How to defy death:

It’s easy…

To Tumble and Fall defying death

The most popular British summer activity:

Crossdressing!

To Tumble and Fall being caught crossdressing

Introducing…

…guest author Phil Alexander. “A guest author?”, you shriek and spill a bit of your 300 year old whiskey on your mahagoni keyboard while trying to remove the rests of a pandabear steak with your ivory toothpick. “How can there possibly be a guest author for a three frame comic that has no dialogue whatsoever?”, you insist and throw up a little bit of the tortoise-soup you had earlier into your mouth and swallow it back down again.

Well, I’m not quite sure myself, but it’s surely isn’t as easy as scribbling it down on an application called Graffiti on my facebook profile. Anyway, here it is:

To Tumble and Fall wearing a sombrero

Life canceled due to boredom

So it’s this time of the year again when young and not that young British people get locked up in a house and all of it will be televised on a show called Big Brother.

Before we arrived in England, we watched the German version of Big Brother. In Germany they had a little different approach to the whole thing. They built a complete village and put the candidates in there with the prospect of staying for an unlimited amount of time. The villagers then had to work for their food and special treats for parties after work-time. So basically it was trying to actually imitate life and televise it.

It took the audience a whole year before it got bored of watching duplicates of themselves mirrored on their television sets. The show got canceled, the village was torn down and the ex-villagers were released into cheap record-studios to produce extraordinarily bad Euro-Trash pop in German. Which is even worse than German HipHop. Fun all around.

Moving over to England and we were greeted by a woman called Jade Goody bullying some actress with one of the members of S-Club 7. And was a Jackson involved in it as well? Can’t quite remember anymore. So before you complain about Big Brother, be grateful those house mates are busy being booed into the house, after all they could be recording German Techno-Gabba HipHop instead.

Oh, by the way, look! A comic-strip:

To Tumble and Fall in Big Brother:

Compli. D. or Semi-A?

To Tumble and Fall against the frame:

So, I’m not sure if I like this style better than the ones featured in the previous TnFs.

The complitely digital ones seem to be a lot cleaner, do cause some handcramps when drawing them, though. The semi-analogue ones seem a little more dynamic, but are also a bit fuzzier.

What do you guys reckon?

Welcome to the Digital World

This is a triple digital premiere of sorts. Firstly, one part of TandF made a step over to Facebook to manifest his ego and actual face on the buzzing servers, keepers of the Internet. Secondly this is the first all digital strip showing (thirdly) a videogame. Wow.

To Tumble and Fall onto a Goomba

Hm… yes. Well…

Phhh. Uh. Hmm:

To Tumble and Fall over uncomfortable silence:

Holding things aloft

Everyone of us is pretty familiar with the concept of rose-tinting the childhood. And today I think is a day to look back into the past and throw buckets of pink paint over what I used to think was the best animated series of all times:

Watching this might explain my tendency to hold aloft random objects when I was a kid. It might just be a magic one, you know. Luckily for He-Man it was a sword, though. Mine turned out to be a potato on a stick, which is now sitting somewhere in my basement, hidden under a pile of refuse.

Nothing beats the run towards the camera ending with a punch in the viewer’s face, except for maybe this somehow even funkier intro to She-Ra. It’s good to see a female main-cast, that doesn’t go down the Princess Peach path with superpowers that feed right from the foul bowl of idiot-man’s stereotype-ideas of where women draw their strength from. Namely severe mood-swings that enable Super Princess Peach to trigger the superpower of crying right after burning down something by being really, really angry.

Okay, before I declare She-Ra the symbol of womens’ empowerment and hold aloft my mighty She-Ra DVD boxset, do remember that I did pour a bucket of pink rose-tint over all of this. So much that I surely deserve a He-Man viewer-punch.

Videogames!

Yes, we love videogames. Well, one of us more than the other, but essentially the two of us of T&F love videogames! They’re great! Not all of them, of course. Most of them are rather dull. But some are really nice. Out of those that are nice, there are some which just seem to steal your time and brain capacity, but there’s this small fraction of games that are actually inspiring.

Do not worry, this will not mark the point at which this blog turns into one of the countless videogame-review blogs, this merely marks the point where I will out myself as a Metal Gear Solid fan and cannot keep the urge back to say: Oh my god, there’s a METAL GEAR ONLINE BETA across Europe from the 17th of April onwards to some point in May. I forgot the exact ending date because I’m still too excited about the downloadable beta.

So, if there are any T&F readers out there with a PS3 and who’ll want to team up my PSN name is: MrSchnabel. If you have hobbies like alcoholism or general apathy, why not combine it with a nice session of shooting T&F in the face? Videogames are easily combined with multiple drug addictions and/or states of mental emergencies.

Although, if you are in a manic phase and coke addicted AND you have a headset, please understand if I decline your friend request. Everyone else is pretty much welcome.

From Manchester to Liverpool.

Back in October 2007 when we created Tumble and Fall, Oliver East found one of our strips on the forum of the Comic Journal and he liked it. He liked it so much, he went onto our blog and read through the post of us whining about all this “networking stuff”. Oliver then put one of our strips up on the Manchester Comix Collective, calling out for sympathy for our little comic blog.

Now, half a year later we thought we should return the favor and create a little strip that tries to mimic his unique drawing style. Just as a way of saying “Thanks for the support. Much appreciated!”. As it turns out simply posting a sentence that contains Trains are…Mint quadrupled our daily hits and after Oliver posted about the strip on his blog it quadrupled again (the octupled normal daily hit number equals about 8 by the way, unless guys fall into the google trap when looking for “how to stay awake forever” or “secrets” and end up on this blog). So, it seems like Trains are…Mint are in the process of making it big*.

In December we were among the lucky ones to get our greedy hands on a preview version of Trains are…Mint 5 and almost got into a catfight with Banal Pig creator Steven Tillotson in the process. Luckily Oliver was there to calm the situation down in his comment section with, I hope I recall the words correctly, “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT”.

A week or two ago we received the complete version of Trains are…Mint 5 and our first impressions were all quite true (great artwork, funny narrative, not going into too much detail here as you could just go back to that post we made then, so we don’t have to write lengthy paragraphs nobody will ever read because they are too bloated with information of the written kind and no picture in between as you would expect from a bloody comic blog, so when I close this bracket let’s not discuss this as I’ll drawn the line, in bracket-form, right here).

The most interesting parts, especially in expectation of No 6, are when Oliver gets self-referential. You get the feeling if Oliver isn’t careful, he might just digest himself. “Digesting oneself is not really a good thing, is it?”, you ask while sipping on that little bit of brandy you pour yourself into your crystal-glass every night before descending into the filthy world of internet blogs. But you are quite right, it isn’t. But these are the moments in which reality and comic-reality merge and everything begins to vibrate a little. And this is the reason why I am very much looking forward to Trains are…Mint 6 as well. I just want to know how the protagonist in the comics copes with Oliver’s success drawing exactly these comics.

But, please, do see for yourself! It’s still available over at www.rollingstockpress.co.uk

And yes, “octupled” is a word.

*Big in the independent comic scene equals being able to pay for the next project before cutting down on food.