New brushes, new subs

Today!

I was just recently thinking about how moving this newsletter from Substack to Steady means I don't get to benefit from the network effects that Substack offers. Then today when I was about to do my weekly import of new subscribers who are still joining on the Substack side of things, I noticed I had got a dozen new sign-ups on Steady. And some of them came from within the Steady network! If that describes you, welcome. I hope you are a real person and not a bot, and that you signed yourself up, and that you knew what you were getting into. Can't take that for granted! Be warned that this is an art and comics oriented newsletter and that there is frequent nudity in the art because that's what I enjoy drawing.

Yesterday

Speaking of nudity, that episode of Greyfriar’s Isle that went live for Planet Nude subscribers last week was supposed to go live for non-subscribers today but at the time of writing, it hasn't. Here it is again, just in case it becomes available.

Last Monday

And speaking of nudity some more, here’s a new Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) page for ya! And as it happens, Kel is in fact speaking of nudity (I'll stop now).

Read this story from the beginning (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) or go all the way back to the very first page in the archives (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) for a binge-read.

Earlier: Black Sabbath after OzzyGeezer - a retrospective review quick ranking

As you know, Bob, Ozzy Osbourne did a final concert in July and then passed away two weeks later. During the Black Sabbath section of the show, I was impressed by how good bassist Geezer Butler was - the band was pretty shambolic, but he did what he could to keep things together, and he looked and sounded great, the only one of the four musicians to be undiminished by time and age.

And then, after Ozzy sadly left the world, of course a large box of Black Sabbath CDs would be prominently displayed at my local record store (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), and I realized that I was only really familiar with their work up to Born Again, the album they released in 1983 with Ian Gillan as the singer. Since I only had that on old, old vinyl, I bought a copy of Born Again, and then checked out Seventh Star on Qobuz. And then I listened to the entire run, all the way through Ozzy’s return and the 2013 album 13, writing notes on my Mastodon account while I was listening.

Last week, I promised I’d tidy up those Mastodon notes into some more cohesive writing. But when I started to work on that, there wasn’t really enough substance there to justify doing the work, even though it ran to about 3000 words. So instead I’m simply gonna rank them and provide an above/below-the-line recommendation for which of the albums you should and should not bother with. It mostly aligns with the conventional wisdom about that run of albums, but there’s one contrarian take in there (that Forbidden is actually quite good). Rankings are never just arbitrary lists of what a person happens to like the best; they inevitably tell a story and this one fit the story I wanted to tell pretty well.

1. Cross Purposes (1994). The same formula as the other, worse albums with Tony Martin on vocals, but the one where they get it right. Butler is back on bass and it benefits massively from him having a hand in the writing and arrangements.

2. Dehumanizer (1992). With Ronnie James Dio back on vocals, Butler on bass and a more brutal, rawer sound with less dependence on keyboards, this holds up really well. Nice and doomy, just the way I like it.

3. Forbidden (1995). By broad consensus, the worst Black Sabbath album. But the things that people got upset about (a rap verse! A producer associated with… a rapper!) turned out, when I listened to it, to be a storm in a teacup. What Forbidden is is a perfectly good grunge-influenced stoner rock album. It's not original and the fact that it sounds like other bands Black Sabbath had influenced before counts against it, but it’s very pleasant to listen to. If one drop of hiphop was too much for old-school metal audiences and critics in 1995, that’s their problem.

4. Seventh Star (1986). Not a real Black Sabbath album and it’s not trying to be. It should have come out under Tony Iommi’s name, but on its own terms, it’s all right. Good songs, strong performances. The production has aged very badly though and sounds muffled on the 2010 reissue I have.

5. Tyr (1990). Beyond this point, this is simply the remaining albums with Tony Martin on vocals in reverse chronological error. Like a new band slowly learning how to make things work, this version of Black Sabbath evolved over its first three albums and got a little better every time. But they started out very poorly especially from a songwriting point of view, and none of these records have aged well at all. This is the best of the bunch but that’s not saying much.

6. Headless Cross (1989)

7. The Eternal Idol (1987)

It should not need saying, but most of the original Ozzy-era albums blow all of these out of the water. The band’s chemistry was at its best when it was those four individuals and not any others. However, the albums above the horizontal line are still worth a listen, and worth owning if you’re into owning your media.

Items of interest

Hey, some good news: Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) - James Gallagher, BBC news. The new therapy only slows the disease down, but that already makes a huge difference for patients.

The iPad drawing app Procreate (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) put out an update with improvements to the brush engine and a whole new collection of brushes. While it’s made the organization of brushes a little more complicated, the brushes themselves are worth exploring:

I’ve focused on inking brushes that fit my existing style, but some of the paint brushes are also very nice and I’ll explore these more over the weekend, after my work on the next comic is done. I do find it weird that Procreate’s own brushes appear to be easier on the battery than 3rd party brushes. This indicates that Procreate may not be giving brush developers all the information/API access they need to optimize their brushes. (More on my Patreon (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), in the $10 tier)

Earlier still

Today’s blast from the past is “Padding through the corridors (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)”. Remarkably, we’re very close to where we were when I resumed work on the comic a year ago. This, though, was originally posted in 2019.

And the full page:

If the appearance of the red-eyed monk seems kind of random, it is! The monk is a vestige of a now-scrapped crossover story that is not in the regular Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan archives. In that, the red-eyed hooded figures manifested across the multiverse, and since I was working on “Feral” at the same time, they manifested in that story as well. Ehm, that wasn’t nearly as old hat back in 2010 as it is now.