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Mom: 20 Years On

I can’t believe I’m writing down that it’s TWENTY YEARS since my mother died. In all kinds of ways it seems surreal, improbable and deeply perplexing to try to process this apparent fact of chronology.

And yet, there it is. I have lately been rebuilding/restoring the old archives on this blog, dating back to December 7th 2000 (how naïve it all seemed back then), more than half of which are now back online, with much more to come… and there’s no doubting that these events happened a full two decades ago. The same day Alex Toth died; the birthday of both Vincent Price and Christopher Lee—what is it about May 27th?!

Mom August 1956
This is mom in August 1956, aged 13. She was a cool teen.

If you haven’t already, I hope you go and read the blog I wrote back on May 27th 2006 (and indeed my contribution in the comments thread). These posts say it all, with much more clarity and raw immediacy than I can hope to summon today. I was curiously impressed, looking back, at how articulate I was. I’m not sure I’d handle it as well today. I know I wasn’t, in fact, handling it well at all at that time (who does?)—but I was expressing myself extremely well.

I would like to use the second half of this post to… go deeper. But first, the positive stuff. I have a photo album page, fully restored and updated, dedicated to mom—which I will update over time, as I continue to scan more of the best old photos I have. You can view the page as it stands here:

In Memory of Mom.
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Me & Mom & Horror (and More)

Some memories of mom as we approach the 20th anniversary of her death…

I got my love of horror from mom. Where mom got it from, who knows. But she was hooked on weird stuff fairly early on. One of my favourite stories that she liked to tell also explains her approach to me and horror movies when I was a kid.

In the summer of 1958, the UK was buzzing with the release of Hammer’s first entry in their Dracula series. Starring Christopher Lee as the Count and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, the word was that this movie was seriously, hard-core scary and maybe, too, a little bit (GASP!) sexy!

Dracula Poster 1958

Mom was 15 years old on August 13th 1958. Dracula was an “X” certificate—she was too young to see it.
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Daredevil: Born Again… is OK

Daredevil: Born Again Promo

I mean, it’s not up to the standard of the three series of Daredevil that were on Netflix, c. 2015-18. The third season of that (actually a version of F Miller’s Born Again storyline) is about as good as live-action superhero material gets. Notwithstanding my reservations about superhero stuff which excludes kids… and this most certainly does, in all its incarnations… the Netflix show, but especially season three, was excellent.

Netflix Daredevil
Netflix DAREDEVIL. Who’d think that DD played by a Brit would be so good?

Born Again of course is full-on Disney/MCU/Kevin Feige territory. This left some people to dismiss it as foredoomed junk from the outset. Not entirely without reason, perhaps, but……
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Battle of the Bulge

(Top note: the personal posts are back!! Please tell me this isn’t a mistake.)

NEWSFLASH: I need to lose weight.

REWIND: I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had my ups-and-downs, weight-wise!

I was always pretty skinny up until about 1988, when I first gained a bit of weight. And I do mean a bit. At the time I was drinking some alcohol and also smoking an amount of pot (which, I’m sure many of you know, gives you “the munchies”). So, I was aghast enough, after seeing a photo where I looked kinda round-faced, to go on a diet! I probably weighed 11 stones. But by mid-1989, I weighed a mere nine stones—the lightest I’ve been my entire adult life. In fact, I was a bit too light. I am, after all, 5’8″, and my build, while not large, is not petite—so nine stones was pushing it!

It didn’t last long. I was back up to maybe 10.5 after a few months. And that, to my mind, was a good weight for me. Anyhow, I have to say that at the age of 20, losing weight was a breeze. I had a simple method: I just ate exactly half of every meal. The weight came right off, quickly & efficiently.
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Fiddling With The Site

I used to make a habit of it back in the day—restless tinkering, never quite being satisfied. In the last decade, although this site has been through a number of changes, I’ve been less inclined and not even sure what purpose the site served. For a long time the Portfolio section attempted to be an all-encompassing summary of everything I supposedly do, for example, and it never quite worked. So this time out I have focused it just on my artwork.

LOL, look—some people think my artwork is crap! But I have as much right as anyone to improve. I believe my portrait work has improved significantly in the last six years. Overall my stuff has enjoyed a more modest improvement. No doubt I have weak areas. But it makes sense to me to focus the Website on something in particular. It gets messy otherwise.
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The Blog Is Back

Oh, no, really?!

Worse than that, I am slowly reviving all the old archives going back to December 2000. It will take a while, updating & adding categories & tags, checking old links, adding or upgrading images where possible, etc. But yeah. I wanted the history back in place.
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