Had a chance to see completed pages for “The God Trap” today, and stared Bamapana in the eye for the very first time.

What’s more disturbing; that there is an aboriginal trickster god famed for his incestuous ways, or that I write about him? 

In any case, Gary has done a fantastic job and Bamapana looks utterly filthy and profane, just as he should. Fans of EC horror, tentacles, night clubbing, betrayal, and evil tables (yes, evil tables) should all do just fine. Kitten fanciers … not so much.

Check the story out in the upcoming “Choices” anthology from Insomnia, and prepare to come face to face with Bamapana …

Snark and Fury has put the first episode of the new season of Robin Hood through his snark-o-meter and found it wanting!

If you believed that thought crimes were for foreign dictatorships and science fiction distopias, then beware.

“The Criminal Justice & Immigration Act 2008 came in to effect in January 2009, and Section 49 of the Coroners and Justice Bill is currently being reviewed. Both of these Acts could impact on the creation of comic books and how they are sold, both have the potential to land innocent people in court, on the sex offender register or in jail.”

Essentially, it would appear that our government want to make it as illegal to draw something as it is to photograph it actually happening. All it takes is for them to deem your art “inappropriate”.

Needless to say, this law probably makes most of Monkeys with Machineguns illegal.

On behalf of horror writers everywhere, I urge you to sign up to the petition against this abusive form of censorship -Petition to: ensure that the future of the medium of Comic Art is not endangered by The Coroners and Justice Bill or The Criminal and Immigration Act 2008. | Number10.gov.uk.

Facebookers, you can now show your support for Monkeys with Machineguns … Live! by joining our Facebook event.

We have something special planned to run alongside the all-day story-making extravaganza of MWM Live, so numbers count. Literally.

Look forward to seeing you there. I think

Monkeys with Machineguns … Live! is on the front page of the updated website for the Small Press Expo 2009

No pressure.

I’ve just read the online preview of Cy Dethan’s Cancertown from Insomnia, and must say it looks like a very interesting read.

Cy describes the story as “Chinatown meets The Wizard of Oz, and he should know, but I get more of a feel of “Neverwhere meets Angelheart”. Whatever the mix, you can’t go wrong with those sorts of ingredients.

Bryan Talbot says “Cancertown will disorientate you, suck you in, chew you up and spit you out and you might well be in need of a change of underwear by the end.”

I say “Check out the Myebook – Cancertown preview and prepare to be impressed”.

I have been using Celtx to write my comic book scripts for quite some time now, and find one of its most useful features to be the ability to keep character, prop, and scene information seperate from the main body of the script but with hyperlinks to move to and from the script. Celtx also allows you to attach notes and annotations to elements of your script.

As with any piece of software however, there are drawbacks, and my key gripe with Celtx is that you can’t easily redefine the templates for characters, props, scenes, etc. Whilst the software is quite well optimsed for movie production, filling in the little forms isn’t really suitable or applicable to creating a comic book.

This prompted me to explore the notion of using a Wiki to write my scripts – free from the constraints imposed by Celtx’s formatting and functionality, but with all the functionality to create links between points in the script and additional information.

I knew I wanted a file based Wiki, probably using Javascript, that had no requirement for a server install. I also knew that I wanted it to be open source, so that I could change it if I wanted to and support it if I had to. I had a thought that possibly TiddlyWiki was what I needed, but no ideas beyond that.

Enter WikiMatrix. 

WikiMatrix is a fantastic site that documents the functionality of all the major Wiki platforms, both closed and open source, and provides a comparison matrix that can be used to compare features and functionality.

Possibly its more powerful feature is the ability to select a Wiki using a wizard based series of questions, providing you with statistics as you answer each question as to how many wikis you have discounted with each answer.

Predictably, TiddlyWiki came back as the obvious answer for me, but WikiMatrix also threw up a number of other options that are all worthy of investigation before I settle on what might be my new writing platform.

So, whilst I may or may not be changing platform from my beloved Celtx, I will certainly be returning to WikiMatrix.

Received news yesterday that Cymru Con was cancelled, at least for this year.

Official news is that 

Our main sponsor has had to withdraw their financial backing, and with the current economic climate this has simply made it impossible to be able to put on a large event such as Cymru Con as we have been unable to secure further financial backing.

I know a number of the people who have been involved in putting this convention together and we are all obviously disappointed that it will not go ahead this year. It is certainly not for a want of effort from the likes of Iz McAuliffe, who have fought valiantly to keep the con alive.

Still, there is always next year …

The software that is free in Microsoft's Free Web Software Eco-System seems mostly to be open source; watch out for Wordpress and Drupal in their top five! Considering that Microsoft are touting this as "their" web platform, does anyone else think that the inclusion of PHP and MySQL based apps is a little misleading?

This needs no explanation or introduction, it is simply laugh out loud funny … BeaucoupKevindotcom | Just Imagine…Social Media’s Watchmen..