Comic Cuts - 13 October 2017

I must be barking mad... but I've agreed to do another boot fair with my equally daft, but clearly persuasive, sister. It is going to be a busy weekend as Mel and I have tickets to see Jeremy Hardy at the Arts Centre on Saturday night and we want to fit in a trip to the cinema to see Bladerunner 2049 as soon as we can, although trying to find a free evening for it with our friends is proving to be as easy as nailing smoke to a ceiling.

It will be a nice (?) break from sitting in front of the computer. I'm maintaining my 1,000 words a day on the Fifty Famous Authors book. I've worked on a pair of related essays for the past couple of weeks which are at long last almost complete. One is finished and the other is waiting on some information that won't be arriving until next week. In the meantime, I've dived into another piece, this one a lot shorter, which will probably be part of batch two of essays... but it made for a change of pace after two weeks wallowing in the same subjects.

So we have an addition for the totalizer after a couple of weeks  of zero movement. The word count is now 69,816 spread over 16 essays, so they're averaging around 4,350 words... which at a 1,000 words a day means I'm writing one every four days. I need to pick up the pace a little, or I won't be hitting fifty completed essays for some time. I am, however, almost ready to process the first batch of essays in order to put out the first volume of the e-book version of this project. The plan is for these to be around 50-60,000 word collections, somewhere between a quarter and a third the size of the print version.

How long I can keep up the pace without becoming distracted by the TV is another problem I'm going to be facing. There's a lot of shows appearing that I want to watch, and keeping up with them could take over my life, if I let it. Were currently only watching a handful of shows on UK terrestrial channels, many of them only recently back on our screens – The Last Leg, Have I Got News For You, Upstart Crow, W1A – while Freeview is providing us with our favourite, Taskmaster (which I cannot recommend highly enough... if you can get Dave, give it a try). We've recorded the latest Scandi-noir drama (Black Lake) and one of the crime dramas on the BBC (Rellik), which we'll catch up with shortly and we're watching only one other drama each week: Channel 4's fantastic Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams. The episodes to date have been fantastic and hopefully one in the eye for people who still insist that science fiction is all rockets and ray guns. Its good to see this arrive hot on the heels of The Handmaid's Tale – hopefully Electric Dreams will do well enough for the people who control the schedules to see that decent science fiction can find an audience.

The above I can cope with, even with the addition of QI and a couple of other shows that are starting up next week. It's the mad rush of shows coming out of the US that's the problem. We've been watching Star Trek: Discovery, The Orville (a Trek parody) and Marvel's The Inhumans for the past couple of weeks. But "Après nous, le déluge," as the French say: The Gifted, Gotham, Designated Survivor and Lucifer have already started and this week alone has seen the new season debuts of Mr. Robot, Supergirl, The Flash, DC's Legends of Tomorrow and Arrow with Mindhunter and Dirk Gently arriving tonight (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday).

I think I am now officially attempting to watch too many shows. I still have a bunch of shows that I haven't gotten around to watching, including most of the previous season of Arrow and I've just started watching the first season of Designated Survivor. Only a year late!

Today's random scans were selected by doing a search for "bat" in my cover scans folder and then trying to pair up some of the results.