It's that big a deal to me, and besides, it'll be fun introducing a nationally-famous Dutch group to my international readership and trying to explain why they're a big deal.

In my review, I said that the songs from Klaar didn't have the relevance that the earlier albums had. I've been listening to that album though, and my statement shouldn't be intended to mean that the album is bad. It's very, very good - just not up there with their 1980s material in terms of hitting the nail on the head all the time.

Yes.

Hell yes.

How about much better sound, to start with? The 2000 gigs, great though they were, suffered from the fact that they were in Ahoy' Sports Hall, notorious for its reverb-laden acoustics. Tonight's concert at Feijenoord's stadium had crystal clear, well-balanced sound with the deep, pure lows that the group's reggae-inspired style needs. In fact, it was easily the best sound I'd ever heard at a concert?

How about a leaner band? Back in 2000, I felt at times like there were too many people on stage - a percussionist, a brass section, an extra guitarist doubling Henny Vrienten's bass lines. I wanted to see and hear the four main guys - Vrienten, Jansz, Hendriks and Pijnenburg. This time, there were still additional musicians on stage, but the way it was handled was that the band was augmented by three people, two of whom were multi-instrumentalists. There were also two guests who came on stage for two or three songs each. While the total number of musicians was the same as last time, the impression was of a leaner band that had to choose which parts to play and which to drop.

How about a stronger set list? Though the set started and ended pretty much the same as on the 2000 gigs, the two and a half-hour concert had some real nuggets in it - "Ruma Saja", "Situatie", "Winnetoe". Paradoxically, the fact that the band didn't have a new album to promote helped make the set seem more up-to-date. The old stuff is still relevant in a way that much of the material from Klaar never managed to be.

And how about having Joost Belinfante back in the band? I had heard he was going to show up to perform his ode to cannabis sativa hollandica, "Nederwiet" but I didn't know he was going to be on stage all the time, as one of the three additional musians mentioned earlier. Belinfante is one of those performers who are more than just musicians - his mere presence added a touch of unpredictability to it all, like a morris Fool. Where Doe Maar as a whole sound like a well-oiled machine, you never really know what Belinfante is going to do next, and how his favorite plant will influence him. "Nederwiet" doesn't have a fixed lyric or even a fixed number of lines in the verses, so the musicians have to be on their toes.

And what musicians they are! With the improved sound quality, leaner band and timeless set list, Doe Maar really showed off their skill at creating tight, danceable, dynamic performances. The most impressive part of their sound is their rhythm section, with a precise, angular style driven by Vrienten's bass work. Jan Hendriks on guitar has one foot in the rhythm section, spending most of the evening strumming chords on the afterbeat - but when he gets some solo space, he uses it very well indeed.

If you're Dutch, you almost certainly know the songs. If you're not, let me tell you that Doe Maar have some great songs - humorous ones, thoughtful ones, touching ones, but always understated ones whose poetry is in their simplicity. This night, they impressed me greatly. Best concert I've ever been to.

I haven't seen any watchable footage from the 2008 gigs on YouTube yet, but here are some YouTube highlights from the 2000 gigs, taken straight from the DVD:

"Is Dit Alles"

"Doris Day"

2. The two updates for Invasion I mentioned earlier have been scanned and one of them has been sent to a new colourist.

3. I also have some new character art up on Odds and Ends for you to check out and hopefully discuss. I'll try to have something up every day, because I need the practice.

Feral: Chugging along nicely. Aggie's switched to larger format paper, and while the update frequency is now down to a shaky once a week, the results do look gorgeous. The fact that Aggie's drawing it is helping me focus on the writing as well. As in doing it, and doing it a bit more thoughtfully and effectively than I have been in the past.

Invasion: Going very slowly. It's literally been progressing at a rate of a few lines a day, or a few bits of Photoshop colouring a day. That's all I have time and energy for after work and going to the gym or the running club to blow off steam after work, which I'm afraid has become very necessary for me to maintain emotional stability. Day jobs suck.
Still, some progress is being made and I've been able to free up some more hours this week than I have in the weeks before. There are some pages of art on my desk and the whole thing is scripted all the way until the end.

I have a new collaboration with Aggie in the brainstorming stage. We now plan to aim at a younger audience - what I have in mind is a present-day science fiction adventure. It's gonna take time to develop, but when we do, it will be very thoroughly thought out.

Crossovers/Spin-offs: I also have a fun crossover planned with another webcartoonist. This will be a standalone story that will be kept separate from the ROCR archives. It's probably best to think of it as more of a spin-off. ROCR itself will never do crossovers again. Seriously. If I want to mix it up with someone else's characters, I will set up a separate series for the purpose.

Remasters: The Drunk Duck mirror has been running for almost a year now, at a rate of one update a day. Lately, it's featured remastered versions of The Faerie and the Earth-Pig at a larger image size of 560 pixels wide. While preparing those, I found two updates that had been missing from the regular archives: the comic for February 13, 2001 and the one for February 28, 2001. Both have been restored to the regular archives, at their remastered size. The entire story will eventually appear on the main site in remastered form.

That's all the news, really. Stuff is moving, but very slowly.

It's taken me months, but I've finally put all originals from the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story Invasion up for sale through my ComicSpace Galleries. So if you want an original from this popular series, you can now buy them there. Prices are somewhat negotiable - I've assigned a fixed price to all of them but you can email me if you want to haggle over any one page.

A few points:

1) The pages Calvin Bexfield worked on are more expensive because a) he's fab, and b) we're sharing the loot for these pages.
2) All pages are European A3 format, except for this one, the first to be made, which is A4.
3) I will give each page a final check before sending it out. I don't expect any issues with the state the pages are in, but if any turn up, I'll let you know and cancel the sale if you want.
4) All originals will ship with a colour print of the finished product.
5) Many originals from Feral are also still for sale.

There are 106 pages in the gallery, several of which got very good comments when they were published. The one you loved is almost certainly still there, so why not do some browsing and invest in the arts?

Instead of trying again to write that post and having it be a little less than fresh, I'll just be lazy and point you to Aggie's newspost about it. It's short, well-organised, comes with a silly photo, and she mentions that I look hot, which you wouldn't believe if I told you so myself, so referring to her post is a win-win solution for me.

There are of course, varying analyses as to why this is happening, from "The Netherlands is becoming a Caste system in which Muslims are the Brahmins" (which statistics about the income, job opportunities, educational opportunities and general integration into society most Muslims "enjoy" would seem to disprove, but never mind that) to knee-jerk blaming of the Labour party (which wasn't in government when the complaint against Nekschot was filed, but never mind that) , to the one that I subscribe to, which is that the Christian Democrats in goverment want to restrict blasphemous and other undesirable speech, but can't do that without making a show of impartiality, so they pick on a cartoonist who insults Muslims first - who also happens to be an easy target because his work is genuinely loathsome and ugly.

I'm pretty sure that Mr. Nekschot will be cleared of all charges; his work does not incite hatred in any legal sense, though a case can be made that it reflects, and feeds on, existing hatred in himself and his readership. It's firmly in the realm of opinion and satire. So it's too early to say that some kind of turning point has been reached. Yet it is very worrying that the enemies of freedom are apparently trying to get us to that turning point and make an example of someone.

More at Polderpundit

For the longest time, I've been telling myself I wasn't going to travel to the United States - not as long as being in transit means I have no rights, not as long as I have to be fingerprinted, prodded, questioned and poked before I'm allowed in, not as long as shit like this can happen, not as long as George Bush is President and the dumb fucks who voted for him in 2004 are still allowed not just to vote, but to drive as well.

Well, I've changed my mind. I have a damned good reason. However, it's the same reason this Italian traveler had, so reading about that struck a chord:

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

Domenico Salerno, with his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper, in Rome on Sunday. He was held for 10 days in the United States after being denied entry.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit - meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon - eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

Now the odds of this happening to me are, realistically, slight. It's the principle that matters though. This is what can happen and if it happens to you, you have no rights. I wonder, though, whether Americans understand how much this hurts them. The American authorities have permanently deterred Mr. Salerno from returning to the US, spending his valuable Euros there and doing the volunteer work in the community he was a guest in (more on that below). Any tax moneys spent on Ms. Cooper's education will be benefitting Italy instead once she's tunneled her way out of the Land of the Free. People reading the story, like Martin Wisse who I got the link from, will be thinking twice about traveling to the US while the conditions above apply, and they also won't be bringing their Euros in. This shit adds up.

Aggie and I discussed this incident a bit, and without wanting to put any blame on Mr. Salermo, there are probably lessons to learn about what kind of behaviour to avoid when traveling to the US. I guess by now all reasonably intelligent people understand that you don't say things like "I have a bomb strapped to my chest! Allahu Ackbar!" when customs ask you if you have anything to declare. It's probably not a good idea to testify to your own character by telling Immigration you've done volunteer work in your host community and that you're integrating well with it, especially if your English isn't too good. It's not clear from the article whether Mr. Salermo did that, but it's a possibility and I'll add it to the list of behaviour to avoid for the 17 hours or so of nonpersonhood on my trip. It's probably an even worse idea to do that while being Meditterranian-looking.

After my summer trip, my next visit will be after the elections, but before the next President's inauguration. The post-Bush restoration project will be a long and arduous one, but I hope that they'll find time to look at the policies that make abuses like this one possible.

I'll live.

The response to the swap has been interesting. Initially, a lot of AGD fans didn't like my style, but as I evolved towards the pencilled greyscale style, the response became more favourable. That, or the critics abandoned the comic. Meanwhile, response to Aggie's work on ROCR was mostly favourable, but the one commenter who hated it, really hated it.
Today, I took Aggie's coloured wolfpack dream sequence and turned it into a tower ad by shrinking it to the required size, adding a border and a URL, and posted that on a few sites that I thought it would work on through Project Wonderful. It's doing extremely well there, and I think that reflects the appeal of Aggie's art and colouring at its very best. Colour isn't always possible with our schedules, but when she adds it, it works really, really well. Also, tower ads that are simply mini-comics have always done very well for me. I will make some more ads based on her art, and in the light of our plans to stick with her as an artist, she gets full credit on the Webcomicsnation mirror, where I can do that on a per-story basis.

Of course, uploading it to the mirror site at Webcomicsnation accomplished nothing but the breaking of that particular archive page, because Webcomicsnation has been a bit crappy lately. But that's a whole 'nother story.

Meanwhile, I've also been busy with drawing Aggie's American Gothic, in a new style based on pencil greytones. I like using pencils this way a lot and I'll definitely be using that style more often in future projects. It's a little bit faster because I don't have to wait for ink to dry, but it's mostly more expressive than the tight ink lines I've been going for in the past decade or so. I've also done some work on Invasion and on a remaster project for some of the work published onsite in 2001.

Since I have a very large image in this post and have some space to fill next to it so I don't screw up the lay-out of the blog, let me mention that I'm unlikely ever to order anything from Amazon again, but that that's not Amazon's fault. The problem with ordering from Amazon is that their deliveries to the Netherlands are going to ship with TNT, which means that if you work full-time, you will either end up

1) going to the post office on a Saturday morning, if yours happens to be even open on a Saturday morning, to wait in a Soviet-style line to be told that yes, they were supposed to have your package but they can't find it in any of the three different locations within the space they keep packages in; or
2) finding a note saying they've delivered it to your neighbours at a number that doesn't exist. I think I know which address they do mean, and I have no idea who lives there and whether they can be trusted not to open the box. They're not my neighbours unless they live in the same block.

If ever there's one privatised service that needs to be renationalised, stat, it's the mail.

...and wow... There's more!