Bore Da Brawdren! Your buddy ATD is back like cooked crack with another DON VLOG, this one recorded on the auspicious date of the twelth of the sixth twenty twelve.

In this legendary vlog I pour righteous ire upon the foolishness of that goddamn Prometheus Space Jesus Bollocks theory that everyone and their mum has been tweeting at me of late – wherein it is suggested that the reason the engineers in Prometheus were pissed off with us is that they sent Space jesus to save us 2000 years ago and we kil’t his Voldemort-looking un-semetic ass – which some feel explains the film and proves that it is not retarded crap written by the screenwriting equivalent of Rob Liefeld but in fact amazing theological deep shit that’s been flying over the heads of us doofuses like so many homing doves carrying THE TRUTH back up to the heavnes from whence they came. Well I say BOLLOCKS to that swinedip, and if you really think that Ridley Scott and DayMUHN’s rehashing the plot of Chris de Burgh’s A Spaceman Came Traveling is creating something of such depth we mere mortals cannot understand it I have a Justin Bieber LP for you to spend the next week dissecting the theological worth of on your cotdurned Livejournal.

“When two thousand years of you life have gone bye… the song will return once again.. to a xeno’s cry… and it went

SKRAAAAAGH AAA AAAA AAAAGH!”

Lord have mercy on us all.

Elsewhere in that vlog up there I answer your burning questions, that you left on my Facebook page yesterday. Thank you for your interest, and feel free to hit me up with any questions or requests you have for next week’s vlog.

Now let’s hand over to the channels, and some of the stuff I have been receiving.

That was my birthday last year. What a great day! People email me asking when I am touring again most days, and I am afraid I simply haven’t the time or resources to out one together on my own, so I am gonna focus on my album and hire some people to help me do it. I am however plotting a special one off gig for the end of summer, and I will give you details of that as soon as I have them.

I did a bunch of massive post runs last week, which took the best part of three days and covered me in paper cuts, but it is always hugely gratifying to see people’s reactions when they get their swag in the post. As mentioned previously, last week’s stock check has revealled tme to be stupidly low on almost everything (2 Superman Ts in medium! 3 Revolution in medium! Etc!), so I suggest you get in there quick and grab everything before it’s gone for ever.

Meanwhile I am working on a bunch of NEW STUFF, including some designs based on your lyric T suggestions as posted on my Facebook page. As ever, feel free to hit me u with sugggestions for stuff you’d like me to make for you. I live to serve.

Speaking of which, I reupped 3rd hand Wire Riffs to the mixtape section, as it was mysteriously absent. Holla if you spot anything else amiss and I shall endeavour to fix it.

And with that, I must bif you a fon farewell. I have a 60 minute mix to complete for tomorrow lunchtime, the sequel to an ambient one I did on Sunday. It’s a private comission, to be played at the )2 as part of some festivities, but maybe I’ll be able to let you hear it some day. it is beautiful and i love it, and it remidned me what I loved about my early mixtapes, all that chopping up fragments of audio and weaving together slabs of other people’s music in an evocative fashion. Maybe I’ll do another TAD tape in that mould. Or maybe I’ll carry on making ever more ambitious post-album projects. WE SHALL SEE!

Oh, and before I forget, make sure you check out the @sweden feed on twitter, manned by regular humans who change on a weekly basis. It’s amazing. Earlier I noticed it’s hilarious, but I later noticed it is also RIGHTEOUS!

Shout outs and high fives then, to this week’s Sweden Tweeter, Sonia Abrahamson, “ a 27-year old womanlike human being from northern Sweden [where] people there are relatives and they all own tractors… I’m a single and low educated mother, but at least I don’t do drugs and prostitution.”

Amen.

PS!

I put Thunderchrist on Youtube as a track separated playlist! For your convenience! I LIVE TO SERVE!

— Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

Photo by Mary Wycherley

Praise Jah for we have had fine adventures these past days – travelling to God’s Favourite Country, Wales, to entertain children and grown ups with our incredible pop songs and Beard. Croissant Neuf is the sort of festival where the security smile at you and are helpful, and you can get to the front of the tent and watch Ranking Roger playing off of an Ipad in close qarters. We had a wonderful time, enjoying such marvels as PIZZA and falafel and The Old Man’s Great Fire, and the blacked-up white guy in the dreadlock wig (wo). Jim got to see his favourite Magic Numbers song performed live, and I saw my ace pals Martin and Mary’s little cherub Sonny dance to my songs, and Joey had a spiritual experience by The Old Man’s Fire and whupped me at Car Games on the journey home, where Jeres overcame his fear of the middle seat, and Charlotte did all the driving and went for a 5k run straight afterwards.

So hail Croissant Neuf, and all the ace people we met there!

Since I got back I have written a number one hit hook for Big Narstie, some dark ass raps for ATD25, and completed 4 levels on GTA The Ballad Of Gay Tony on Xbox. I have cleared 3 pages of email, designed one half of  a pair of shoes,  two thirds of a website, and a logo.

Oh, and I found this:

Rob Liefeld's Jesus

A thing that defies all reason and might case the universe to explode if enough people tried to comprehend it at once.

OH! AND we completed Sonic! Achievements galore round these parts. We should celebrate. To close then, have a brand new song from my buddy Narstie.

— Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

“I’ve been plagiarising my whole life. It’s called learning.”
Akira The Don, 2008, paraphrasing Hunter S Thompson

So, I was taking a break from the rent-earning task I was doing today that I kinda hoped I’d have got out of the way by this point what with having loads of really important stuff to do like songs and comic strips and whathaveyou, riiiight, and I had a look at Tweetdeck, and at the top of my mentions column, which is essentially an inbox, I had the following, from fellow Death’s Head fan @jaykayell_ :

@AkiratheDon Sorry to beg of your services good sirrah but could you let your followers know about this http://bit.ly/a5Frv9

And I thought, sheee-it, who am I, Neil Gaiman? Then I clicked on it, cos I am totally into helping people out. I figured it might be a song that needed some promo, or a charity, or something. But it was not! It was a link to a message-board, seething with outrage over this indie comic that’s full of art that rips off other comics, that’d I read about already earlier on Robot 6 while I was eating my hot buttered toast.

So I was like,

@jaykayell_ The thing about Gene Simmons’ son? I saw that earlier. Silly boy. Why’d you want everyone to know?

And he was like,

@akirathedon Art theft really pee’s me off. Speshly when it’s so blatant, just thought you’d be the man to report them

And I was like, HMMMMMM. I suppose I AM that man.

I am, after all, an authority on comic books – well, the comic books I’ve read at any rate. Or the one’s I’ve read that I can remember. Like, I read a lot of Justice League comics at one point, but I’m buggered if I can tell you what happened in any of them, apart from that one where everybody fell alseep. Actually, that’s all I can remember about that one. Batman probably figured it out. He usually does.

ANYWAY! I know stuff. And you know what stuff I probably know most about? Ripping stuff off. Shee-it, I even called my second album – well, my first album-mixtape, my Hatfull of Hollow, shall we say – Thieving. That’s something I do. I steal stuff, bubba. And make new stuff with it. And that’s what this kid Nick Simmons did, right? He ripped off some stuff and made some new stuff with it. For example, a panel from Tite Kubo’s famous Manga Bleach, and a panel from Simmons’ Incarnate:

OK, that’s pretty similar. I’m not quite sure what he’s added there. Other than laughter. Laughter’s good, right?

“AH AHA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!”

Oh no, I just noticed the other guy’s laughing too, just with a uniform typeface. Oops. Well, Simmons got rid of the drooly blood stuff! That changed it, right?

Um…

Further investigation reveals that much of Incarnate is copied from Bleach, from fight sequences to character designs right down to personality types. Simmons is obviously a big Bleach fan.

Now, as I mentioned, I am an authority in the field of creative theft. I have sampled the crap out of most of my favourite artists, and have always been as brazen as possible about it. Like, when I ripped off a gang of Jack Kirby art for my second album-mixtape, The Omega Sanction‘s sleeve. I said I’d ripped off a load of Jack Kirby art. I’d changed it a bit, I’d made it look like me, and arranged it in a big Omega Symbol, so it was something new – it looked like something else now, and, more importantly, it said something else.

Not that saying something new with your stolen art is necessary. The message I put across in CLONES was pretty much the same as Alice Cooper’s in his Clones (We’re All). I just went into more detail – my detail. And I went crazy with the drums and bass.

I also credited Alice Cooper on the record. Maybe if Nick Simmons has put a nice “inspired by Tite Kubo’s Bleach” at the start of his comic people wouldn’t be calling for his immediate DEATH by ANGRY BLOGGING. Then again, maybe if he was someone other than Gene Simmons’ son, and people weren’t already suspicious that he’s got his own comic book because of that monied parental bonus, rather than any of his own talents, maybe there would less of a giant shit being given. I mean, it’s not like this sort of thing is rare in comics. They have a word for it: “Swipe”. Some of the industry’s biggest names have been doing it for years. People like Levi’s Ad star Rob “Crosshatched Groinal Area” Liefeld, for example:

And so on… Sheee-it, Rob even has his own character called SMASH!, who’s a, shall we say, hulking individual with purple skin and a propensity for city-levelling fights with other super-types.

But so what, right? Doesn’t Alan Moore steal all his characters from out of copyright Victorian books? Wasn’t X-Men a rip off of Doom Patrol (super powered outcasts lead by bloke in wheel chair)? Wasn’t Batman created by drawing on top of a picture of Superman? Wasn’t Superman himself a big rip off of Doc Savage, Man of Bronze?

The Stones Stole. Led Zepplin stole. Kool Herc stole.

If we dismissed all stolen works from popular culture we wouldn’t have any popular culture.

So Sayeth The Don.

As for Nick Simmons, he’s only 22, give him time to learn. You gotta copy a whole gang of pictures before you get good at making your own. He obviously loves what he’s doing, so let him get on with it. He will learn from this. Either way, I’m not salty about any jump-starts he might be getting. I don’t imagine having Gene Simmons as a dad is all that fun in real life.

Well, that’s my 5pence worth anyway. What do you think?

— Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Zen Pyramid dropped this in the comments of that Rob Liefeld Getting Inerviewed By Stan Lee post, but it’s so awesome it had to have its own post.

See, a couple of years ago, every body’s favourite fucked up body fetishist Rob “Bro!” Liefeld (described once as “a pair of blue jeans with a backwards baseball cap on top of it but when you turn the cap around its still backwards”) took it upon himself to go at Alan Moore, a bit like when Nelly went at KRS 1 or something.  From the pages of OC Weekly, here are some of the most choice quotes from Rob’s dandy assault.

“If you’ve done business with Alan, you have a different opinion of Alan. He markets himself as a poet, but he’s just a ruthless businessman, like everybody else, he kept wanting to more work because he just wanted to get paid. Jeph Loeb [Yeah, Jeph Loeb definitely writes fuck awful crap like Ultimates 3 out of love for the form - ATD], he can tell you.”

“You worship at the altar of Alan, and then you go, oh, he’s just another guy that’s looking to get paid, and that’s why he’d do 3-4 books a month for us. Literally, he’d send three scripts through the copy machine. [A man that wants to get paid for doing what he lovea and isgreat at? NO! Burn the evil fuck! - ATD]”

“He’s brilliant, but to me I think he’s been revealed as someone who’s spiraled wildly out of control. Like, he had a falling out with Wildstorm, you know, he’s having another falling out with DC, he won’t work for Marvel. At some point you put yourself on line and go, well, gee, Alan, is it everyone else, or is it you? [No, the comics industry is a corrupt and full of twats as any other - ATD]”

“Alan just wants to get paid more money, that’s it. Sorry Alan. I got my body of work out of Alan Moore, he doesn’t intimidate me, I don’t put him on a pedestal like Jack Kirby and Frank Miller. He’s just a guy who wants to get paid, and he cuts deals for himself that he doesn’t like down the line, and then he gets whiny and cries about it… Hey man, he worked for me for two years, I was quiet for like ten years. And then I watched him burn every other bridge, and I go “Hmm.” Although we didn’t have a falling out with him. He just stopped working with us, because he now wanted to invest in his new universe with Wildstorm comics [Ur, no, YOU ran your company into the GROUND because you are a famously shitty businessman, so you couldn't pay anyone, you great big spoon - ATD], and again, like I said, OOPS! That went up in flames. He gives ‘temperamental artist’ a new meaning.”

“And he comes out and he lets everybody know now ‘I’m going to crap all over the adaptations you do,’ he’s shown no loyalty to his fellow artists like Dave Gibbons or David Lloyd [Yeah, signing over all your royalties to those artists definitely counts as "crapping on them" - ATD]. He knows that by coming out and crapping on the movie, he’s gonna keep a certain percentage of the fan base away [WHat, you want him to LIE< and tell them to watch a piece of shit that has nothing to do with the source material? That's how you'd treat your crazy fans if someone was ever fucked up in the face enough to bring one of your shitbags to the screen? I thought you were a nice guy, Rob!- ATD].”

“He once called us up to tell us that he had just been in the dream realm and talking to Socrates and Shakespeare, and to Moses, dead serious, and that they talked for what seemed to be months, but when he woke up, only an evening had passed, and he came up with these great ideas. And I’m tellin’ ya, I think it’s shtick, dude. I think it’s all shtick. I’m gonna start saying that stuff. Cuz you know what? It makes you instantly interesting. Like ‘O yeah, last night I was hanging out with Socrates. Came to me in a dream. We played poker. We dropped acid.’ That’s the kinda stuff Alan would say all the time, and he’d say ‘Oh, I’ve been practicing dark magic.’”

YOU FUCKING WHAT?!?!?! This, as someone notes in the comments section, from a man who that a magical creator impregnated a virgin with his son so he could be murdered by humans who would then be forgiven so they could live forever but only if they worship him? ARE YOU SERIOUS, BRO LIEFELD? You ARE? Fuck!

The really sad bit comes at the end, when we discover that Liefeld owns what sounds like an amazing Moore script, but he doesn’t know anyone good enough to draw it.

Liefeld goes on to describe a comic book pitched to him by Moore that he still owns the rights to, entitled War Child. Written shortly after Moore saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, it’s a knights-of-the-round-table concept set in a Tarantino-esque inner city gangland setting.

“I have him on tape for 4 hours just talking about it; it’s my most cherished possession”

“You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alan describe the heroes – this is in the near future – getting trapped in an amusement park in Compton, where one of the rides you go on is a drive-by shooting.”

“A couple of the artists I gave it to handed it back. The first ten pages is some of the most difficult, visually, it’s hard to crack. We’ll probably publish it in script form. I can’t crack this, life’s too short.”

“There’s standing atop a building, looking in through the window at a certain angle, while the person is sitting doing their hair looking at themselves in the mirror…and the panel descriptions, you go, how do I shoot this? I could shoot it with a camera, but like all the storyboards? It’s just very difficult.”

“He’s a genius, a showman, a shrewd businessman, and a whiner. I have no intention of working with him again.”

Awesome.

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

This is absolute fucking gold. I cannot thank Chris at the ISB enough for this one. Really. Stan Lee interviewing Rob Liefeld. Stan Lee watching Rob Liefeld draw a guy with a big gun.

Stan: “So you have a name for him?”

Rob: “Ur. Let’s call him cross.”

Stab: “How do you spell it?”

Rob: “Ur. C R O SS.”

Stan: “I assume he’s always angry.”

Rob: “He’s not a happyy guy. What they do isn’t easy.”

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAH!

Go check Chris’s breakdown at Comics Alliance. I am beside myself with mirth and joy.

— By Akira The Don on Saturday, October 31st, 2009

Edit: The entries are in. I so had the biggest slap! Go vote please I wanna win!

The Don enters the ring with one panel of Pain! Let’s get it!

From the pages of Grant Morrison’s most excellent Rob Liefeld piss-take, Doom Force # 1, published by DC Comics back in 1992!

Hit the jump for more of that awesomeness.

— Saturday, February 28th, 2009