Five Awesome Links

Great Pop Things – Great Pop Things was a comic strip that ran in the NME around the time I started reading it regularly. 1992 I think as Father Ted writer chap, Arthur Matthews’s  “Doctor Crawshaft’s World of Pop” cartoon was running at the same time. GPT was the creation of Colin B Morton and Chuck Death. Chuck Death being a psuedonym of the Mekons’ Jon Langford. It was great. My brother and I still refer to Steve Albini as “Steve Albundy” to this day because this strip.

Ghost In The Shell Lego – It’s the crab tank thingy from the end of the Ghost In The Shell film. In Lego.

Moriyama Miki and The Honkytonk Devils – Another Japanese country band. I’m kind of fascinated by the Japanese country scene as the best I can tell, it seems to work exactly like the British country scene.

The Usuta World – A fansite for the works of humour manga author, Kyosuke Usuta. The most well known work of Usuta’s in the west is “Sexy Commando Side Story, That’s Amazing Masaru-san” through the fansubs of the late 90s anime. And when I say well known, I’m guessing it’s known by a couple of thousand people at most. Currently running in Japan is the strip “He Blows Like PYU! Jaguar” which hasn’t made it to anime yet, but has a number of video games and CDs out. Usuta’s humour is along the lines of something like Cromartie, but is more surreal and fractured, with a less of a reliance on hammering a joke into the ground.

Marvel Super Heroes – Scans of the old TSR Marvel RPG, known fondly as the FASERIP system after the seven stats it used. I ran this on and off from the late 80s in secondary school, until the much better SAGA system came out in, I think 1998 or 97. The books produced were more bad than good. I know this, as until recently I owned all but 3 of the products produced for it. The Advanced Rules, the Ultimate City Campaign Set, the Ultimate Powers book, the MX modules, and the MT modules are probably the only essentials. The Gamers handbooks are nice if you want to play specific Marvel characters. Those MT modules by Ray Winninger are awesome adventures, with the best meta-payoff I’ve ever seen.