| | A Strange and Unexpected Turn -- continued from 06.13.08
I stared at it. After a moment I reached forward into the upturned cab, my revulsion and fear overcome by my need to be certain that it was real.
"Don't touch it!" Frank implored me, his voice impressively under control. I might have spoken if it weren't that it felt as if everything from my eyeballs to my vocal cords was in such a high state of tension that calling on them to function was nearly impossible. I simply couldn't believe what was in front of me. But there it was, like all of the '90s paranoid conspiracy memes, staring right back at me with black, oval eyes.
"Is it alive?"
I thought the better question was, "Is it real?" In the cab of the upended truck was what I can only describe as a large Grey. Somehow, in light of that, I hardly noticed the very human body next to him. Perhaps because the unfortunate man that shared the cab was dressed like he belonged there; flannel shirt, jeans, green John Deere cap.
"Is it alive?" Frank asked again. I wasn't sure how to determine that even if I disobeyed his earlier behest and touched it. My mind boggled, very much like the Parker Brothers game, bits of my brain bouncing around, ricocheting against my skull.
"How the Hell should I know?" I finally replied, my vocal cords unlocking.
He looked at me and seemed to understand what I was saying. He leaned in past me, fitting his head into the cab and took a good whiff. After a moment he said, "I think they're alive."
"What makes you think that?"
"When a man dies it tends to loosen the grip on his shit." I nodded and blinked at Frank. This bit of mundane, if disgusting, knowledge seemed to bring me back to reality. With that, my brain began to collect its Boggle bits, composing itself, even if it was crying quietly. This did bring me, though, to the logical question.
"How do you know this thing even shits?" I stepped back to look at the ruin of the cab, decapitated from the rest of the poignantly absent truck, sitting in the field. "How'd this even get out here? What is this, some sort of intergalactic trucker?!?"
That's when we were surrounded by the bright light. It was if someone had turned on a fluorescent light hot enough and bright enough to make me forget about the morning sun.
I looked up to see a swirling silver disc with a burning center descending upon us. Dropping my eyes from it, I stared out from the incandescent cone that surrounded us and I saw the sun and the bright blue sky and I thought to myself, "I thought this shit was supposed to happen at night."
But when my feet left the ground, I believed. |
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| If you ever feel like you need a trip to the nut house, try writing a time travel story. Everything cascades off of everything else until it feels like your trying to hold evaporating water in your head. Your frontal lobe will begin to expand, pressing against your skull until you look like an old Star Trek villain.
08:32 MST
While stumbling around the internet doing research I came across this oath that Lester Dent had crafted for his iconic hero Doc Savage. | | Do we have heroes like this today in comics? If we did, would we even believe them? Given that Savage spent most of his time punching people in the face, did we ever have them? |
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| In the face of disappearing civil liberties Briton's keep their customary sense of humor.
16:32 MST
"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cancelled four global-warming research expeditions, citing the cost of fuel." -- Harper's
12:32 MST
Just awesome.
Awesome, incidentally, is becoming my favorite word of the moment. While, technically, if everything is awesome, then by default everything is just average, it seems to make my tiny corner of the world a brighter place. Even if it does make me sound like a moron.
08:32 MST
James Dobson of Focus on the Family has accused Barack Obama of distorting the bible. Dr. Dobson is apparently without a sense of irony.
As we move towards the 2008 election with two candidates that at least appear to be reasonable, it's a real pleasure to watch Dr. Dobson and his ilk become more fractured and marginalized as no one is in a hurry to bow down to the supposedly monolithic group that is the evangelicals. You can almost hear his voice getting tinier and more shrill as if he were being flushed down a toilet.
That's probably just wishful thinking though.
"I fought the war, but the war won." -- Magneta Lane |
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| After stumbling at the end of last week, we're back onto Mirror Man. Here's page six.
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| We've hit a bit of a snag on page six of Mirror Man so for some filler, here's a sneak preview of some art from The Reckoners.
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| Life had taken a strange and unexpected turn. | | "Frank," I said, sipping my coffee and looking out the back window, "what's the…" I paused and moved the blinds aside to get a better view. "What's the truck doing in our backyard?"
I smelled Frank coming before I heard him, the odor of his morning cigarette filling the kitchen.
"What's it?" With the morning grogginess still thick in his voice, I couldn't tell if he hadn't heard me or if the question confused him.
I turned and gestured toward the window. "There's a truck in the back lot." I looked back out the window again to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.
Nope. Still there.
"Or what's left of a truck anyway."
Frank rolled up beside me and I stepped out of the way to make room for his wheelchair. Frank's legs worked fine, but he had found the old piece of hospital equipment on one of our salvage runs and kept using it around the house. I never asked why and he never felt like sharing.
He squinted against the morning light and the smoke drifting into his eyes as he pursed the butt between his lips. "Hellfire," he muttered, not sure of what to make of it himself. "How the Hell did that get out there?"
"Couldn't say. Was hoping you'd know. It wasn't there last night before I went to bed." The front end of the white truck was embedded in the ground, the back half of it entirely removed, looking as if it'd been ripped off, tendrils of metal and plastic snaking upward towards the sky like it was growing out of the ground, grill first.
"Well, I sure as shit didn't put it there, Mike."
"I didn't think that you chained it to your wheels, dragged it out through the orchard, over the barb wire and parked it next to the barn for aesthetic purposes." Frank looked up at me with an expression that made it clear my sarcasm was not appreciated before his morning coffee.
With a burst of energy, Frank kicked his way out of the chair. "Let's go check it out."
Getting out to the field that the truck was in wasn't the easiest thing in the world, even if you did have a pair of functional legs. Frank and I had hit on some hard times awhile back and we moved into this dilapidated farm shortly thereafter. The owner was a real estate speculator who was sitting on the land till someone made the right offer. We offered to fix the place up, make it look nicer for possible buyers, in exchange for free rent. Well, not long after the housing market took a dump and buyers stopped coming around, so Frank and I spent most of our time drinking beer in front of what we had that passed for a television. After living at the ass end of nowhere for the better part of a year, I'm pretty sure you could pick up "Wheel of Fortune" in Pakistan if you tried hard enough.
Anyway, the fields were uneven and uncut, the orchard trees looked as if they were out to get you and the barb wire fence was run down, rusty and couldn't support a man's weight. But the barb wire was our last obstacle and we hopped over it ably. The first thing that I noticed (and I could see Frank picked up on it to) was the grass around the truck was untouched. No tire tracks, no dirt pulled up from drag, not even a blade of grass flattened. I walked around the truck, taking the white hulk in, looking for anything that might offer a clue as to how it ended up there. Eventually, I came around the driver's side window.
That's when we found the body. |
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| So we're going to try something a little different. The schedule around here has always been a bit chaotic. So we're going to try a bit more of a schedule. On Monday and Wednesday, we'll be updating as usual with art from one of the various site projects. On Friday, we'll be doing the Ramble, something I'll write specifically for that day. I can't promise it will make sense, or be relevant, but I'll at least try to make it entertaining.
In the mean time, for those of you who are wincing at the idea of having solid text on Fridays, rejoice! The third page of Mirror Man.
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| Well, the summer season is always pretty busy for comic book publishers. Everyone gets out and about, struts their stuff and pimps their shit. So why should I be any different? But Matt, you say, by being a contrarian, you could show your work to publishers in the off season when they don't have fleets of fanboys trying to get them to look at portfolios and scripts? To you, kind stranger, I say, keep your logic away from me. If I had use for that stuff I wouldn't be here.
The Mirror Man project has been around awhile, but the art that was posted there was generally regarded as being of poor quality. So after far too long, I've picked up another artist; a talented gent by the name of Branko out of Belgrade. His work on the first page of the story is here for you viewing pleasure.
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| If you're a regular here, you may have noticed the reading section has been quite neglected lately. This is mostly due to my growing responsibilities at and affinity for Comics Bulletin, where I write and edit. While the "At Least One Lie" column was a dismal failure there, it will continue to live on at this site. However, if you enjoy comic books, I highly recommend checking out Comics Bulletin. And if you don't enjoy comic books, I've got to ask, what are you doing here?
Anyway, writing in other venues continues. The Ana Chronistic page is up, complete with synopsis. Still looking for an artist to take on the project. Let me know if you know of anyone, will you? That's a dear. | Later that same day...
If you somehow fused these two women together you'd get something close to what I imagine when I think of Ana Chronistic. |
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