Sunday Comics #34 (Tom)

Here's part 2 of my story from last week.

angst

Sunday Comix # 33

Ef For Effort. 

Sunday Comics #33 (Tom)

Here's my comic.

The Furious Story. Part Seven: "Awakening"

For some time, the schoolteacher just sat in the darkness and drank his whiskey. Not a sound could be heard in the cottage – even the usual chirping of crickets and tree frogs was absent. It was as though the story had absorbed all sound and light in his anger. 

The schoolteacher felt the story's rage through the silence and his mind began to burn with a fever sparked by fear and fueled by alcohol.

The teacher decided to break the silence and end his torment. He reached for the candle and matches, intending to burn the journal and purge the story from his life. But in the darkness, he knocked the candle dish off the table and it crashed to the floor, shattering.  As he bent down to pick it up, the teacher struck his head on the table and fell to the floor in a drunken stupor, cutting his arm on the broken candle dish. As he laid motionless in the darkness, he could feel the warm blood trickle down his shirt. And now, though his eyes remained open, he fell out of consciousness into a delirious hypnotic state.

The schoolteacher began to see the stories of his life, as if projected on the walls of the darkened room. He heard voices of friends and foe, strangers and loved ones.

The teacher trembled recalling the cruelties of childhood – malicious name-calling and schoolyard fights. He felt the pain of humiliation and betrayal and could see the faces of his attackers – images that had long since been locked away. 

Along with painful moments, the schoolteacher experienced the unexpected joys of his past. The kind words of a stranger. The soft touch of his mother’s hand. The warmth of friends and encouragement of family. The teacher lay suspended between sleep and wakefulness all night, as his hallucinations raged on filled with both pain and pleasure.

As the first light of dawn finally began to pierce the oppressive darkness, the schoolteacher began to wake from his trance. Wiping off cold sweat and dried blood, he rolled over on the floor. 

The schoolteacher was weak and sick to his stomach from fever and drink, but he pulled himself up and sat at the table. Still feeling the echoes of the stories of his life, he was overcome with emotion and tears streamed down his cheeks. He reached for his pen and slowly opened the journal, fearful of what he might find inside. 

As he opened to the blackened page, the characters that filled the sheet began to fade away, one-by-one, until the page was clean and white. By now the sun had risen over the horizon giving the paper a warm glow. The teacher took his pen and began to write:

Once, at a very special moment in time, in a magical land, lived a remarkable person, and he was a...

...schoolteacher.

There was no interruption, no response at all from the story, so the schoolteacher continued:

And the magical land he lived in was a beautiful forest, filled with flowers and plants, birds and beasts. And the very special moment in time was now. 

Again there was no response from the story, but the schoolteacher had a feeling of confidence and purpose, so he continued to write, and he did so every day, until he finished the story, and the next one, and the next one.

And the stories, like the pages of his journal, were filled with more light than dark.

The end.

The Furious Story. Part Six: "Darkness"

The schoolteacher carefully buried the bird beneath the rock and stomped back into the house, flinging open the journal and tightly clenching his pen. "You want me to write what I know?" Said the schoolteacher to the story. "Then you shall have it!" And with this he began to write:

Once, at a very special moment in time, in a magical land, lived a remarkable animal, a noble bird that fought for his freedom and died in the battle. 

Then he drew a picture of the bird, an accurate portrayal, only more regal in stature with a purposeful gaze. 

But as he finished the drawing, he saw the story's words again appear on the page, only this time the characters formed softly, in a shade of grey, not black. The schoolteacher sensed more disappointment than anger as he read the words: "This is not a story about a bird."

"Oh yes it is!" Said the schoolteacher. "This bird's life inspires me."

"What do you know of the bird's life?" Wrote the story. 

"I know it well," said the teacher, "he sought comfort and warmth in the shelter of this house, but found only confinement." And now the bird in the drawing lowered his head in sadness as the schoolteacher continued."

"He fought for his freedom, but he was blind to the only means of achieving it. He chose death above imprisonment." And with this, the bird in the drawing lay down and closed his eyes.

"Interesting." Wrote the story. "Perhaps a fitting analogy, but this is NOT your story. It is a handful of sentences at most, representing a few moments in time, a fragment of a day, not an entire life." Wrote the story. 

"Do you suggest you know what motivated that bird to enter the house?" Wrote the story more angrily.

"Perhaps it was the search for food that drove him, not comfort. Perhaps he did not seek escape, because he had not yet found what he came for; a few morsels of bread to take back to his offspring, now starving in the hollow of a tree!" The story continued in a furious tone as a drawing of baby birds in a nest appeared on the page. 

"Perhaps it was duty, not freedom that took his life. How do you know you haven't trivialized his labors – cheapened his life – by suggesting he sought only comfort and freedom! Do you think him so shallow that his only motivation was to serve himself?" The story angrily continued.

"And why do you see the beasts of burden you muse about as slaves and not heroes." Continued the story, now changing the subject from the bird, whose image faded from the page. "Do they not willingly accept the yoke? Their labor is not without purpose – they plow the earth so that we may make bread!"

"STOP this torment!" Said the schoolteacher, taking a long drink from the dark bottle. The room had now darkened with nightfall, illuminated only by a single candle that cast the pages of the journal in a warm brown. 

"I am weary of your harassment." The schoolteacher slurred. "This is MY story, NOT yours!"

As he looked at the book, the schoolteacher saw his own words form on the page. "This is MY story!" The story wrote in large, angry letters. And then letters of all sizes formed on every part of the page. They glided across the parchment in chaos. Letters. Numbers. Punctuation too. Periods and semicolons blasted through the letters like shrapnel as the page continued to darken with an angry, swirling mass of characters and symbols. The candle flickered as a dreadful gloom filled the room. And soon the letters filled every empty space. And the page was black.

And then the journal slammed shut so hard that the blast of air blew out the candle, leaving the schoolteacher alone in the darkness.

The Furious Story. Part Five: "He was Gone"

Things had become very difficult for the schoolteacher. 

He left his job at the school and came to this refuge in the woods to be free. 

He loved teaching, but as the years wore on his shoulders slumped from the constant pressures of working to serve too many masters and conforming to the expectations of those he worked for and with. He felt like a beast of burden, restrained by an invisible bridle made not of leather but of words – commands and criticisms.

In this hidden place, he hoped to be his own master, but now it appeared he was again enslaved. The story had become his master, with its own set of commands and criticisms. Only these demands were more burdensome, because he could find no argument against them. The critiques, he felt, were pushing him toward some unseen end – a destination he both welcomed and feared.

And so, when the story angrily shut him off, he turned to the same comfort sought by many writers and artists before him; a bottle of amber liquid – a fifth of a gallon, eighty proof.

The schoolteacher drank until he could no longer hear his own thoughts and then he slept deeply and late into the afternoon. When he awoke, he was greeted by the sound of hammering. He turned his head slowly to the noise and witnessed a most unusual sight. A large bird, mostly white and black with a flaming red crest, clung to the side of a kitchen shelf and hammered on the nearby window. And though his pecking was forceful and loud, he could not break the glass. 

"What brings you here?" The schoolteacher asked. "And how did you get in?" As far as the schoolteacher could tell, all the doors and windows were closed and had been so through the night.

Of course the bird did not answer, he just continued his work and paid no notice the man who sat just a few feet away. 

"So you seek your freedom?" Said the schoolteacher. "Then you shall have it." And with that, the schoolteacher reached past the bird and threw open the window. But the sudden movement alarmed the bird and he flew off into the next room. When he came to rest, he began hammering on a bookcase with the same persistence he applied to the window, but with seemingly no purpose, since the bookcase was situated near the center of the room and penetrating it would not aid the bird's escape. 

Observing this, the schoolteacher felt a wave of sorrow come over him and he determined to set the bird free. He began chasing it around the house in the hopes of guiding him toward the open window, but, instead of calmly surveying the situation and pursuing the path to escape that was set before him, the bird became frantic in his behavior, pounding harder and faster on whatever piece of furniture he happened upon, until finally, the trauma of his own panicked labors overcame him and he dropped to the floor. 

The schoolteacher ran to the bird, cradled his body and rushed him outside where he laid him on a stone, free to fly away. But the bird did not fly, or open his eyes, or move a muscle. He was gone. And now the schoolteacher sat and sobbed. His head pounding from last night's drink, and his thoughts, dark and stormy. 

Smiley Comic

Stage 1 Comic

The Furious Story. Part Four: "The Journal Slams Shut"

Lost in thought, the schoolteacher wandered through the dense woodlands, occasionally pausing to observe a colorful box turtle or a slithering snake making its way through the underbrush. Only when the deepening dusk made it hard to see the way did he notice how far he'd traveled and how late it had become.

"Oh my!" said the schoolteacher, and turned to briskly make his way back to the cottage. Soon the sun set and the woods darkened to a brown-black haze and it took great concentration to see anything at all. 

The schoolteacher felt his way along the trail and on the occasions when he stumbled off the path, he was gripped with fear, not informed by rational thoughts, but by reflexes that welled from his heart and not his head. At these times, he imagined foes unseen and animals unheard and he wondered if he would ever see his little cottage again. But the path was never more than a few footsteps away and he was never away from it for more than a moment. 

Before long he saw the faint glow of the fireplace showing through the windows and he felt safe and warm. He threw a large stack of wood on the smoldering embers as if to force back the traces of darkness that still tormented his soul, and drank a full mug of whisky before falling into a deep sleep, still in his clothes. 

When he awoke, he thought of the darkness and its unseen threats and began to think about his story. He sat at his desk and began to write:

Once, at a very special moment in time, in a magical land, lived a remarkable person, and he was a...

...private detective investigating a murder.

But before he could add another word, letters formed on the page and the story responded: "A what? A detective? Surely you're joking! He is NOT a detective!

The schoolteacher was taken aback. "Well you've no need to get angry," he said, "and he is indeed a detective, and a very good one!" He began to draw a smartly dressed man in a long, black trench-coat with a belt pulled tightly at the waist and a dark grey fedora hat. The detective had one eyebrow raised as he smugly looked down at the taped outline of a figure on the ground.

"How do you know he's good," the story responded, "What do you know about detectives?" With this the detective in the drawing looked up from the ground with a curious expression on his face, as though he was eager to hear the schoolteacher's response to the question. 

The schoolteacher quipped back, "I know plenty about detectives. I must have read over one hundred true crime books." 

But the story jumped in, "You know NOTHING about detectives! Do you know how they find their first job, or how they are trained, or what motivates them to go into their peculiar line of work? Do you what they feel when they look upon a body, torn by bullets? Have you ever known any detectives – even ONE? Have you interviewed them? Have you so much as met one in passing? NO! NO! NO!"

"There is NO detective in this story!" And with that, the drawing of the detective jumped and ran off the page and the journal slammed itself shut. 

The Furious Story. Part Three: "The Wizard Walks Off"

Seeing no other alternative, the schoolteacher reluctantly accepted that the miraculous writings on his page were indeed the voice of the story itself. So, though it made him feel as though he was going insane, he decided to talk to the story. 

"But he's a wise and powerful wizard," he wrote, and then began drawing the wizard on the page, "With a magical staff."

"No!" Replied the story. "That is, indeed, a wise and powerful wizard." With this, the drawing that the schoolteacher just made became animated and took on a look of pride. Then the story continued, "But he does not belong here. He is the subject of many other tales, but this is not his tale. Not his story." And with that, the wizard, now looking a little less proud, slowly walked off the page and disappeared. 

The schoolteacher was puzzled and frustrated. He'd had more than enough of this, so he slammed shut the journal and left the cottage for a walk along the creek. 

It was a beautiful day. The water was glistening with the reflection of a clear blue sky. Under the surface, the schoolteacher saw a few small trout swaying in the current near a rock. The teacher continued along the creek until he found a mossy boulder that he loved to sit on. He sat and took a deep breath and thought about his encounter with the story. 

"Curses!" he thought, "The story is right. That wizard isn't mine. I didn't create him; I merely called him to mind. He is an amalgam of the wizards of many of my favorite stories – a noble character – but not my character. I must work harder. Think again. I will find my hero.”

And with this, the schoolteacher continued his walk, thinking deeply about the subject of his story.

Sunday Comix # 32 (Burry)

Here's some junk for your perusal.

Sunday Comics #32 (Tom)

Here's my final version of the comic I sketched out last week for the stage one theme. It turned exactly how I planned, thus showing the benefit of planning clearly. I planned, then I did the final one, just like in the plan. The plan was executed, so the things in the plan came to pass, just as planned.

I am typing this on Barry's keyboard, and for some reason I find it amazing to type on, I just don't want to stop typing. I simple cannot stop myself, lalalala, this is incredibly entertaining for some reason. I'm in the typing zone, I just don't want to stop typing for some reason, it is just like a whirlwind of typing where everything is just coming out at top speed, undeniable, inexorable, impervious, indivisible, incongruous, indefensible speed.

I guess the only thing for it is to write a poem to commemorate this typing moment.

Ah, yes typing
typing on this computer
pressing buttons
many buttons
each button keyed to a letter of the alphabet
press a sequence of buttons to generate a word
read a word to generate a connotation or denotation
process the meaning to create an idea
and thus I press a button to make you think of something
juicy pear
strong perfume
sandpaper
boogie boarding
simply by pressing a series of buttons I have controlled your mind
like an alien being

OK, one poem down, how about a boring short story?

Once upon a time there was a man. The man liked sandwiches. THe man bought supplies for making sandwiches at the Kroger. Everytime he went to Kroger he bought these things, peanut butter, bread, ham, jelly, mayonaise, cheese, turkey, onions, lettuce, tomato, salt, pepper, you know, sandwich things. All kind of different ingredients to put on a sandwich. Things like almond butter, things like mustard, you know, olives. Anyway, he bought them at Kroger and took them home. On his walk home he passed a dry cleaner, a boutique, a restaurant, a little place for selling stuff, he couldn't remember what, another restaurant, a bead place, a McDonalds, you know buildings and things. There were 12 stairs going up to his apartment, where he lived. He owned a bed and several other pieces of furniture that used to sit on or other purposes. Example of other purposes include writing things on the table, setting things on the table, books on the bookshelf, you get the idea.
Anyway this man's job was to work at a bookstore. His duties included. OK nevermind.

Barry said to leave all this crap in.

The Furious Story. Part Two: "I Am the Story"

The next morning, the schoolteacher poured a cup of coffee and returned to his desk. He lifted his pen and began to write.

Once, at a very special moment in time, in a magical land, lived a remarkable person, and he was a...

..wizard. Tall and wise with a musty blue gray cloak and a long white beard.

The schoolteacher paused to contemplate the next sentence, and as he did he noticed something quite remarkable. On the paper, below the words that he had so carefully written, dark shapes were forming by themselves as if guided by an unseen pen. 

The shapes formed into letters and the letters into a word and the word was "no!"

The schoolteacher was astonished and a little afraid. He questioned his own judgment. Since the word could not have written itself, perhaps he had written it unconsciously. This, he determined, was the only reasonable explanation. He now took a large gulp of coffee and with a swift stroke, crossed out the word "no."

Again he prepared to write – this time very consciously – but before the point of his pen touched the paper, shapes began to form. He glared at the paper intently, determined to see for certain, whether the writing was his own, but the shapes continued. 

This time they formed more letters and more words. "No. He is not a wizard," said the words that formed. 

The writer was now completely flabbergasted. He gulped the last of his coffee, slapped his own face to be sure he was fully awake, and put his eyes close to his paper, but the words remained. 

The schoolteacher trembled with fear and curiosity. He wondered how it could be that words formed by themselves with no hand in sight. He feared that a ghost had invaded his home. Some spirit of a past resident of the little cottage perhaps. He looked about the room, but saw no evidence of another presence. Still, he called out "Who are you" hoping that the ghost who now haunted him would reveal himself, but there was no reply. No vision or voice to claim credit for the writing.

He became impatient and thrust down the cover of his journal turning to leave, but behind him, he heard the pages of the book flutter, and as he stared down, the shapes again started to form. They formed the words, "I am the story, and I repeat: He is not a wizard."