While my flaky posting seems to be a more recurring trend lately I’d like to take a moment to assure you that I am not in fact dead.

Truth is I started a new parttime job for three days a week to help pay the bills. On top of that I still have some client work that needs to be sorted.

Until I have all of that squared away this site will be a bit quiet. Once that’s all settled and done I’ll be back in action.

For real this time.

Honest…

No really…

Hey where are you going?

About half a year ago I joined a local boardgaming group which we found via friends. Me and my girlfriend loved playing boardgames, at the time the biggest different game we had was Catan, which is a really fun game.

Since joining the group my interest in boardgames has advanced even more. Primarily because this group doesn’t play your standard toystore boardgames, but the more interesting and exotic ones. My current favorites there are Dominion, Union Pacific, Incan Gold, Panic Station, and Pandemic.

Through the miracle of Twitter I was brought to the attention of a game called Elder Sign, a Lovecraft inspired cardgame. Given the many Lovecraftian references in my comics, it comes as no surprise that I’m a big fan of the whole Cthulhu Mythos. As such I decided to buy the game.

It really is a ton of fun. There’s a lot of dicerolling involved meaning there’s a serious amount of luck required. The goal of the game is to prevent an Ancient One from awakening by collecting Elder Signs. Failure to do so means the Ancient One awakens and he devours you. By the end of the game you will be cursing the dice, repeatedly.

Another game I bought which is from the same publisher is DungeonQuest. It’s a reprint of a game from the eighties and involves dungeon crawling in search of the Dragon’s treasure.

This game is brutal, you are likely to die on nearly every turn in the dungeon, but you can’t stand still either because you have to escape with treasure before the sun goes down or the dragon eats you. My first game I decided, quite foolishly, to venture into the catacombs, I spent most of the game there until I got out. And then my greed got the better of me as I tried to get more treasure. Suffice it to say, I became dinner for the Dragon.

That being said, I love both these games. Lot’s of fun to do and they won’t be the last games I buy.

Also, this is a general call. I’m looking for two playable decks of Netrunner. If anyone can help me out, please let me know.

So recently I’ve been messing about with drawing, writing and other creative things. One of them was reworking Shazram, not showing it yet as I’m still working on it. One of the things is that I wasn’t happy with the quality of the Shazram pages I did. The same sort of goes for the other comics.

As such I’ve decided to end No Tie Zone. Although the comic had merit it wasn’t really working for me, and as such not for others. The humor was stale and somewhat forced at best. Instead I’m going to work on an entirely new comic, I already have things worked out in my head and it will be closer to The House Of Madness, which did work. Though I was never fond of the self insertion.

This new comic will be entirely new in it’s own universe unrelated to anything else. I will probably post sneakpeaks here as I work on them. Since I really want to have things worked out a bit better before going on.

Tim will be updating for a little bit still but there will be a break in the near future when this particular story arc ends. We’re working on new pages but we’re also going to launch it in our native language and want to make them synch in terms of updating.

Shazram is going to be long term. I really want this to push my skills and abilities, I may even not publish Shazram as a webcomic but make it available in a different format. However on this I can’t make any promises or certainties yet. I will however be working on it.

For now I shall entertain you with continuous updates of the House Of Madness which is rerunning entirely in color.

As you may have noticed, the website has had some changes. Most notably the homepage displays the latest page of each comics in order of latest publication.

The plan is that each comic will get their own updating schedule. Similarly each comic’s own page will have a more personalized look to it.

Lastly the comics are now in subdomains.

More things are on the way, so just keep an eye out.

The Hobbit trailer has been making it’s rounds around the internet for a while now and like the Lord of The Rings it looks pretty interesting and entertaining.

But at the same time I can’t help but feel a bit bummed. When LOTR hit the big screen it was supposed to usher in a new era of movies based on fantasy fiction. To a degree this was true. But there was a glaring ‘flaw’ with books converted to movies after LOTR.

Namely they were all children’s stories. Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Golden Compass, Spiderwick Chronicles, and a bunch of others I’ve probably forgotten.

These aren’t bad movies, but if Hollywood is so insistend on not creating original stories and converting books why not grab a few gems that would do quite well as big budget adventure movies. So here’s a list of of fantasy stories that would probably do quite well in the cinemas if done well:

Dragonlance Chronicles

This has adventure written all over in heeps. With a lot of interesting and identifyable characters, this series of books would be quite awesome as a movie. Or three movies, since Hollywood likes milking.

For those of you that don’t know. The world of Krynn used to know Gods until they got a bit annoyed and decided to smash a big city with a meteor. Leaving the world without clerics or sane religion for about 300 years. Untill a barbarian woman shows up in an Inn (it starts in an inn like it should) with a bluecrystal staff, said to hold the power of the gods. What follows is an adventure involving undead, dragons, death knight, regular knights, gnomes, dwarves, elves, and one very adorable Kender. (look it up)

Magic Kingdom For Sale: Sold

This is a slightly lesser known book by Terry Brooks, but it’s all kinds of fun. A mildly depressed man (after the death of his wife) finds an ad for a Magic Kingdom. He decides to buy it and becomes it’s king. Assisted by a not so great wizard, a butler turned into a dog and a few other interesting characters he has to find out the secret of the Kingdom of Landover.

Face it, that premise alone makes it worthwhile. It even has that thing Hollywood prefers, a link to the real world in the form of the main protagonist. This movie would go a long way really.

Forgotten Realms

Admittedly I haven’t read a lot of these books, I tried reading one of the Dark Elf saga books but I was in a weird mood. However, there’s bound to be a wealth of stories that would make excellent material for movies.

Gotrek and Felix

These are two unlikely allies that have a multitude of adventures. Felix is a bard that once pledged that he would write a song about the heroic death of Gotrek. The result is that he now has to follow Gotrek everywhere in order to witness said heroic death. That premise alone is enough for a fun movie and there’s a lot of stories to draw from.

Artemis Fowl

Technically this stars a kid, however this kid doesn’t annoy me and is in fact a genius. The stories themselves lend to proper movies quite well. So hollywood ought to get on this one since the Harry Potter tree is empty now.

Basically a genius level IQ boy inherits the fortunes of his parents and manages to find that fairy creatures exist.

Wheel of Time

Okay so this behemoth would require the team of Game of Thrones to make anything wortwhile. At 11+ books and a season per book, that’s a lot of seasons to get through. Would be totally worth it though. This series has a lot going for it in terms of high fantasy, intrigue and many other cool stuff.

In closing Hollywood needs to get off their asses and either start making more original work, or draw from books that are in fact interesting and cool.

How about you? What books would you prefer to be made into movies since they don’t do original work?