I Want To Fly And Run Until It Hurts...

Reports of my demise have been not so much exaggerated, as fabricated by me, in lieu of possessing an actual life.

Chaps and chapettes, a thousand pardons for leaving you all poised at the cusp of climax, awaiting my next missive. Not since Captain Ireland #2 came out in August ’95 have so many waited for so little. I genuinely thought you and I would see more of each other, but I foolishly started this blog venture in the midst of my first foray into monthly comics, thinking I’d have gallons of free time to tit around, spewing our sketches, and puking up prose. How wrong I was. Maximum Dinobots is now in the can, with issues #4 and #5 still to come. Track the previous three issues down if you can, and feel free to ask any questions here on this very blog.

So, I have recently arrived back from a two-week sojourn in the Australs. Whittle and I had visited there together previously five years ago, and she’s addicted to the place the same way as I am to Japanese plastic and muffins. So as a treat for the pair of us following my Dinobot enforced incarceration for over half a year, we jetted off for two weeks. I’ll spare you the slide show, but I had many a hairy experience with the wildlife over there. However, in one piece, though a smidge scorched, I’m back again to save the universe. Working on the script to an issue of the upcoming Transformers: Coda in which I get to revisit Kup, the character I wrote for previously. Enjoying the process immensely so far, it’s a lovely change of tack from cramming in a million E.J. Su designed Headmaster TFs onto a single page.

As well as that, I’m cheating on you at another blog. http://eclecticmicks.blogspot.com/ is a collective effort between myself and six other Irish comic artists, namely Bob Byrne, PJ Holden, Stephen Mooney, Declan Shalvey, Will Sliney and Stephen Thompson (alphabetical order’s the way to go with these things). In it, we are allocated a specific day and we psyche one another out into posting a sketch on our given day. Mine is the nattily titled ‘Nick’s Sunday Roche’ and I urge you to check it out, mainly for the inhuman effort those other fools have put into their offerings. I wonder how long I can blame jetlag for the quality of my sketches…

Want more? Okay. Over the next week, I’m gonna be offering folk the chance to buy some original artwork from me. Details to come, as I iron them out, but if I suss it out, I should be able to offer overseas folk a chance to purchase my colour print sets too. I promise you’ll hear about this in the next seven days, or you may all, in turns or at the same time, violate me with a pinecone.

I’ve got another thing to post at you, but I’ll save it for later. For now, let me speak of my trip to Australia…

I was apprehensive about this visit, due to my chronic fear of spiders. Here in Ireland, I have a functional form of the condition, meaning I can get on with things, but feel very uneasy knowing there’s one of those eight-legged pricks loitering nearby. My last stint in the Antipodes featured an ordinarily scenic walk through a forest, but was shat upon by the presence of huntsmen spiders, squatting malevolently in webs every few metres or so, each specimen an incarnate symbol of evil. Whittle acted as my superhero, marching ahead of me so as to take on the wrath of these satanic spinners. (I watch out for ghosts and monsters for her, so it evens out.)

So, knowing that this trip, she and I would be venturing North to Cairns, and the Tablelands in particular, I was fretful in the extreme as to what would lie in wait amongst the moistened glades of the rainforests. Whittle promise me that there would be no spiders. While this was a DIRTY FUCKING LIE, and I almost passed out from repeated exposure to the cruel site of orb spider-after-shitting-orb spider, this , my girlfriend reassured me, is the only creature I would encounter on my travels:



Species: Patrick (Patricus Ridiculus)

· Reaches speeds of up 62 kph.
· Third set of legs purely for cosmetic reasons.
· Hairs on afore-mentioned legs grow to great lengths, and are plaited for ease of manoeuvrability. They grow rapidly during a full moon, and must be shorn accordingly.
· Rear legs grow throughout Patrick’s life.
· This is actually how a Patrick dies; the legs continue to grow unobstructed, until they are so long, Patrick’s rear is raised to a 45 degree angle. At which point, his bodily waste can no longer be processed along his body and expelled, and he perishes, drowning in his own faecal matter.
· Patrick is making his sex face.

You've Been Nicked.