There was a nice, old-style carousel plonked right in the middle of Festival City the other day. Luckily I'd brought along a camera, and the little Kodak performed admirably (it really is a boon to have some manual controls on these compacts). Myself, less so, for I took a lot of photos, but only one -- this one -- was any good.

This is a two second exposure on shutter priority, hand-held with my dad's shoulder acting as tripod.

Our parents' shoulders are useful for so many things.

V

Ever since stone-age man first propped up a palm-leaf awning between two commercial mud huts, stuck a fountain in the centre and posted a sign for ‘toilet’ and ‘food court’ next to it, mankind has had malls to go to. A civic space that provides some place for Madame to shop, Sir to ogle, Young Master to gorge and fourteen-year-olds to stand around in groups trying to look cool (and failing en masse to do so).

And, like most things we’ve invented, over the subsequent thousands of years we have been attempting to make ever greater, more elaborate versions of the two-shop-fountain-and-food-court model we know as the shopping mall. Take the great pyramids of Giza, for instance; a quirky design whose unique architecture and indecipherable signage had led to it long being mislabeled as a place of worship, and even a tomb! Well let me tell you, the pyramids now have serious competition.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been to the Dubai Mall, and I have lived to tell the tale -- with pictures!

So begins the second Comic Konga! I think I'm starting to like doing the first one as a single panel gag; it's a format I never otherwise use, and it's a challenge to distill something down to one panel and one line only. Like most writers I have a tendency to ramble, and something like this could easily have been a three or six panel piece.

The anatomy and line-work is all over the place, and I did try to colour it but decided just to keep it to black and white (perhaps that can be a theme for this time's CK). Hope your own comic endeavours are fruitful. Can't wait to see what you lot have come up with.

V

You see some strange things at the mall. Most of the time it has to do with fashion accidents and, in the case of Dubai, kiosks selling ridiculous looking real estate, but once in a while you spot something you'd swear came out of a Katsuhito Ishii movie.

Take this guy, for example. Fairly normal looking white guy: shirt, loose trousers, glazed-over, pre-weekend look in his eyes, bag of shopping and... fluffy bathroom slippers?

I hope it was some kind of subversive fashion statement, but chances are that either his pair of snakeskin moccasins were off at the cleaners, or he was just too stoned to know what he had on.

V