Monday, July 31, 2000Posted by Pete New BugPowder stock in, which will be making its way to Caption in a fortnight. Full details to be posted eventually, but in the meanwhile... Monkey vs Robot is a CD of songs by James Kochalka (you can hear them at MP3.com or buy the CD from me), the title track of which he's now adapted as a comic. It's rather top with a big fight between the Monkeys (nature, art, expression) and the robots (machinery, crafted, etc). Like James' best work it combines a childlike narrative with some dark and well thought through ideas. £10.00 Bacchus book 6: the 1001 Nights of Bacchus by Eddie Campbell is a collection of short stories in the spirit of the Arabian Nights. Bacchus is in a pub where the landlord will let the regulars drink after hours as long as Bacchus stays awake. So they tell him stories. If Doing the Islands with Bacchus was set in a British pub rather than the Greek islands it's be like this. A number of artists draw some of the stories including Hicksville's Dylan Horrocks. £9.00 Bughouse by Steve Lafler is new to me and I'm still reading it through. So far I'm impressed. Jimmy Watts moves to Bugtown to play Sax and falls into the seedy music scene. All the characters are bugs, which is neat, but the characterisation is painfully human. An insect-noir gem. £10.00 Ordering details in the shop. You can check out more details about these titles on the Top Shelf website. 3:16 PM | Sunday, July 30, 2000Posted by Pete Following the Gav Burrows articles (especially the second one) it looks like we're about to hit a seam of comics fandom reminiscences. One profile figure on the current scene is toying with the idea of a 70's piece while a rather familiar misanthropist is considering recounting what he saw in the mid 90s. One awaits... 4:29 PM | Posted by Pete At a recent book launch (read: free booze and canapes lig) we met a nice young lady from Alphabetstreet who used to work for "the premier source worldwide for information on the canmaking and rigid packaging filling industries". Specialist publishing is the new black, IMHO! 4:19 PM | Posted by Pete For those who want to know where I got the BP name from, look here and scroll down 2/3 of the page. 3:03 PM | Posted by Pete It's been up for a while but I've just found the Calvin and Hobbes archive. All the strips from 1985 with a new one each day (so it's not complete yet...). While this is one of the more over-exposed newspaper strips it's also one of the best executed with a sould knowledge of how comics work. Check out the Sunday pages. 2:17 PM | Saturday, July 29, 2000Posted by Pete I've uploaded a couple of favourite articles by Gavin Burrows from the mid 90s. Comics and My Life parts one and two. Part one has him going back to his childhood and reading Marvel UK reprints before drawing his own comics. This, he hopes, will help save the medium. Then in part two he tell the sordid history of the 1980s fandom scene where such high hopes of respectability and artistic acceptance for comics were dashed by sheer stupidity. 2:33 PM | Thursday, July 27, 2000Posted by Pete We're thinking of moving over to BT Internet. However, I would seriously be interested in hearing any bad stories about said service before any money changes hands. What hidden bits are there? 1:53 PM | Posted by Pete Experimented with very lo-fi online shopping at Island Spice and was very impressed. 59p a bag and they arrived in four days, postage paid. You have to print out the order form and, using a pen, tick the spices you want, and then, using an envelope, post the order off with a cheque. How innovative! This could be the future! 1:04 PM | Monday, July 24, 2000Posted by Pete The News of the World paedophile listing has riled me, but this article says it more eloquently that I could. Shame it's in the Guardian. If only the rest of the press would take this line... 3:25 PM | Saturday, July 22, 2000Posted by Pete Shock! The Guardian has reviewed Preacher (a comic book, to those of you outside the sphere). I know the reviewer's name from somewhere, but having read his piece it's obviously not from comics fandom. I'm curious as to why this made the Guardian Online edition's front page, though. The tag-line "The graphic novel grows up" is soooo 80s! 3:36 PM | Posted by Pete From a tip from Jez I'm trying a second tracking service, the subtly named eXTReMe Tracking. 2:54 PM | Posted by Pete This cowboy thing is getting better. Frank and Tom Mclaury - "together they had eleven children". Multiple male pregancies in the Old Wild West! The mind boggles! 1:37 PM | Posted by Pete New comic by Simon Gurr re-jigged for the web. Despite my misgivings about streaming (I like to read comics off-line at my own leisure) it reads well. Nice to see some grey-tone work online as well. 9:10 AM | Posted by Pete Weird cowboy shit, and check out the music! 8:55 AM | Posted by Pete
Digging deeper in Tom Hart's site I found some sizeable previews of strips from the new Hutch Owen collection (which will of course be a BugPowder stock item!). Good stuff there.
8:47 AM | Posted by Pete
Playing about with Ditto.com, an image search engine, I entered Tom+Hart to find stuff on said cartoonist and was presented with this list of images. Lots of cowboys, an estate agent, a map and one of Tom's panels saying I'll take any of you on! at the bottom. Nice!
8:30 AM | Posted by Pete Figured out style sheets (pretty easy really) and hopefully sorted out the Javascript errors some of you were getting. It was the fault of the tracking service (or rather my bad copying of their scripts) that was the culprit. 7:32 AM | Posted by Pete Radio 2 continues to surprise. I'm currently listening to Mark Lamarr sitting in for Jonathan Ross and it's very good radio. Whether this is me getting old or Radio 2 re-positioning itself to my era I'm not so sure, but Mark is currently chatting to Billy Bragg and playing The Small Faces. Perfect Saturday afternoon listening. 4:43 AM | Tuesday, July 18, 2000Posted by Pete Bookseller news (the rest of you can ignore this): The boy Evers is leaving! Stuart has gotten a job at Macmillan as some kind of assistant editor! Leaving do on August 4th. 3:21 PM | Posted by Pete For those travelling to Caption on August 12th, the address and phone number for the Oxford Backpacker's Hostel, where the Birmingham pub meet contingent (amongst others) will be sleeping, is here. 1:51 PM | Posted by Pete Started reading up on DHTML so I can get cracking on this style sheets malarkey, but I fell asleep. Not because of the book I hasten to add. I was genuinely tired. However, I was listening to a very experimental performance at the Proms on radio 3 which, as I was drifting off, was introduced as combining new technologies with classical music. The hallucinatory images of music within mark-up tags were most curious and will haunt me for days. 1:44 PM | Posted by Pete Today was spent epos training for work. A few months ago the company invested rather a lot of money upgrading their computer system but neglected to train anyone in how to use it properly. This is being rectified and having sworn and cursed the bloody thing I now know, at least theoretically, how to make it do what I want. A lesson learned there. This doesn't help with the cash tills though. We don't have dedicated cash tills. We have a Wintel computer that pretends (or rather, "emulates") a till. Which means it slow and prone to accusing you of doing things wrong when you did everything right. (fascinating stuff eh?) 1:44 PM | Monday, July 17, 2000Posted by Pete Aparently this is a photo from the set of Star Wars episode 2. I guess the hunger for empty hype has not left LucasFilm then. Mildly amusing spoof here 4:48 PM | Posted by Pete On the notsosoft blog I came across a web tracking service, Stats4all.com who I'm now using to see how many of you buggers are looking at this site. God knows what they're doing with all my info (why does a web service need my phone number? I gave a falsey) but it seems they're happy to just give me banner adds to ignore on their site... I'd be more than happy to hear if anyone knows of a better service though, as this is the first of it's kind I've played with. I really want to know where people are coming from. 3:55 PM | Posted by Pete Matthew has done a brief biography on his site, and on it he links to Web Darts! 3:51 PM | Sunday, July 16, 2000Posted by Pete The Swedish James Kochalka fan site! 3:37 PM | Saturday, July 15, 2000Posted by Pete We finally made it to Tate Modern today. No queues but it was packed to the gills with people, leading one to speculate that all this "open access to the arts" is a nice idea in principle, but in practice... It's weird being surrounded by amazing and important works of art yet at the same time having the urge to get the hell out. We shall try again on a Friday or Saturday night when the gallery closes at 10.00pm. We might actually have a chance to look at something from a distance of more than a foot. Or failing that wait a few months until the masses have a new toy to lay with. Ooh, I love being a cultural snob! 1:48 PM | Posted by Pete My employer is in the news again. Much more civil than the last time these two were in conversation, allegedly. 1:41 PM | Friday, July 14, 2000Posted by Pete I've uploaded the new Shop which sets the framework for it's future development. I'll tell you more about it later (it's really late and I should be in bed...) but for now, go have a look! 8:55 PM | Posted by Pete Looking on Goggle I noticed that BugPowder, while bottom of the list, is judged to be nearly as "important" as Diamond and Last Gasp, based on their "patent-pending PageRank technology" which judges not only how many links there are to a site but the "importance" of those linkers (if you get me...). So, who in the world of "important" sites is linking to me? More seriously, if you have linked to BugPowder, could you let me know so I can reciprocate the favour. Ta. 3:55 PM | Posted by Pete I've just come across the Nail Gaiman 24 hour comic Being An Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabolus which I first read in Cerebus about 10 years ago. It still holds up and is probably one of Neil's best works, but I would say that as it's dead scratchy and obscure... 3:38 PM | Posted by Pete Simon Gurr, who readers of my old fanzine Vicious will know as "the guy who did the Dredd article-strip", emailed today, which was nice as I hadn't heard from him in an age. His site is rather slight at the moment (he's thinking of animating said strip for it, btw) but has a nice flash entry for a Swatch competition. It for that Internet Time concept which is aparently Swatch's attempt to brand internet time and make us all use their clock rather than the 07:15:16 -0500 thing that happens currently. A nasty idea. Thankfully it doesn't look like it's getting off the ground as anthing more than a publicity stunt, but beware and oppose it. 3:03 PM | Posted by Pete Coming soon - secure credit card transactions for buying stuff from BugPowder via ITrustYou.com. Watch this space! 6:46 AM | Thursday, July 13, 2000Posted by Pete Scott McCloud (see resources on this site) has started serialising his new Zot series online. The first chapter is up now and while it doesn't add up to much yet, it's worth checking out for the intriguing panel layouts. 12:03 PM | Wednesday, July 12, 2000Posted by Pete I've uploaded a 13 page Malcy Duff comic, Nail Man in the Gallery. Malcy has been one of my favourite small press creators over the last year and I urge you to check his stuff out. 5:11 PM | Posted by Pete A good article from the Boston Globe about the indie comix scene in the US looking at Highwater Books, Jordan Crane (editor of Non) and Million Year Picnic. Very well written and informed, which makes a change... 11:57 AM | Posted by Pete Another reminder. The small press comics convention Caption 2000 is coming up soon on August 12th-13th. Details here! 11:47 AM | Posted by Pete Jez blogged some interesting news about 2000AD. They didn't mention this during my interview! 11:39 AM | Posted by Pete Tinkered with the site a bit! 8:31 AM | Tuesday, July 11, 2000Posted by Pete Well, it wasn't me but some other member of this household who was looking at uglypeople.com but you'll never guess who was found there. Boris Johnson! Public school arse and editor or the Spectator (in that order). Well, I never! 2:10 PM | Posted by Pete Been busy the last few days redesigning focalplane.com, the sister site to BugPowder which houses my dad's photography and writing. This has my first experiments with the wonders of Javascript. Woo! I'll be starting work on the new BugPowder site on Thursday. Tomorow I go swimming. Yes, really. Swimming. 1:06 PM | Thursday, July 06, 2000Posted by Pete Andi Watson, graduate of the UK small press who writes the comic spin off to that Buffy thing, has a very nice site. I like the clean design that doesn't look plain. Nice. 1:57 PM | Monday, July 03, 2000 |
 |
| Archives
2002 | December | November | October | September | August | July | June | May | April | March | February | January Powered by Blogger Pro |
|
All contents of this site, unless otherwise stated are copyright © 2000-2002 their respective authors. Images and covers are used here for review and promotional purposes only and remain the copyright of the respective artists or companies. BugPowder.com is a non-profit site maintained by Peter Ashton. For information please email me at pete@bugpowder.com |
|
|
