The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Wezil]

1. That's an awful thing to say about embalmer.

2. How did you get access to his psych records?

[Krill]

...Ian Brady.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

He is still a diagnosed pschyopath. The judge shouldn't send him to prison.

Psychopathy doesn't equate to insanity at law or in medical jurisprudence. There are many psychopaths walking around in rather well-paid jobs and functioning adequately in society.

[Krill]

Psychopathy doesn't equate to insanity at law or in medical jurisprudence. There are many psychopaths walking around in rather well-paid jobs and functioning adequately in society.

In the Mental Health Act 1983, Psychopathy (any mental disturbance or injury or disability that affects the mind according to the act) is enough to get you sectioned if you are a risk to society. He is a psychopath, and a murder. Thus he should remain in hospital. He will probably be on a section 47/49, remanded from prison for treatment with restrictions (cos he's a murderer), FWIW. The fact that he wants to die doesn't stop that fact. OTOH, I don't know how they are legally force feeding him using the MHA, because it can't be used for treatment of a physical illness, nor is the duty of care a legal excuse to restrain him. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 needs to be used for that nowadays, but proving he lacks capacity and thus has to be fed under a best interests decision shouldn't be that difficult to finagle. EDIT: looks like he was force fed in 1999, under older capacity laws.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

He's not a risk to society, because he's on a "whole life" prison tariff.

[Wezil]

Rolling Stone) -- Doobie Brothers drummer Michael Hossack died at his home in Dubois, Wyoming, on Monday at the age of 65.

He had been battling cancer for some time and succumbed to complications of the disease with his family at his side.

Hossack was a member of the Doobie Brothers between 1971 and 1973, playing on several of the band's best-known hits, including "Jesus Is Just Alright," "Listen to the Music" and "China Grove."

[Krill]

He's not a risk to society, because he's on a "whole life" prison tariff.

That's not how it works Bugs.

He has to be suitable for release into the community, before he would be considered suitable to return to jail. Call it what you will, but that's how it works.

[Wezil]

We're off to our second slowest start ever.

While we wait...

Less than a year after being named the world's ugliest dog, Yoda has died.

The 1.8-lb. Chinese crested-Chihuahua mix was owned by Terry Schumacher, of Hanford, Calif., whose daughter found the mutt in a field.

"I told her to put it down because I thought it was a rat," she said on the website of the Sonoma-Marin Fair, where the ugliest dog contest has been held for 23 years.

Last June, Yoda's scruffy fur and what fair officials charitably refer to as her "irregular" features vaulted her to the top of the voting, over 28 other contestants.

Yoda won a trophy "15 times her size" and $1,000, a photo shoot and an overnight stay at a luxury hotel. Her win also gained her international fame, including TV appearances and media coverage.

Schumacher told the Hanford Sentinel she will miss Yoda's "funny little ways. Her memories will live on forever."

Yoda died in her sleep on Saturday. She was 15.

[molly bloom]

Moebius has drawn his last breath.

It's been about one week since we said goodbye to the great comic book master Jean Girard, who passed away at age 73 after a long struggle with cancer. Better known around the world as Moebius, Giraud had an immeasurably massive influence on the realms of cartooning, illustration and even film. Naturally the tributes to his legacy have been legion, particularly in the comic book community where he was most revered. Some of these tributes have taken the form of personal essays on what Moebius' work meant to them, reverent obituaries and original illustrations inspired by his legendary work. We've collected some below.

Batman: Death By Design artist Dave Taylor has published some wonderful anecdotes about his personal interactions with Moebius. Here's just one:

I was due to be in Paris so called [Giraud] at his home there. He welcomed me in with a huge bowl of tea and sat me down saying "could I show you what I've been working on?" He disappeared into his studio, which I was craning my neck to look into, and emerged like an embarrassed child clutching a half finished page of Blueberry. I took it. He stood away, looking to catch my thoughts as I looked over it. What struck me wasn't so much the beautifully crafted page of art, perfect and unique as it was, but the attitude he had. I was an equal, a fellow artist who's thoughts and impressions meant a great deal to him. I shrugged, smiled up at him and said "Beautiful!" to which his response was so humble and honest that the moment stayed with me to this day.


Frank Quitely is recognized as one of Moebius' most popular stylistic descendants in mainstream American comics, as evidenced by his in work All-Star Superman and New X-Men, among others. The artist at Dangerous Minds about Giraud's unmatched technique. An excerpt:

Everything that makes his designs, comic covers, illustrations and individual drawings and paintings beautiful, striking, well composed and effectively realized, is also employed in his strip-work. The ability to make not just a collection of wonderful images, but to make those images work together in sequence, is a whole other art-form in itself, and Moebius excelled as much in the fluidity of his storytelling as he did in the brilliance of his linework.


As a teenager, The Sandman writer Neil Gaiman was profoundly influenced by the original French editions of Métal Hurlant, the science fiction magazine Moebius co-founded.

I read the magazine over and over and envied the French because they had everything I dreamed of in comics - beautifully drawn, visionary and literate comics, for adults. I just wished my French was better, so I could understand the stories (which I knew would be amazing).

I wanted to make comics like that when I grew up.

I finally read the Moebius stories in that Metal Hurlant when I was in my 20s, in translation, and discovered that they weren't actually brilliant stories. More like stream-of-consciousness art meets Ionesco absurdism. The literary depth and brilliance of the stories had all been in my head. Didn't matter. The damage had long since been done.


ComicsAlliance contributor Matt Seneca wrote beautifully about Moebius' transcendent work. An excerpt:

Moebius is more than his stories, more even than the specifics of what his images depict. Those colors, those marks, those rounded and expressive forms, touch something very deep in people. I've thought it through for the better part of a decade, and my best guess is this. Moebius fused all the hallmarks of genre comics -- intricate spaceships, ancient monoliths, monstrous creatures, superpowered demigods, beautiful maidens, unexplored landscapes -- to lines that made every surface look a bit aged, a bit used, long since gone over by multitudes of human hands or feet, and to colors so bright and crystalline that every panel seems ripe to be reached into and touched. He presented the worlds of fantasy and escape that comics readers across the globe have lived their whole lives in, not as we've seen them elsewhere, but as we imagine them -- scuffed up and worn around the edges from the time we've spent inside them, but still forever shining with the promise of new wonders yet to come.

In his very personal eulogy for Moebius, Sean Witzke wrote about the artist's indelible influence on popular culture:

No artist, let alone a comics artist, has been as singularly influential on the way we as a species see ourselves moving forward. For good or ill, since Moebius, and his contemporaries, imagined what we now think of as the modern urbanized city (or the cyberpunk city), we couldn't have conceived of it. While that idea has many, many precedents, none of them ring as true. None of them are still relevant. Not one of them captures what city blocks teeming with dozens of kinds of people all together in one space. Walls of faces, some alien, all familiar. None have the locations and trappings of "the future" as used, lived-in. Science fiction in the past 30 years is indelibly linked to Moebius, he is everywhere you look.

At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon wrote a short biography of Moebius that included this passage about the artist's success outside his native France:

Giraud was rare among his similarly heavy-hitting French comics peers in that he was frequently published in North America. He even enjoyed a unique relationship with Marvel Comics, better known for exploiting its own properties than working with artists on books revolving around their names and concepts. He drew a two-issue Silver Surfer mini-series scripted by Stan Lee that appeared in 1988 and 1989 -- at which time the artist had moved to Los Angeles -- and made a popular series of single-image drawings of Marvel characters. Marvel's Epic imprint published a series of their album-sized "graphic novels" featuring Moebius' work from about 1987 to 1992, one of the stalwart projects of the Direct Market's initial infatuation with the graphic novel format. Because of that market's sometimes-narrow range of interests, that a stylish artist like Giraud had any work featured at all let alone by a market giant like Marvel made him an important influence on the next wave of comics-makers, just as the wild Metal Hurlant work had inspired a generation before them.

Most comprehensive of all may be this thorough obituary written by Kim Thompson at The Comics Journal, organizing Giraud's career chronologically. A portion about the creation of Métal Hurlant:

And so the "Moebius" signature made its reappearance in L'Écho (in the story "White Nightmare"), and soon Giraud joined his friends Druillet and Dionnet, as well as a fourth founder Bernard Farkas, to create the similarly-formatted adult science fiction comic Métal Hurlant (and along with it its publishing arm, Les Humanoïdes Associés). For the rest of the 1970s, Giraud would divert much of his focus from "Blueberry" (which was still running in Pilote regardless of the Goscinny dust-up - in part because the series' substantial royalties funded Giraud's far less profitable alternative work) to focus on an astonishing run of wildly inventive series and stories for Métal, including the stunningly-colored, wordless surrealistic fantasy series "Arzach" and the whimsically disjointed, Michael Moorcock-inspired "Garage Hermétique de Jerry Cornelius," both of which premiered, to the delight and frequent bafflement of readers, in the first issue of Métal.

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/03/16/jean-giraud-moebius-tributes-artwork-essays/

[Wezil]

I'm still not taking him off ignore...

[-Jrabbit]

FYI, Wezil, the artist Moebius has passed away.

It's been about one week since we said goodbye to the great comic book master Jean Girard, who passed away at age 73 after a long struggle with cancer. Better known around the world as Moebius, Giraud had an immeasurably massive influence on the realms of cartooning, illustration and even film.

[Wezil]

You don't say?


I have (our) Mobius on ignore, not Molly.

[Dinner]

You don't really need to talk about your ignore list, do you? I mean if you want to ignore someone then just go ahead and do it but taunting him over it just seems childish.

[SlowwHand]

Why don't you shut up?

[Uncle Sparky]

Why can't we play nice?