#and lord feel free to have finally written rian leaving

[unproduciblesmackdown]

forgot i had the thought like if anyone's leaving b/c they're so totally to nice for this business why isn't it ben (ft. tuk as a duo) the person who's always been [hey this guy doesn't fit in here! he's too nice!!] thee most, as well as actually committed the whole time to Not bullying anyone around him

if ben & tuk had just left / stayed away then (a) maybe they were so loath to possibly have an episode without ben kim, speaking of the [s1 shit] priority put on the overall season. but it's a sacrifice that could be considered for the tradeoff of "why not give that [walking away b/c you just can't accept being So Mean]" which would of course also feel much more relevant for ben being told like "yeah you'd have to do what i did to step on tuk specifically, for example" versus rian who was just turning her own [is herself actually among the Constant Workplace Bullies] on tuk 4 min prior. and (b) then i guess we could have rian just standing there in the end too like oh right who are you again? and that also would've made it all the clearer like oops she's just become a generic employee who Could blend in with victor and dollar bill b/c she's just Another bully with Another slight variation in her style of being so, but that's a matter of like: yeah you made this bed now lie in it. she stopped having a chance to be a funny little guy of a tertiary rank & file character b/c she started to be an inconsistent plot device instead, & was never given the prominence to at least truly drive plots instead of staying that [plot device who just veers off in whatever direction another, truly prominent character's plot needs] like yeah you should've picked one for this character, or if not, had her leave at the end of s5. and if not, had her leave at the end of s6. and if not, well, here we are dealing with billions having to insist she's had an arc, as well as that she hasn't Already just been yet another employee with the bullying spirit completely suited to just stick around here forever

meanwhile billions seemed to focus not on "the thing about ben, & tuk, isn't that they don't fit in b/c way too much they're among the people who try not to be awful to everyone else whenever they feel like it" but instead focused on "the thing about ben & tuk is that [sound of luke bradford crashing their fake married bank heist moment] people think they're PUSSIES!!!!!!!!!!"

#winston billions #like Okay that they're just still around now #and lord feel free to have finally written rian leaving #truly a disappointment like sorry they didn't write a role either getting to be [funny little guy] &/Or [any actual prominence] #what a disaster. and really no affection left obviously for just this clear endpoint of rian still being a bully / presumably always will #get That moment outta here and give it to ben &/or tuk getting to also choose otherwise on their own terms perhaps #like again Fine I Guess they also can just stay b/c they always have...? too Nice to quit #but like there's people who Do have this actual conflict w/this workplace while w/rian it's so much less substantial/believable #can't stop now!! made this bed now just slowmo putting on sheet after sheet (ref to wretched 4x12 moment) Forever to avoid lying in it #fr like supposed to be like ''oh but they haven't left before; so why now'' well exact same question about rian then #''oh but rian's had all the confidence boosters like. learning what research is'' ben & tuk have had those too! all the more notably!

[mondofunnybooks]

MONDO FUNNYBOOKS; HITLER, BREXIT THE COMIC ,WEIRD INDIAN GAY PORN AND SADDAM HUSSEIN ON AN OSTRICH!

There was a time where comic creators worked to cause up a stink. Keith Giffen shot a comic (We're still after one, please, Dave or anyone else who worked for Blackball.) Kevin Maguire made ALL of Steve Rogers embossed. Spawn shipped 2 issues out of order. Lobo punched God in the face. Kyle Rayner became a Green Lantern. Barry Windsor Smith said some of the early Image Comics were a bit rubbish while promoting his new book 'Storyteller'. Youngblood: Year One would feature fully painted art by Rob Liefeld, akin to just released hit 'Marvels', featuring painted art by Alex Ross. Tom DeFalco famously declared his new ongoing from Marvel, 'Sleepwalker', would be 'Sandman' done right.

Copies of Sleepwalker are usually found in cheap bins across the Western hemisphere so feel free to judge for yourself how successful he was with that.

But for our money, nobody stirred up trouble like Gregarious Grant Morrison. His interview alongside Mark Millar with Comics World to promote their upcoming mini-series 'Skrull Kill Krew' remains one of the funniest moments of 'What a load of old bollocks this is!' vindictiveness since John Buscema told everyone in his art class to swipe since 'this stuff ain't going in the Lourve, pal.' Some of the less informed American hype rags attempted to suggest that SKK was the natural sequel to Zenith since it would see Morrison reunite with his partner in crime: Steve Yeowell.

Which either means they didn't know, or thought it wiser not to mention a strip that ran in Crisis circa 1990 called 'New Adventures Of Hitler'.

We'll come back to Crisis in more depth because it's probably the answer to the question a lot of the UK retailers are asking at the moment: How do we get people reading comics again. Crisis or something like it would be a good attempt, featuring a ton of original strips in a format that didn't suggest it ought to be stocked amongst a bunch of plastic bags full of toys and a magazine. Crisis also featured two of our favourite stories: 'Dare' which finished off from the sadly cancelled Revolver (Again, more another time.) as created by Grant and Rian Hughes and 'Trip To Tulum'. Which oddly was the only way to find the English translation of the collaboration by Milo Manara and Federico Fellini for quite a long time. God knows how they even got that in the first place.

NAH featured in issues 46-49 and surprised a few newsagents opening their delivery at 5am across the UK when confronted with 'Mr Hitler's Holiday', featuring your man from The Third on a bike against a dirty lurid purple cover. NAH concerned itself with Adolf taking a trip to Liverpool from 1912-1913 and learning a few tricks about fascism from the English while reality warps itself silly around the wee lad. Morrisey shows up singing 'Heaven Knows i'm Miserable Now'. A bunch of randoms begin chanting 'Hitler Has Only Got One Ball' on a bus he's on leaving the future Fuhrer mystified and mortified.

'NAH' originally ran in something called 'Cut' magazine but one of the editors, also someone from a band called 'Hue & Cry' having a strop so either 'Cut' itself stopped or at least stopped running the story. In any event, it migrated over to Crisis. It's rather excellent and while we don't know who owns the rights to it, it's one of those things that really ought to be in print.

Speaking of which......

Those more in the know will have to explain it to us, because the common answer is 'Because Grant and Mark aren't friends anymore.' and we're not sure that's how book publishing works, but the question is obviously 'Why isn't Big Dave in print?' If ANY comic were a timely insight into the mindset of the Brexit voting population of the UK, 'Big Dave' prophetically nails it like a time bullet fired from 1993. Essentially a high budget Viz strip beautifully pencilled by Steve Parkhouse, BD is a series of increasing ludricious adventures featuring that wide necked bloke in an England shirt with a bulldog tattooed to his forehead you see every St George's Day with a copy of The Sun in his back packet. It is ludicriously sexist, homophobic, racist and pro-monarchy.

Or at least the character is. Quite a few people seemed to confuse 'the portrayal of an attitude' with 'the glorfication of same attitude'. 2000AD apparently getting a bit narky if you bring this not being in print up. Frankly, if you don't find Dave having a threesome with Princess Di and Sarah Ferguson funny, you're probably reading the wrong column. We'd like to see this back in print. And please, please do not feel compelled to update this strip the same way 'DR & Quinch' was earlier this year. We'll stick that little relaunch in the same bin as the 'Femme Fatales/What if our artists swiped from Loaded and stuck some 2000AD related costumes on the art.' supplement from 1994, aye?

Finally, we go from the unreprintable to the never even published and perhaps not even written!

Unless somebody does something incredible, we will probably go to our graves saying that 'Kill Your Boyfriend' by Morrison & Bond is the best single story in comics ever published. This, before old men start getting heart attacks, does not include long form series, mini-series, single graphic novels, cartoon strips, etc. In terms of a story that starts, continues and ends in one issue with no knowledge of any other comic ever published, KYB is it. It brings up and destroys the notion of the personality as anything other than a series of reactions to various traumas and conditioning far faster than 'The Dice Man' does and with much funnier results. It could be read as the documentation of how a good acid trip will crack the inner monologue of the ego and set your inner self free, if you were of such a mind. It's certainly one of the best things Vertigo ever did.

'KYB' was part of a line called 'Vertigo Voices' published in 1995. The other books were 'Faces' by Pete 'Shade' The Changing Man'* Milligan and Duncan 'Oh, all the good things' Fegredo a book about why is plastic surgery and what does it say about us that we've conditioned ourselves to believe that there is such a thing as an imperfect face. Also 'Tainted' by Delano and Davidson (we've not read it, but the line up is well sound) and another book that we'll come back to in a bit but what's relevant here is that there was meant to be another comic in this line.

That comic would have been 'Bizarre Boys' by Grant Morrison, Pete Milligan and Jamie Hewlett.

The legend is that a suitably refreshed Grant and Pete were out in India and were looking around at various stalls filled with magazines, amidst the chaos the publication 'Bizarre Boys' caught their eye and was so outlandish (we're not Googling it, but nor are we stopping you from doing so.) that they committed right there to sell a comic with the same title to Vertigo. It got as far as being previewed in Spin Nov 1994 along with talk of an Invisibles TV Show (and come on. PLEASE. Netflix has cleared the deck of all the boring Marvel Superhero things so now is the PERFECT time for the adventures of Lord Fanny And The Other Ones.) but somewhere along the line it simply dropped from the publication schedule with no word of why, although as the comic was to be a fictional biography of Milligan and Morrison's alter egos, it's suggested that they were too busy living the life to settle down long enough to document.

We'd have to make the point that an oral account of the Vertigo offices circa 1994-1996 as spoken by Pete and Grant while drawn by Jamie would be a far more interesting thing to bring us back to the shops for new comics than, well, Tank Girl or Green Lantern.

The following pitch ran as part of The Time Is Now: DC Comics' Editorial Presentation 1994.

'Here's the solicitation copy for Bizarre Boys, which ran as part of The VERTIGO does what it does best in VERTIGO VOICES - a new umbrella title for four distinctive one-shots - where four of VERTIGO's most creatively deranged writers give voice to their most outrageous, gripping and graphic imaginings. Each "VOICE" delivers its own sound, in turn hyperreal, darkly disturbing, irreverent, and biting. FACE is the first "VOICE" to be heard, followed by KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND, and closing with BIZARRE BOYS. These are stories with sounds all their own, tearing a jagged rip through reality.

BIZARRE BOYS, VERTIGO VOICES' most irreverent title, is a story within a story within a story. It's about some fictional characters called the Bizarre Boys, and about the writers who write them and about the writers who are writing about the writers... There are two voices telling the tale of BIZARRE BOYS, and they don't agree with each other at all.

BIZARRE BOYS is a comic about a comic and about the process of putting together a comic. It's a sparkling tapestry of post-modernism and a fast- moving breathless chase across time and space.

It all takes place - naturally - on Bizarre Boys Day, when writers Peter Milligan (SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN) and Grant Morrison (THE INVISIBLES) join forces with artist Jamie Hewlett (SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN, Tank Girl) to tell the tale of two writers called Millison and Morrigan, and their fabulous creations, The Bizarre Boys. Echoing James Joyce's Bloomsday, whatever events happen on Bizarre Boys Day also happen in the comic.

As the two writers begin their quest for the fantastic Bizarre Boys, whose sweat contains miraculous healing and hallucinogenic properties, these latter-day Brothers Grimm weave some dissolute modern fairy tales, take the wraps off the creative process itself, and tell a joke or three.'

We're told by inside sources that elements of 'Bizarre Boys' ran in the final book of The Vertigo Voices line: 'The Eaters' as drawn by Dean Ormston and Pete Milligan.

And that's us for now. What do YOU think? Should these projects remain in the dustbin of FunnyBook History? Maybe Kickstarters, er, started to try and release them as independent books (Lord knows if Cyberfrog can be a thing again, then...) Amazon have begun publishing comics directly from creators like Kyle Baker and Rick Veitch, which could sidestep the whole 'Comics are for kids so why is this in Sainsbury's!?' furor all over again. Image has put out some fairly anondyne nonsense lately and could do with something like this in their line-up. Let us know in the comments and as ever we'll see you in The FunnyPages.

(Big Dave ran as part of 2000AD's 'Summer Offensive' in 1993, some of the most fun the Progs have ever been. Big Dave features in the following issues*:)

"Target Baghdad" (with Steve Parkhouse, in 2000 AD #842–845, 1993) "Monarchy in the UK" (with Steve Parkhouse, in 2000 AD #846–849, 1993) "Young Dave" (with Steve Parkhouse, in 2000AD Yearbook 1994, 1993) "Costa del Chaos" (with Anthony Williams, in 2000 AD #869–872, 1994) "Wotta Lotta Balls" (with Steve Parkhouse, in 2000 AD #904–907, 1994)

*according to Wiki, anyway.

'New Adventures Of Hitler' can be found in Crisis: #46 - 49.

#Grant Morrison #Mark Millar #2000AD #New Adventures Of Hitler #Crisis #Skrull Kill Krew #Zenith #Vertigo #Steve Parkhouse #Phillip Bond #Steve Yeowell #DC #Jamie Hewlett