John Mortell’s blog

Continuing Marvel Comics current stance of good works which they keep a fair bit of control over, here’s a sample video for a new ‘Black Panther’ cartoon. Heavily based off the new version of the comic that came out a few years ago, you can really see the John Romita Jr. artwork. There’s some interesting interviews here with some of the cartoon’s creators.

I’m going to try write a post on my experience of the U.S and finishing college the next day or two. In the meantime, back to video-blogging:

I already talked about part of this movie before, this is the whole film. Not bad, though certain parts are better than others. Its got a weird ‘metatextual’ vibe going on, though the Adam & Eve stuff is pretty good:

Continue Reading »

I may not have bought it yet but it is pretty good and well worth the buy. It has gotten the tone of the book down pretty well, though unsurprisingly enough, lacking the space for the subplots that made up the book, it feels a bit … emptier. On a tech note, for some reason the film goes into black and white every so often. Try and ignore it:

While this cartoon isn’t quite as funny as the comic, mainly because it’s been toned down a bit, it’s still good for a chuckle:

Cock Load – Cock Load – Battle Pope – In the Beginning

Cock Load – Cock Load – Battle Pope – Genesis of an Ass-Kicking Continue Reading »

While I’m supposed to be studying, I instead went looking into some old Cartoon Network stuff and came across some fairly entertaining shorts. Like this old ‘Dial M For Monkey’ ep. What was weird was how well hearing Dexter’s (of Dexter’s Lab fame) voice and the music brought back the feeling of being a kid again.

Came across this ‘Garfield is dead’ flash movie somewhat randomly today.. its a flash movie that is based off a series of ‘garfield’ strips form 1989… they’re rather dark as the feature Garfield being left alone in the house after everyone has moved away, which one would assume resulted in Garfield starving to death…

Interestingly enough,it’s lead to a group of people believing that given that the strips end with Garfield retreating into his imagination that it implies that all the Garfield strips since about 1990 (when Garfield would have starved to death) are now the result of Garfield’s ghost which is trapped in the house and refuses to realise that he’s dead.

Which is a load of bollocks really, but it’s a cool idea. And the strips are wonderfully dark….

While the strips I’m uploading are in colour, the b&w one’s that the flash movie uses are somewhat better so I’d advise people to take a look at that first…

And while we’re on the subject of depressing comic strips – this is actually worse I think and this is another great example of ‘is that actually real and written by the real author’ style comics where Walt Disney has Mickey Mouse trying to kill himself

UpdateThis site has a lot of the information about the strips as well as a really cool animation that is very similar to the actual strip and its story Continue Reading »

I had heard about this webcomic before but never actually had a look at it. But today,having nothing better to do with myself and wanting to have a day where I didn’t do college related stuff ofr the first time in well … ages, I had a look through all 300 odd strips. (Well technically,I tried to do college stuff but was really not into it and decided to give myself the day off). Anyway, they’re pretty good, granted the last few strips befroe it went on a break (where it currently is at the moment) were a bit lacking in imagination, and the insistence they have on archiving all the weekend filler strips (even though most of the time its the same strip saturday and sunday and those same strips keep being repeated … ahhh) is a bit annoying. But the whole thing is pretty funny. Anyway, here’s some samples so take a look.

Jonathan Hickman produced one of the best comic books and general pieces of entertainment I saw last year with his book ‘the Nightly News‘. Thankfully he isn’t resting on his laurels and has got several works in the pipeline. The most recent of which being ‘Pax Romana’. Here is a link to the first issue online. It’s very very good, maintaining the impressive design sense that the ‘Nightly News’ had, while still not seeming too derivative of that work. Granted, the story sounds derivative to those of us who have read too much science-fiction but it’s still done better than a lot of those stories. As a final aside, in an era when many 22 page comics take 5 minutes to read a book like ‘Pax Romana’ is very much value for money in terms of time spent:

PAX ROMANA tells the tale of 5000 men sent on an impossible mission to change the past and save the future. It’s the end of the world: Will they succeed, or will they fail?

Also of great interest is his talking about the first issue in depth here. What he says that I’ll pass on in it is that the internet doesn’t really do his art style justice as the two page spreads are designed to be read as one image rather than two seperate pages. Anyway, I really recommend taking a look and if your that impressed there’s a preview of the second issue here

Funny. And very very weird.