this whole comic exists in the first place is a tweet I saw one Sunday from Rhian E. Jones, talking about the weirdness of Lewknor Turn on the bus trip from Oxford to London. A weird, out-of-the-way stop that always looks haunted when you stop by it at 2am, in my case always coming back from London from a concert. Having read the tweet in the morning, I spent the afternoon sketching out this story, and that led to coming up with the other three stories to come up with a collection.

My intent was to try and invoke some of the creepy, haunted 1970s TV folk horror; grimy videotaped insides and faded 16mm film exteriors mixed with my own memories of going on that bus journey to London. And yet somehow plonk it in recent times instead (I didn’t give much thought to the actual time period other than ‘now-ish’, but the last page actually matches up to the train strikes of 2022, putting the bulk of the story in 2018/2019).

And yes, the trade dress of the comic is meant to resemble the Oxford Tube livery. I spent real money to use the right font and everything…

Page 1: Ah, all the comedy train classics — leaves on the line and the horror of the wraparound toilets on the Virgin trains. It’s like Mock The Week in here or something…

Page 2: The High! Nicolás did a great job capturing both Oxford and the classic Oxford Tube bus, I think.

Page 3: In an odd twist, I actually found myself having to do this journey in 2022, as rail strikes meant I couldn’t go to London by train. And I will say that Sam was right, especially when there’s frost everywhere.

Page 5: So much text — Marin did such a good job fitting all this on this page, but I should probably have extended this sequence by another page to space it all out a little.

Page 6: I love the Niamh’s foot extending into the third panel. Again, this would probably have been better over two pages in a way to build up the tension. Instead it’s a little rushed. But look at Marin’s sound-effects and the great use of different fonts — and Nicolás’s glitching techniques! So good!

Page 8: Spoooook! Niamh & Alan! The look of recognition at the end! A fairly traditional ending that presents no answers (see the previous story), but I think it works.

Excavation

This story wasn’t supposed to be here. At least not in this form. For a year, I’d been toying with a story about an artist that lived in my most hated building in New York, haunted by their early works of art. But I just couldn’t make it work, so I put it to one side and worked on a different story, which got to the point of being fully-scripted before I realised that it also didn’t really work in its current form of “1970s Public Information Film crossed with a Los Campesinos! song and somehow Quantum Leap as well”. But I still needed one more story for this book…so I went back to the New York idea and struggled. By chance, I came across a reference to a housing estate in the North being built on top of an old mine…and things clicked into place. I wrote this script in a weekend and got it out to Nicolás to draw very soon after, which was probably a little bit of a mistake - as I read it through again, it definitely could have used one more draft. But at least one panel turned out almost exactly how I pictured it in my head, and well, it’s never a wasted opportunity to beat up on Tories.

Page 1: I’m fairly sure part of the mood board I sent Nicolás was full of Tory horrors like Grant Shapps and co. ‘Dad’ would have been in his 20s during the 84-85 strike.

Page 2: Panel 1 gives me big Yeowell’s Peter St. John from Zenith energy.

Page 8: During the pandemic, I found myself rediscovering John Smith and reading pretty much every comic he wrote. Excavation, in both its New York and here in the Northern form was an excuse to get to this page. And I couldn’t have asked for a better letterer to handle this; Marin does such a wonderful job here with the caption boxes and even the text itself becoming warped by the spectre of the old mine. Even though I feel the story needed another pass - this panel is one of my favourites in the collection.

Page 9: The North Will Rise Again, and the NUM gets a long-awaited revenge.

Mystery Ad Page

When I was writing the stories, I set hard limits on page count; which probably hurt things a little, but I wanted that restriction so I didn’t just go off and just write; there was always that tightness that had to be worked around (and it helped for budgeting purposes too). This was great, but when it came to actually laying the collection out, I realized I was a bunch of pages short. Drive Time was fairly easy to sort out, as the conclusion of that story leant itself to just having a blank page following. The end of Space To-Let gave me a chance to mess around with a hellish Foxtons-like vision of selling body space in the future, but I still had one page that needed…something. Hence this page, which is an advertisement for a potential sequel book, but with the text sent through a CLIP tokenizer. Decode it back for secret information!

Space To-Let

Finally, of all the stories in this collection, this is my favourite. It’s an idea that feels at home in a 2000AD Future Shock, there’s a double twist, and I think it’s Nicolás’ best work on all four stories. Plus, working digitally, it was very easy to incorporate the purple/cyan effect without blowing up the budget for printing. Who doesn’t love a “do you see? Housing in London is very expensive!?!!? allegory”?

Page 1: Like I said, Nicolás does so well in this story, and the different colouring of the panel columns was just the effect I was going for. Plus, misdirection from the first sentence!

Page 2 & 3: Right from the start of this project, I knew I wasn’t going to produce printed copies; the expense versus the demand just was not worth it. Even so, every story was written with the idea that it could be. This is probably most obvious here; this is totally a two-page spread that does work when reading digitally, but missing a little of the effect when you don’t see the bottom panels of the two pages side-by-side.

(incidentally, I wrote this while the Queen was still alive; I feel like I should have done a little more to indicate that this is 204x above and beyond the drones and robots circling about. And I’m already smuggling model weights about, so that background detail has come to pass even sooner than I suspected…)

Page 4 & 5: Conference and an info-dump, the latter of which just about barely sets up the twist on the last page.

Page 6: Part of me wanted to keep the purple / cyan thing up all through the story, but it’s mainly Helen’s story, not Mark’s, so he only gets one more cyan panel here.

Page 7: Oh noes! Evicted from your own body! The satires! Plus a horrific scenario of the rich moving into their own children in the captions.

Page 8: This last page is one of those “working in comics” affairs where everybody came together to make the page so much better. Nicolás does a terrific job with the art, but the first attempt at this page had far too much text on it. Marin was very polite about trying to get it all in, but listening to her advice, I struck out two or three caption boxes from the script entirely and moved the remaining ones about the panels, which I think makes the final twist of ‘this isn’t Helen’s body’ work better.

And that’s your lot! Will there be another comic this year? Probably not. But you might see a few experiments towards the end of 2023…

Week One

We survived the first week! Admittedly, we couldn’t go outside for most of the week because of the terrible air quality across the Midwest from the Canadian wildfires, but we did eventually go to the post office and the supermarket. Maybe this week will be the one where I don’t open Slack at all.

(obviously, that’s never going to happen. But I did also make a bunch of headway on a bunch of the ‘parental leave list’ items, so that is something!)

A lot has changed again in just a week — Maeryn is now reaching for and interacting with toys, plus she is really getting the hang of the posture of sitting, even if she hasn’t quite worked out balance yet. She’s coming along week by week, sometimes even by the day!

Next week: I begin the process of getting an Irish passport…

And Now For Something Completely Different

It occurred to me on Friday that the upcoming weeks will see my longest bout of time off from work since…well, possibly the end of 2010 when I quit my last job in the UK. That’s quite a while ago…

Making Plans For Maeryn

I realize that my current ‘things to do during paternity leave’ list has grown to comic proportions at this point (the ‘comics’ entry currently even has three subitems!), when what it should be is “keep baby fed / sleep when possible”. But I like setting unrealistic targets and then berating myself when I fail to achieve them! This is fine, right?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and assemble my Father’s Day present…

That Was A Week

People of the Internet! I need your opinion! Should I try and go to see this band when they’re in Cincinnati next month?

Otherwise, another quiet week. But only two weeks left until the last of my paternity leave kicks in and I’m out for over a month. That…will be interesting! And only 9 working days, too…I might be a little busy trying to get all that ready…

Network Is Down

Continuing the focus on old television, it’s been a sad week, as Network Distributing’s website went offline on Tuesday and although there’s no official news, it appears the company is either in administration or liquidation. It’s terrible news for physical video media in the UK in general, as Network seemed to be one of the last ‘giants’ standing the market, pushing out a lot of titles each year, but it’s even worse for people that are interested in the more esoteric fare that they put out. Sure, they had plenty of crowd-pleasers like the restored Prisoner blu-rays or the astoundingly complete Monty Python boxset from a couple of years ago. But they were also the company that would put out a children’s TV serial from 1974 that may have only aired in the Yorkshire TV region and that half the cast have forgotten they even made it. And they’d produce that release with a similar amount of care as they would the Python set. A company that was fully prepared to release a 13-disc set of Give Us A Clue and the complete insanity of the recent 90+disc Crossroads set. They were legends and will be sorely missed.

(As part of the hordes descending upon retailers in an attempt to get hold of things before they sell out forever, I got hold of the complete series of Watching. Which I would never claim is brilliant, but I have good memories of watching it both at home on broadcast and in Santa Monica ten years ago. And who is going to be crazy enough to do a repress of this series? I’m not even sure if it’s even online in the UK…)

In happier news, it looks like I will be in San Francisco for the first time in over three years this coming August! I’ll be going to the Google Cloud Next conference in the centre of town, and hope to meet up with a bunch of people I haven’t seen in person for a while. I feel like I’m already regretting the red-eye back home on Thursday night, mind you; I didn’t realize the conference ended at 2pm…but given the time difference, it looks like I wouldn’t get home any quicker anyhow. Still, should hopefully be fun…and I’ll get to see the new offices for the second time in three and a half years…

Ken Morse

I’ve been living in the US for almost 12 years now, and one of the things I can’t wrap my head around? The United States Postal Office. Let’s take postal redirection. It will cost you almost £40 in the UK to have Royal Mail redirect your post. In this shrine to capitalism and money-grabbing? $1.10 online, or free if you do it at a post office (they only charge you to verify your identity). The equivalent to the First class stamp costs…63¢ versus £1.10. They’ll take your outgoing post from you at the door if you don’t want to find a postbox. I get emails every morning showing me what post is going to be arriving later that day. And then there’s the packaging. I ordered about 12 different sets of packaging (probably close to 100 pieces altogether). Everything from DVD-sized boxes to tubes that look like they’re explicitly designed to send massive Toblerones across the country. And the cost of all this? $0.00, including $0.00 postage and packing.

Honestly, I can understand why the Republicans want to privatize it. You can’t have a publicly-owned company be so useful and able to send post across the country for a flat-rate. It just breaks their minds.

In other news, this week I began my long-term plan of indoctrination. Exposure to The KLF, Kate Bush, New Order, and Kenickie is well underway, plus Maeryn was also treated to the first series of The Fast Show (I’m hoping she’ll start doing the “oooh!” part of Suits You soon). I don’t think I saw the first series when it originally went out; my first memory of watching it is this moment from S02E01, which is where I knew it was going to be something I loved:

The additional detail of throwing in an obscure TV gag where it wasn’t really required, but Higson/Whitehouse decided to go the extra mile. Possibly the last truly great BBC sketch show?¹

Also, I have to admit that this Ron Manager segment is…well…yes I could hear the vidiprinter sound as he was talking…