My Illustrative Life

Going offline for the weekend (due to both a pain in my touch-pad hand and my gentleman coming for a visit), which will give YOU a few days to think about spending money to support concept-based music. Because if I was flush, I would - but I’m not, so you can be my surrogates.

Abney Park

They make music, they have a look, they have a whole parallel reality.

Buy them for me, buy them for you, whichever.

Nuns vs bikers with good hair and neckerchiefs, in a battle of words, in the sixties, with an audience of boarding school girls. On a road trip.

That’s my kind of movie, baby! Dig it!

I celebrated the close of my first year of blogging last week, but the first real post post that I wrote was actually published on the twenty eighth. So I have four days to go, til then. Since my gent’ll be here for the next few days I may well be disinclined towards posting anything then, so consider this the partypost, kay?

My first real post was about The Tribe; a show I loved when it was first shown and I was eleven-ish, and which I had just started re-watching a year ago. I still love it, and the feeling only GROWS.

So that’s what was up a year ago. What is up today is that I got an email from Hervia that they are having an up to 70% off SS10 sale. And I am filled with COVETOUS WANT.

I really don’t have any spare money, though, so to dull the pain and on a sudden stroke of it-all-comes-together I decided to assign as many pieces as I could to a Tribe character. The aesthetic philosophies are similar, I think. Awwww, here goes!

All pictures wither from TribeHeaven or Dwayne Cameron’s (Bray) personal site (uh, hope that’s cool?)

Some of these may be tenuous, and some you may think are stinkers. You just don’t understand my vision. Click to buy!

Kay, first, this one was easy: Ebony.

This is a girl who knows how to wear red leather, and also when: always.

For the lulz: Lex!

Pretty flippin’ obvious, if you know the show even a little (if you don’t, well, you should learn): Zoot

I’m pretty sure that Tai-San wore tangerine at least once.. This picture at least has the turquoise, and the spiky.

Trudy had a tiny short fringe through the entire run of the show, I think. The very low vamp and toe cap (? I had to google for shoe terms), with the little prissy hole, echo that to me, and the colour halfway between brown and gold suits Trudy’s insecurity and power trips.

The lilac colour is on The Guardian’s scheme, and the wax-style seal is representative of his grasping for that orthodox, cultish, heavy-formality type of power and organisation!

I always did think that the Technos did at least have snappy dressing going for them, if nothing else.

Nothing, I mean nothing, will ever be as ungodly fug as Bray’s knitted string vest, as seen here. I hate it so much that I almost (not quite) love it. It shocks me offensively every time I see it.

But even when he wasn’t wearing that thing (Amber must have really, REALLY loved him) he was wearing some pretty goony, earnest prep-skate-hippy stuff.

I was going to give him this:

But that harkens clearer to another Dwayne Cameron (goony) role -

And then I saw this, with the right slate-something/white-ish beige colour scheme, and decided that even if it wasn’t totally gross, at least it was weird, like a lace-up vest knitted with string that has apron-straps over the shoulders UGH UGH AUGH WHY.

Amber, my very, very favourite (and how I despised her on the first go round, unable to tell ‘incredible badass’ from ‘goody two-shoes’) has worn a lot of things, and I would put any of them in my own wardrobe in a second. But this was what had the most visual similarity in the collection - matched to Eagle-Amber the resistance leader. Man, just typing that makes me want to wave flags.

The Amber-Bray love ring (or should I say the Amber-Sasha-Amber-Bray-Amber-Pride-Amber-Bray-Amber love ring? Whaddeva, I’m a romantic. The Amber-Bray love ring.

Well romantic as I may be, I have always though that that ring was pretty unattractive. It reminded me of one I’d got off a magazine, and I appreciate that it was given to a thirteen year old by her father, so it’s not going to be Tiffany’s, but.. ehhh. It’s so HUGE.

This ring is huge too though! And has Amber’s signature turquoise, and a knobble, and silver, and a symbol on the ‘face’.

It also has the white of Bray’s heinous vest. Of course.

Bonus! What did Zoot and the Locos wear to do their exercises? WONDER NO MORE!!

You’re welcome.

I’m offline! But I wrote this BEFORE I went offline, as a PLAN. Enjoy it now! Whilst I am not here!

“Naughty schoolgirl” is a concept that has been so porned out that it barely exists anymore. “Naughty schoolgirl”, someone will say to you, and your mind will reply “augmented woman in her late twenties wearing a bandeau “skirt”, fake tan, and white shirt tied so tightly I fear she may suffocate (on the shirt OR the cock you’re implicitly permitted to stick in her, come to think)”.

You know what? That sucks. Schoolgirls deserve to own their own sub-genres.

When I was a school-going girl and a Guide, in my early teens, my troupe picked the theme “St Trinians” for the parade we were in. We all wore rolled-up skirts, and tied up shirts, and ties tied around our heads or inappropriately loose. We wore knee-socks and fishnets and carried hockey sticks, and most of us had never heard of St Trinians before. This was the movie-verse St Trinians. Not nu-movies. The 50s-60s-1980 movies. I wore bunches.

It felt powerful and silly and fun, and I didn’t feel like I was giving anyone the right to touch me or fantasize about me or show me their genitals. I didn’t feel fake, I felt permitted to try out ‘loose’, in a socially permissive and/or “so in control of the situation that I don’t have to be in constant overwhelming control of myself” way rather than the hurrhurrvagina way.

Ronald Searle’s original St Trinians cartoons or comic strips, by the way, are really really good. You should read them.

Actually at the end of said parade, at the fair, a grown-up man I sort of knew (I think he was someone’s dad? maybe someone who knew someone I knew?) said to me, “Oh, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on”. I don’t know if he meant “those dress-up clothes” or if he was purposefully implying he had seen me naked, but either way I felt like I wanted to punch him in the fucking face. Because whichever he meant, his words suggested that he might have seen me undressed, and I thought: how dare you do that to me. I did not want to hear about sex, in any way, from any guy. Especially an adult. Especially in such a brusque way. Especially when I was wearing an outfit I knew, vaguely, was sometimes used to mean “slutty!”.

If you don’t get this, or if you feel inclined to say I was asking for it, maybe imagine that you’re wearing an outfit you really like and often air, and then you get a CC’d-to-all-your-friends email showing someone who looks kind of like you, wearing that exact outfit, having something done to them that you’d never want done to you. Or imagine that you move to a new place, where you discover that your name is the same word as the locals use to mean “worthless” or “fucking disgusting” or “fart” or “incest”.

I didn’t punch him, I looked hard at the nearest non-human object very hard and pretended I hadn’t heard. I had no power there.

That was probably about ten years ago, and “naughty schoolgirl” has really gained momentum as a thing since then. What are real school girls going to do, when their forays into rule-breaking and cheekiness and physicality and their own relationship to their own sexuality* are already telegraphed, loud and clear, in town centers and internet side-bar ads and on tv and in magazines (I hate you, Nuts and Cosmo and your ilk) and in the general consciousness, as being a message of “yes, you may fuck”?

*No. Just because someone is exploring themselves and the power or effect they may or may not potentially have (and if they like or are comfortable with it or not), it does not give you permission to be a leering douche. If someone is dressed “sexy”, it does not mean you get to say HAY BABY, I SEE YOU HAVE SEXUAL CAPACITIES!!. Act as normally as you can towards them, and that will tell them what they want to know. Be respectful. Don’t assume that they want anything from you. Especially? Especially if they are or might be underaged. Gee whiz.

I started thinking about this because of this picture in the paper:

It’s Hit-Girl, from the film Kick Ass,which I do not think I would enjoy. I don’t like the comic and I can’t get behind eleven year old murderers played for awsums. I do have a soft spot for Nic Cage though. THEY’RE IN MY EYES!. She’s played by Chloe Moretz, who was born in 1997 (and who’s gonna be in the (actually really positive-sounding) re-make of Let the Right One In. Go Chloe!). So she’s twelve or thirteen in this picture. Do you see the differences, between Hit-Girl here and the average current “naughty schoolgirl”? Yes. Yes, you do.

This picture reminded me of another comicbook (as you wish, Stan Lee!) depiction of a schoolgirl gone wrong. Here’s Jenny, 15, from Grant Morisson’s excellent (excellent!) book The Invisibles. She appears on two pages as far as I can tell (does she return? I haven’t read every volume), and she’s pretty darn enjoyable, as a character.

Okay so I said above that I can’t get behind killer kids, true - but forgive me my over-generalising. Hit-Girl’s essentially a real-world fictional kid, albeit a highly skilled one, and she’s gonna have to live with being a people-chopper for the rest of her real-world fictional life. Jenny’s metafictionally one of the last survivors in a post-apocolyptic Enemies Exist world, born of a psychically well-protected mind being tortured. That changes things up. Am I a hypocrite? Bollocks.

The thing here, is that these are two internally enormous, badass, power-reaching characters who know how to do what they’re doing and who don’t do just what they’re told (or what we as viewers know they’re societally told), who are nevertheless currently encapsulated by the school uniform. They don’t fit, level-one semiotically; it’s still understood that school uniform means “be good”. That’s why school uniform, and the “schoolgirl” part of “naughty schoolgirl” matter: the goodness is there to be subverted. Whether you’re talking sex-play, or violence, or anything else.

>>Other objections aside, it is SO LAZY and missing-of-the-point to turn the school uniform into full-on erotic decoration. If you make it into a straight-up string-stripper outfit, you lose the reason you were interested in the first place! You lose the character, you lose the realness, you lose the honesty. All you’re left with is “isn’t screwing hot?”, which, wow. Fascinating.< <

Jenny and Hit-Girl’s skirts are short, and we can see Jenny’s knickers, and knee-socks have enough cultural-sexual baggage already that they can mean ’saucy’ by themselves - these outfits aren’t completely unsexualised or unsensualised. Like I mentioned, we tied up our school shirts and rolled up our skirts in the Guides parade (we rolled up our skirts in school - that’s a pretty culture-wide experience). I’m not arguing for the sterilisation of teens, image-wise or biologically!

I think that the photo of Hit-Girl is a good one, and I can dig those two pages of Jenny in Invisibles. Not in any way because I want to exploit them sexually, but because I can sympathise and empathise with these pictures. That’s a lot of what fiction is for, I think - more than just entertainment and escape. It’s not quite identification - it’s understanding what characters, as constructs before/as well as people, mean; Hit-Girl here and Jenny are about bursting out of your chrysalis - saying YEAH FUCK THAT, WHATEVER! and going really, really fast at your own discretion. Being aware of the body that you’re in, what it can do and what it means to you. Feeling that anybody who wants to appropriate any of that can go blow away to nowhere. They’re about moments of realisation that you’re god of your own damn universe, and you make the rules for you.

It’s easy to see how those sorts of thoughts can segue (for teens or between consenting adults interacting with this sort of imagery) into “let’s do it”. They don’t have to, but they can, and that’s fine! That’s nice, even! Know yourself, enjoy yourself, use symbols that you like or that speak to you (I’m not assuming I need to give permission here, I’m just hopefully making it clear that I’m not trying to somehow deny you permission to do what you want in private. I don’t want to know about what you do in private (or public, if it’s shaggin’)).

But these feelings, grown organically, are too necessary and vital to have them publicly and almost overwhelmingly equated with misogynistic, performative, no-strings intercourse.

‘Sex’, a lot of people seem to forget to remember, is not about what platonic-I can do for platonic-you. It’s not simply about places to put penises or things in vaginas. First of all, it is about what platonic-I can do for platonic-me, and basically, the rest of the world has no rights to that.

It just thinks it does.

No, Jerkface, she can’t. But you can empathise, or sympathise, or just allow her to enjoy it without trying to make it all about you. EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY. Do you speak them?

I kind of like Lady Gaga, maybe. Her costumes are often sexually coded, and then she outright says to her fans “it’s okay not to have sex if you don’t feel like it, no matter how you feel like dressing”. Anti-rape culture. That kind of stuff needs to be said.

So that’s what I think about “naughty schoolgirls”. That people should leave them alone, for goodness’ sake, and let the real ones be able to think that they (re-)invented the trope. Because you know what? If they did, they did.

A nice thing about blog-reading is that you come across people who are really doing stuff. People who, no matter how long and hard they may have worked behind the entries, have an air about their writing that suggests that one day they just decided “I think I’ll make a shoe” or “I think I’ll move to a new country and handcraft leatherwear” or “I think I shall sail around the world, by myself”, and then they did. When my dad says to me “You could carve that piece of stone I have outside” on a day when I have nothing planned, having read those people Doing Stuff helps to mean that I think “well yes, of course I could”. And then, I do.

No better pictures than the above yet, I’m afraid, but I don’t reckon I did so bad for a first try. Relief more than sculpture, but I’ll build up. I did both sides, and I only hit myself a couple of times. It was good learning!

If you ever need to make a bonfire (allotment? garden? campfire? very very lost in the huge enormous woods?) and you have a pile of wood and scrub and such, don’t light it until you’ve moved the entire pile from where you found it. Or else you might end up burning hedgehogs to death.

(this isn’t a good fire, because I realised most of the stuff to burn was still damp from yesterday’s rain and stopped stacking.)

If you do have an allotment or a garden , it probably won’t be that long before you gain your very own friend robin. My grandpa’s perches on his spade handle, but I don’t know this one all that well just yet..

If you have brooches or pin badges that you like, or have a penchant for safety pins (me too!), then the turn from cold spring to warm spring can be prettied up like so. If you need underskirts but don’t need ALL the warmth they give you, pin the over-layer and feel somewhere between Belle and a Vermeer subject. Or use two pins, one on either side or your rear, and make the overskirt a gathered bustle! SO SIMPLE.

Final bonus: a properly photographed version of my lino cut from yesterday’s post. Want lino cutting done? I can (probably) do it! I just can’t do the printing for you, as yet.

My mum and sister had half-term last week, so we took an overnighter in Buxton. To walk in nature, and.. look at stuff. We stopped at Chatsworth House (because my sister is a big squealer for Pride and Prejudice), which as you can see above is quite delightful. This is the view from one side of the bridge:

One of several reasons I am proud to volunteer for BW: Waterways are wonderful. So pretty! I drew as much as my freezin’ fingers would let me.

There are links to more pictures (reference/stock) of these gorgeous landscapes in the righthand sidebar.

Also fascinating was the toilet paper, where we stayed. No really, take a gander!

Lots of charming pokey shops, too; antiques and bookshops aplenty. A surprising amount of clothing, in the antiques emporiums in and around Buxton actually - maybe it’s a local thing, but ‘vintage’ seems to be creeping in all over where it was once disdained. I may be being overly romantic.

There was the most excellent bookshop. Second-hand, antique to current, FIVE FLOORS. It had free tea and coffee! That you could make for yourself! It was glorious, and I kick myself for not being in the right sort of mood to really appreciate it. Then again, I really can’t afford to be stocking up on old, old thick books with the sorts of covers that make you want to weep from the perfection of illustration.

Where was my mind? Photographic evidence:

The horrors (and adventures) of my youth.

Truth be told I came out with exactly what I did want - Teacher’s Pet by Caroline B. Cooney, a Point Horror (remember those?) that chilled me so royally that I refused to use the downstairs bathroom for years. I’ve been looking for it for months; I wanted to see if it still had the power.

In the story the heroine finds a rough workmans glove in the woods, which turns out to still have a hand in it. My dad keeps his work gloves in the downstairs loo. I was a nervous and imaginative child!

So, watch out for THAT review, coming soon..

It snowed! The end!

Has anyone else noticed that all the Valentines-themed window displays this year are red (with silver or black accoutrements)? Red to hot pink, at least. Where is all the marshmallowy pink, the fluffy powder colours, the teddy bears swearing eternal affection? Everwhere I looked, in town yesterday, there were red satin undergarments with the spindliest of garter belts (they won’t work, don’t you want your sexy to be practical too?), and shiny metallic balloons.

I did consider that it was a display of solidarity with China, any British-Chinese or visiting tourists, Chinese New Year falling today also. Red being an important related colour. But there wasn’t any gold involved, and besides - shop windows don’t tend to be that inclusive.

I hope you’re having a fine day, whatever you’re celebrating or whatever you aren’t. I do think it’s a shame when people are vitriolic against Saint Valentine’s Day, because being martyred because you refused to disallow soldiers to marry is pretty bloody admirable if you ask me. And technically, by visiting my blog, you did. Ha-HAH! I think it’s a day to celebrate, unless you prefer to make it a day for activism - St. V died for the cause of marriage for a portion of the population who higher-ups felt shouldn’t be allowed it. Who knows what his views on homosexuality would be, but luckily for us (and the whole point of this is that) he’s dead - so he can’t complain if we use his Day to say “Hey, Governments - Let Your People Marry”.

I was unconsciously mirroring the red red world, when I ventured out into it to search out records with my newly-drivers’-liscenced sister. My reds were deeper though, because straight-up primary colours make me look startled. And besides, I like the mystery of a slightly dirty hue.

I couldn’t physically be with my beloved for Valentine’s Day - actually, we’ve never been together on The Day (don’t worry! It’s never mattered, either) - and I’m not near any New Year celebrations as I thought I would be so I’m here typing.. Able to say that if you are feeling blue (and so quite out of place) then all you need to do is put on some dreamin’ gear and use that in-head laptop we call ‘imagination’ to fly you to where and with whom you really want to be. Look, I’ll show you:

Oh - and I beg your pardon, happy New Year to China, and anyone who celebrates!

I don’t always illustrate my face subject to the thoughts I had when I dressed for the day. Sometimes I do, but sometimes I just add what I think would look fitting based on the taken photograph, or to add a balancing agent to the mix (for example, if I look bodaciously Disney-buxom, I’ll probably add a manface). Sometimes I add a completely new element, to see how it changes the story of the clothing and my body language.

Today my creative process went like this:

“Haha, this outfit looks way sixties! A thinking socialite, like the ones from the movies, who took the Sound of Music straight to heart. Such things were nowhere near my mind when I put this stuff on! How interesting! I think I shall add a snooty model head, to complete the ensemble.”

“Hmmm. A lot of my thighs are visible here. How can I make a thigh look interesting? Well, much as I dislike him, Batman has made forearms look interesting.. how can I improve on that.. fins.. fins.. mermaids?.. fishpeople.. Gillman!”

“I can’t be doing with drawing ANOTHER set of thigh scales. The Creature’s only my second favourite type of classic movie-monster, anyway; I’ll show that Kate Beckinsdale what for. What a twit.”

Consequences Creed

Consequences Creed has great hair, especially for a professional wrestler. His body has an unusual chunkiness that looks dependable - I’m not worried for his health, or for the crowd of his opponent - and non-monstrous; he’s not scary thin or scary ‘roidy, he’s not super Hollywood-guy ripped but he looks like he is strong (especially in the thighs!). His costume doesn’t have too many elements to it, but it does have enough, and it makes me think of Wonder Woman a little. He doesn’t look nude like the guys who wrestle in pants, and the short shorts are sporty. I dislike watching matches where people are wearing those long spandexy leggings, because I think about them riding low in the crotch and feel sympathy irritation. The colours of his getup complement his skin tones. He springs about and is cheerful. This is a good wrestler image.

Awesome Kong

I am not impressed with the fact that Awesome Kong’s bodice didn’t fit her boobs properly when I was watching TNA semi-regularly. “Get her a tailor, management!” I shouted. But it looks like they did! I dog the Xena look, and I dig that she is FIERCE not a fuckdoll. She pulls great faces and tends to ignore the crowd, I think. She also has cool hair, and I like how she lets it fly about all over. I like her little wrestler boots! Her NAME is AWESOME. And she really, really does make good faces. Good wrestler image.

Sting

Gothy wrestlers (there are more than you’d think, unless you are a big ole wrestling fan) are some of the funniest things, in my opinion. But I like Sting! He is old, for one thing. Kind of. He has a neat gimmick (the lights go out. They come on.. AND THERE IS STING!!!!!!), and he reminds me of the Misfits I like Vampiro by default. I like that he paints his face, all spooooky and that he used to wear pink leggings with bleached hair. I very much enjoy that he had (has?) a major beef (or whatever wrasslin’ calls it, I forget) with Kurt Angle, who I find one of the most boring Entertainment Superstars around. Sting threatens to bite fingers off! He believes in respect, hence troubles with Angle. I dislike his coats, because great big muscular types need careful tailoring and better fabric and better, non-hideous stadium lighting to look purposeful in structured-flowing garments in my opinion. But I respect that he wears it! Good wrestler image!

Samoa Joe

I liked Samoa Joe because.. OK, I liked Samoa Joe because he had a slight rockabilly bent but mainly because his name had “Samoa” in and one of my favourite moments of Dog the Bounty Hunter is Tim yelling “MY WIFE IS SA-MOAN!“. But! Then I didn’t watch TNA (the only wrestling we get on our TV, which is good, because it is my favourite) for a while. When I came back, Joe had a sleeveless Hokuto leather jacket! And (I think?) different facial “tattoos”! And he went around doing peoples’ bidding, like he had been to the future and come back a badass brainwashed cyborg. Duh, obviously I like that. GOOD WRESTLER IMAGE.

Best of all: Booker T

He has a couple of namesakes to choose from. The musician, seen above, and the political leader Booker T (who you should read about). He wears pants, with massive great boots and sometimes T-shirts, which makes him look so nude that I am simply amused rather than squemish. His use of colour in his gear is skillful He also makes great faces, and pretty evidently has a sense of humour that I enjoy. He uses GOLD and CROWN MOTIFS in his ring-wear. He involves his wife! he wears his hair in a ‘princess ponytail’ sometimes, and his boots look like platforms half the time. I just froze the first video here on a frame that shows him jumping reeeally high, which I admire. He also also has massive thighs, which would alarm me in real life but just make me go wow, really?? when watching on teevee. And he just looks like a “nice man”, silly and subjective as that is.

My beloved adds, Booker T is cool about racism because he called Hulk Hogan NIGGA when he got carried away and then laughed and his wife patted his shoulder! She just pats him and stifles her mirth!

 
“A definite challenge there from Harlem Heat~”

Best wrestler image.

Aw, shit, wiki just told me he’s TNA No More. Shucks.

Why do I take this post to get all this opining (is this the correct word?) out? Partly out of frank enjoyment. Partly out of an inclination to let people know about stuff they might not know. And partly because I want to do my part, if possible, in making sure that we never, ever return to the days of..

“Wrestler hair”

That is exactly what “wrestler hair” looks like. Youtube, for example, Royal Rumble 1992. Or I could do it for you! Jake the Snake is a marginal offender, but watch for Sid.

He was NOT ALONE IN THIS.

Bad wrestler image

Picture credits here
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Sunday Sunday Sunday.

Well, I finally got to reading Tank Girl: Armadillo. I read it in bed, reading reading reading for a decent couple of hours like I always, always used to. Was it good? Should you buy it (or borrow, or.. loan it)? Let’s start at the start! And finish before the end (of the book), FYI; the second half is short stories and suchlike, and I haven’t read’em yet. You can do THAT for yourself.

There’re two prefaces, from the author, and I want you to read this little bit of one of them and understand why I didn’t read past it, in the common room lunch place at work, because of having “something in my eye”.

That’s kind. Kindness and fiction-appreciation are important. Honestly, I think this book is worth the purchase for that sentiment alone.

When I was reading I started out feeling uncomfortable, to be honest. You may be different and probably are but I really don’t find it easy to come in fresh to a story and start yellin’ WOOO, BLOW HIS HEAD OFF! I mentioned in the Jennifer’s Body SPOILERS how touchy I am about cannon fodder. I don’t need ameri-dubbing on my Dragonball to her “I think I see their parachutes!”, or whatever it was. I only catch six pokemon per game if I can manage it, for goodness sake, because shoving them inside a computer seems mean. I’m a big ole bleeding heart and hearing the idol of the novel say Okay, so we shot down a cop in cold blood. So fuckin’ what? makes me go “eeeeehhh” and squirm a bit. But what felt unusual is that the book (author/protag both) seems to acknowledge that. She say the italicised sentences in a page-chapter devoted to explaining how that’s not as muddy as it seems, how I shouldn’t judge her anyway, and how she doesn’t even care if I do. And not in such a deluded, self-convincing, distancing way as the way I put it makes it sound.

I still wasn’t completely cool with the thing of it, though. Which is why it was a relief when everybody revealed themselves to be such complete stinkers who were just as willing to solve problems with murder and carnage and pain as Tank Girl and her gang, only without being fun and kind and caring the rest of the time. In a world of shooting out brains before breakfast, motivation comes to be very meaningful. It’s an interesting authorial quirk, I think - the mixture of boisterous cartoonery and irredeemable-to-the-point-of-2d villains with the 3d motivation and realistic emotional resonance. Tank Girl really does, after a while, become a vessel for violent revenge/lesson fantasies. I don’t really feel ok thinking about feeding grenades to real world despicable people, or people who have crossed or simply annoyed me - it just feels counter-productive and even in my mental Holodeck I can’t ignore that people have.. well, whole people within themselves. But here? These people whose innards I can see are bad, bad, no-good people through and through. I have it on highest authority.

Tank Girl really was my armour, as I read this book.

It’s not just that though; Armadillo is a novel. It has a story. She and her peeps are making war on this one town full of heinous characters, who’ve ruined or messed with the lives of two (really three, I guess, but Sub Girl’s ex is never relevant as her ex) of the crew. It’s full of backstory, and re-weaving of now-story, and I think that makes it backstory for some of the previously published comics cos there’s no talk of any babies. I have no idea how Tank Girl canon works. I sort of don’t want to.

There’s also (I warned you in the post title here, SPOILERS) time travel. Which I enjoyed as a plot contrivance and a method to get extra emotional facts out there, but also because it was a very, very similar method to the one used in the film Somewhere in Time. I really dig that movie; Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, gorgeous clothing, heart-wrenching plot. Excellent rainy day movie, and the leitmotif is a keeper. Tank Girl yammers on about a movie (and a particular song from it) she accidentally managed to see as a child which no-one else had heard of periodically, too, so I figure this is an extra relevant tangent.

Reading this book made me feel better about things. She’s not “the perfect person” and she’s not, of course, “real”. I’ve said before that reading T.G. comics make me want to dress like myself, not like her, and want to celebrate being myself, not like her. And that’s true, because you know when you read her that if you were to meet her, then she would either think you were rad or disgusting - and thinking that oneself is not rad is not the way to go about encouraging Tank Girls esteem. Plus, she speaks a lot of wisdom:

Buy it.

Wearing today addendum:

Four whole pictures. Because I say so!

These next two, see, I find interesting. Because if you could see the expressions I have under the pixels you’d know they were completely different to the ones that I drew. But the ones I drew look like they might be similar, don’t you think?

Listening to (hence double mus-tash whammy):

Gonna be talking about ART this next week. I just found out that one of my favourite artists is the son in law of another of my favourite artists, to whom my mum compared some of my stylings (best compliment in memory, possibly). And after I cook these blueberry muffins, I’ma start reading Tank Girl: Armadillo for SPOILERS v.3.THE FUTURE! IT GLISTENS!

I just recently ate this:

It was delicious. As well as being an excellent shade of green, pistachios are an excellent flavour!

Having written yesterday about “what I have bought this month”, naturally today I went out and made four more purchases. You’re ruining it for me, I hear you cry! My predictions are all thrown off! Well, that will teach you to make assumptions based in consumerism. But I know, I know, it’s all my fault.. So to make up for it, I’m going to have a go at saying I will do this in a blog entry and then actually doing “this”. It’s not that I’ve given up on all the posts I’ve said I’m going to do - these things just take time! And sometimes, equipment.

Anyhow. Coming up in February (or maybe a bit before), four separate reviews of four separate books.

First, because it’s smallest, this single-issue floppy. I picked it up after finding neither of the trades I wanted in the comic shop that’s technically local to me, but ridiculously tricky to get to, and then having seen both Jubes and Gambit and No-Girl on the cover. Then when I flicked through, Quentin Quire! I think that kid is just adorable, his angstpain is just so all consuming and his anger so impotent — despite his great psychic abilities. And he’s so SURE that he’s RIGHT! Grant Morrison, your work is often groovy.

After I left the comic shop (and after I completely failed to find anything I was after for research in HMV) I wound up in Waterstones, where I found three separate comics - or comics-derivative - books. I feel guilty! Comics should be bought from speciality stores! Or they’ll DIE! But I didn’t seen any of these things in that shop! So to make up for it, here’s a plug..

Anyway. Onwards.

Tank Girl. Always a plus, no? Yeah, even the movie. If you don’t appreciate it, maybe you’re looking at it funny? This is a text-only book, a novel. I bought it for novelty value, honestly - can Tank Girl work without images?? We’ll find out!

Jennifer’s Body: this isn’t a novelisation of the movie, apparently. It’s four short stories about how boys in the school perceive Jennifer. I haven’t seen the movie yet but the commentary on Jezebel was fascinating and I’m planning on a dvd watch; I’m generally interested in less than franchise-y peripheral add-ons to fiction and, yeah, I want to see how the (male) writer adheres to or strays from the feminist slant of the film’s plot. STAY TUNED.

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock vol. 2. I want to read more classic 2000AD in general, more Pat Mills in particular, and a black-and-white phonebook post-apocalyptic epic is just what I need on a rainy day. Plus, my beloved said it was good one time, and he usually has pretty good taste.

SO. Let’s see, huh? I’m excited! I hope you are too! And please, don’t think you’ll be bored if you’re here for fashiony stuff. Don’t expect a review from me that ignores character design.

Click the above picture for the warmthblog entry! Just a small tip, but a good’un all the same.

I found this badge earlier whilst I was looking for some nails. It is just about perfect:

Combining good girls who will be fine if through no fault of their own they find themselves lost in a wood, with post-apocalyptica and comics. Or, combining me with me. Marvelous.