Touch the Wonder: Recent Episodes
Tony McMillen
Author and artist Tony McMillen provides droll vivisections of various pop culture (insert third word which begins with the letter "V.")
The complete four issue monthly series is available as a subscription and issue 1 is out now!
Each issue is 50 pages of stylish action and adventure in the Magnificent McMillen Manner!
Destroying Angel Lumen continues the story I started in my first comic Lumen. But it’s also designed to work just fine if it’s your first Lumen comic.
Maybe even just your first comic?
The plan when I started the original Lumen was to do it as an ongoing series.
Bad plan. I see indie comic creators do that all the time and it almost never works out. “This is my first comic, and I’m gonna do 50 issues of it!”
STOP.
I was (and still am) very inspired by Michel Fiffe’s Copra which is (will always be) one of the great ongoings; and I thought I’d do an ongoing series too.
I realized then not only how hard that is, and how foolhardy to commit to such a long run on your first comic project, but that I don’t really like writing ongoing projects.
I like endings. And beginnings. I love series comprised of miniseries.
What better suits this story is a sequel. But also, a fresh start. I kept thinking about George Miller’s Road Warrior movie. I didn’t even know it was a sequel to Mad Max when I saw Road Warrior as a kid. I didn’t need to know what happened before, Max and his world felt lived in like the original Star Wars felt lived in; finding out there was a previous installment was just a bonus as an audience member. It wasn’t necessary to enjoy this new story.
Same experience with Evil Dead 2; thanks to the title I knew it was a sequel but it didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen the first one.
This worked all on its own.
Same goes for Destroying Angel Lumen.
But if you are returning to the story of Esteban Vela; welcome back to the Nocterra.
A lot has changed. But nothing important.
You’re still here.
The cat is out of the bag! Or is that the “Att”?
No, it’s the cat.
I’m sorry.
I am really happy to let you know the good news, Mad Cave Studios will be publishing my comic Attaboy next year in May.
This will be the Attaboy comic I self-published a few years ago with some minor grammar/ punctuation tweaks, a brand new cover and some brand new making of bonus material..
Attaboy remains creator-owned by me and Mad Cave has proved to be a great partner in helping me get my creation to more readers around the world.
You can preorder the book direct from Mad Cave at their site
Or, wait until February when you can order it from Previews or ask your store to put in on the shelf for you.
Thanks, I’ll be sharing more info and artwork as the release dates gets closer.
Sometimes you just want to draw as many Copra characters as you can on two pages. Here is my tribute to Michel Fiffe’s masterclass in superhero revenge comics, Copra!
Finally, a guide to help me, help you, give me more of your money. First off, you’re doing the right thing. Great choice.
It’s never too late to get your shit together and put your life in order.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with buying something from my Etsy shop.
My name’s Tony McMillen, I have been writing novels as well as drawing and creating comics for about 10 years.
So, at this point I have a bit of a library and it feel like it’s a little tricky to know where to start. Don’t worry, I’m here to help you give me money.
Serious, I got you, dawg.
I’m right here, in fact, I’ll always be here.
To help you get me money.
But if you want to try and read some of my work without shelling out money, here’s a Reduced Lunch menu of free comics work on my site:
https://www.tonymcmillen.com/lumen-issue-1-1Great, now that the poor people have vacated the golf course the rest of us yacht owners can discuss trading currency like gentleman.
The Works:Attaboy This is the gateway drug for a lot of folks. Originally released about 3 years ago after a Kickstarter, "There's a video game from when I was a kid that no one else seems to remember."
Attaboy is a 74 page action adventure comic disguised as an illustrated instructional booklet for a video game that may or may not have ever existed.
And this is the comic which I have recently signed a contract with a publisher for it to be re-released into comic shops everywhere next year!
Friday the 13th Bootleg comic “Everyone knows Jason Goes to Hell in the Final Friday but what my new fan comic presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?”
Get an original Friday the 13th sketch by me and I will send you an absolutely FREE fan comic I made called Friday the 13th Part IX : The Last Mask.
This 20 page full color comic acts like an extended movie trailer for a ninth installment in the series that takes the place of Jason Goes to Hell, The Final Friday and returns Jason Voorhees to Crystal Lake; even picking up directly from the baffling ending of Part VIII Jason Takes Manhattan.
This is a bloody, trippy, loving tribute to one of pop culture's most enduring boogeymen.
Serious Creatures: Reel One, Trade Paperback A 212 page graphic novel about a teenage special fx artist growing up in the Hollywood movie industry of the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Picture a story with the decades-long scope of Boogie Nights or Goodfellas but about the fx grunts you heard about in Fangoria magazine.
This is my most literary, funny and conversational comic. And I’m currently publishing single issues of the second half of the story (issues 7-12)
Lumen Collecting the first four (semi) giant sized issues of Lumen, "Level One: Fallen Stars" is a dizzying introduction to a world of endless night and a hero with a lantern.
Also an Apple Owl.
Bounce House Bazaar A 48 page anthology one shot featuring four new stories from Tony McMillen, Nicola Bonometto and Ben Granoff.
First up is a new 18 page story by Tony McMillen introducing Grapeshot, Man of Lethal Leisure, in his first lurk and merc, sexy crime adventure.
An Augmented Fourth “If Black Sabbath starred in John Carpenter’s The Thing.” My 2nd prose novel, a funny and freaky, rock and roll horror story about a bass player trapped in a snowed-in hotel where someone isn’t human.
The Bleeding Tree Trilogy (Higher Climbs the Fire, Scratch Witch Hymns, Songs From Scissor City) THESE BOOKS SHOULD BE READ LOUD
NOT ALOUD...
LOUD
A folk rock fantasy western that reads like Mark Twain’s Dune, The Bleeding Tree Trilogy.
In a future primitive where most of the Old Electric World has been lost, Mal Leatherberry is a folksinger cursed with an uncommon singing voice. A voice which holds an otherworldly sway over almost everyone who hears its song.
Here are several ways to begin reading my work:Most Popular First· Attaboy
· Friday the 13TH Bootleg
· Serious Creatures
· Lumen
· An Augmented Fourth
Action Lover’s Pizza· Attaboy
· Lumen
· Bounce House Bazaar
More Talky, Less Punchy· Serious Creatures: Reel 1 Collection and the new single issues 7-12
· The Bleeding Tree Trilogy (Prose novels)
The Horror, The Horror· Friday the 13th Bootleg Comic
· An Augmented Fourth (prose novel)
· Serious Creatures : Reel 1 Collection and the new single issues 7-12
· Lumen
Now live on Crowdfundr get the final 6 issues of Serious Creatures at a discounted subscription rate plus original art and other goodies!
https://fnd.us/f20ISb?ref=sh_1Uyf8nys8pX1Uyf8nys8pX
One of the best parts of publishing my new set of novels The Bleeding Tree Trilogy is I can promote it however I want. So, here is a free digital version of the first book in this new trilogy for you to download and read however you like.
Download a PDF of the book here.
And if you like what you read pick up the rest of the books here.
The Bleeding Tree Trilogy is 3 new novels of mine coming out in late March that you can pre-order now at my shop.
Here is the second chapter of the first installment in the series Higher Climbs The Fire.
- The Black Minister (4:06)The veil is thin when lifted.
_From The Holy Liber, Book Four, Verse Six
I don’t need to tell you but the place this shadow of mine took me was somewhere dark. At least it was at first. It was like being swallowed up into the night or sunk down into the deep dark of the ocean. There was nothing, nothing at all where I was. I couldn’t even see my own hand if I shook it in front of my face. Not that I had a hand anymore. See, my body had been left behind. Whatever worked the levers of its earthly shell was trapped now in this black. And all there was here was sound. Not from me either. I had no voice. The sound here came from the hum. It coursed through the emptiness and even through me. I never could tell where it came from, it just seemed to move through the shadow place. To tell it true, it was a beautiful sound. It made every bit of me – every thought – sort of dance and shake. It let me know that I was alive and that there was good in the universe and maybe even in me. This might make you ask what was so bad about this shadow of mine then? Well, I’m getting to that.
See, this hum only lasted for but a skinny moment, then it would change. Sounding like it turned into itself somehow. And like it was pained in the doing of it. The hum became an ugly, ugly sound. Like laughter coagulated. Or the death rattle of the imagination. And this sound too moved through me and every part of what I was screamed along with its agony.
But we weren’t finished, no sir, we were just getting reacquainted. Now the sound started building. Cycling itself up faster and faster and louder and louder. And then – somehow – the sound became sight. And what was nothing was reassembled into wherever the shadow wanted to take me this time. Not that it was ever really different. The places might change but he’d always be there. The black minister, Buck Caleb – my true shadow – he was something that would never change.
I knew that he was unaware that I watched him like I did, that he couldn’t see me as I squizzed him from my shadow place but I still wished I could avoid looking him straight on. Like he was somehow behind all this, it was his big trick, and he was just waiting for me to get comfortable and then he’d reach out into the window between our worlds and his black rubber hand would be on my throat. The shadow had taken me far from the silo but part of me knew that my body was still back there unprotected. I couldn’t shake the fear that the minister would find me, in one world or another. I never could outrun him.
What the shadow had me watching now was Minister Buck Caleb moving like some wraith through the mostly empty streets of some town. I couldn’t place the name of it yet from what I was seeing. The sun was going down – which meant the place must have been west of where my body was – and it painted the place red and made the minister – what with his mask and pointed hat – look like some great crow out for a night on the town. There was a bell ringing out, which is why I supposed the streets were deserted, and as it made its seven rings the other three ministers that were with him separated from Buck who was the lead of their retinue. I could see them turning on down the main street toward town square, towards the church and it was then that I recognized the place. The town was called Red Coin and I was headed there myself. Me and Snowy and Karlin, all of us. We were headed there after we took care of some business down in Yont Nellum first. If I didn’t know better I’d have thought my shadow was attempting to warn me.
Buck’s hat had a crooked tip at the top that hung over like a dog’s ear – that was part of how I could also tell it was him even with his mask. The other part was just the way he walked and carried himself. Buck Caleb was skinny as a dagger – fast as one too – and even under his flowing turnout cloak you could see that.
As he was hurrying through the dirt roads there came a wammel that stood on the other end of the road. Like me it was watching the black minister cautiously. Its hackle wasn’t raised, but even if it were the thing didn’t look as if it could inflict much damage. Being so dismal skinny and all, it was missing fur in patches too, and the worst of it, the poor beast only had four of its legs left. If I had stumbled upon such a pathetic creature I might destroy it out of basic human kindness. But what did the black minister do? Why, he stopped walking, squizzed at the wammel through the round lens of his mask and then he crouched down himself slowly. Looking like some great black rubber bullfrog about to leap. And the wammel was dumb enough – or desperate enough – not to spook and it only watched the minister. Buck took off his hat – his long white hair a ghostly tangle – and then he put a hand to the back of his mask and unfastened it. There was the face I’d been running from for years and years. If you didn’t know better you’d think it was a kind face. Cheekbones set high, lending it a sense of nobility almost; his eyes – blue grey – glinted whenever he smiled, which he was doing now. But I knew better.
What I didn’t know was what Buck was up to with this wammel. He reached into his turnout cloak and came back with a piece of red. It must have been meat because the animal started with whimpering, lowering itself down on its remaining larger middle paws to show that it wasn’t going to be trouble. Buck could have stood up and walked the piece of meat over to it but instead he whistled, patted his knee – made the crippled thing come to him. Which it did. The sound of the bells was all lost now and in the distance I could hear folks singing in the church. Buck held the bloody uncooked meat on the tips of his rubber gloved fingers and the wammel gave him a hesitant look but then took the piece into its mouth. It started to back off but Buck – standing now – produced another bit of meat for it. So it went down on all its remaining legs and begged properly. I was waiting for Buck to do what he always did but instead he dropped the meat into the grateful creature’s maw. He even put one of his hands through its patchy fur and gave it a pet between its dangly ears. I studied the scars from where the wammel had lost its two smaller front legs. I had heard stories from traders who made their way far down into the Lowlands that wammels had been known to eat their own legs at times if there was nothing for them to hunt or no one to take care of them. But I never put too much stock in the prattle of some of those traders – they’ve been far out for too long. Same ones who’d tell you that were liable to tell you about desert spectres and forest ghosts. Some will even swear that they’ve seen Scissor City. Skrobble, all of it. But of course looking at the wammel – and its wounds on its underbelly that were like two grisly tree stumps – well, it was hard not to think on it. Buck finished petting the thing and when it whined for more meat he gestured with his hand for it to leave. Which it did at a miserable stagger and Buck scattered himself to where he ought to be. I watched the wammel until it disappeared from out of the view of the shadow. It was a pitiful thing but Buck Caleb knew nothing of pity. If he was kind to something there was a reason. It amused him in some way. Furthered his game. The man lived for games. Believe that.
He walked up to a house at the end of the street, there was music coming from behind the door so he had to knock twice. The first knock got the occupant to turn off the music, the second invited inquiry into his identity. “Who…who’s there? Why aren’t you at church?”
Despite the questioning the woman of the house went ahead and opened her wooden door and found the minister on her doorstep.
“Excellent question,” Buck said. “I might have to ask you the very same.”
The white cheeks on the woman’s face flushed red and her mouth hung all agape like some startled child. “Minister! Oh, of course, please, please forgiveness.”
The minister, he held up his black rubber finger. “Now, Susan, we can’t have you begging for forgiveness so early. At least put up a fight and make this interesting for me.” He cut a smile, almost boyish with its mischief and this woman – Susan – she did the same back.
“Very funny, Minister…you must be one of the travelling ministers, I’m sorry for I don’t know your name.”
“There you are again, sorry. You’ve nothing to be sorry for in those regards, my dear. Though I think you might be telling me a stretcher.”
“I’d never lie to a minister.”
“Now, I’m sure you were only being polite. But I think just by looking at me you know not only that I am a traveling servant of the Church but my name as well. Is this not so?”
She nodded. “Yes, you must be Minister Buck Caleb. I have heard of you. I just didn’t want to assume from the way y—”
“Since we know each other’s names, Susan, won’t you let me in?”
“Oh, I’m sor—” She caught herself and the minister gave her the grin again. And then this fool of a woman, she let him right into her home.
And like it always was with the shadow I didn’t want to watch another thing but I had to. It being dismal hard to shut your eyes when you don’t have the lids. So I squizzed the woman asking the minister if he would like some coffee and then asking him to sit at her table. And I squizzed Buck agreeing to it, all pleasantries, taking off his pointed hat and sitting down at her table and looking comfortable there like he was some old friend and this was just a common thing between them. But nothing about him was common. The black minister looked out of place in her modest home but then he’d look out of place no matter the place. As she set the kettle to the fire I caught her stealing looks at him. I’m sure he saw ‘em too. If it bothered him I wouldn’t know – I’d be surprised though – Buck seemed to revel in the spectacle others made of him. He accentuated his uncommonness whenever he had the chance. He was unusual looking by nature – his skin the color of soured milk and his long hair – not the traditional length for ministers – was the same. It fell down his back looking like a bleached squid. The man looked unwell, as if perpetually fevered. And at times he even looked unnatural, the veins on his face too close to the surface, his build too gaunt and bony. Like he was some nursery rhyme bogen come to life. But when he smiled, people tended to look past all that.
“How do you take it, Minister…dark?”
“Not at all, I’m afraid I take it sweet. One of my weaknesses.” When Buck shifted in his seat, the rubber of his turnout cloak made a series of sounds that oddly and comically were reminiscent of a babbling backside.
The woman Susan sat across from him. “It shouldn’t be too long now.”
“I can’t wait, it already smells delicious, thank you, Susan.”
“Thank you, they’re Slade brand beans.”
At this the grin on his face slipped a bit. “Ah, branding… Can’t say I much agree with these new notions and the liberties granted one family’s farms over all others. But it’s not my place to question the decisions from on high. And I will admit, the Slade family does grow a good bean even if they produced a rotten apple or two… However, I didn’t come here to talk coffee with you.”
“…This about me missing church?”
He nodded to her. “As it says in the Liber, ‘The veil is thin when lifted.’”
“I know I’ve missed a few nights, and more as of late than is acceptable, I’ve just been frightful sick is all.”
“Sick? You seem to me healthy as a lamb.”
“Well, I have been maybe feeling a bit better tonight and I do try to keep my color around company.”
“I bet you do.”
“But I have been stricken as of late with fever of some sort. I’d not want to go to the assemblage and make any of the rest sick.”
Buck just let her tell him all this. He had his hand to his chin and scratched while he nodded along to every poorly planned out word. Then he said, “Very kind of you not to want to spread this sickness of yours.” And this half-soaked woman, she smiled at this. “But you know, Susan, I am a traveled man. Unlike your good ministers of Red Coin here I’ve seen a stretch of the world, which is to say I’ve heard some stretchers before in my time but I dare say what you just put forth was nonesuch.”
Her face fell. She took the leg o’ mutton sleeve of her dress into her fingers, fiddled with it. “I’m sorry, Minister—”
“Now there’s that word again…” Buck’s eyes gave a little dance.
“You’re right, I’m not sick. It’s just…”
“Yes?”
“I feel awful just thinking this.”
“Thoughts may be the currency of sin but they are not the thing itself, understand me? In order to be free of our sin we must first plainly admit it.”
“Yes, Minister. It’s just…” Her voice seemed to shrink. “Don’t you ever…”
“It’s alright, child, you can tell me.”
“Don’t you ever grow a bit tired of going to church is all? Just every once and again?”
His features shifted and any aloofness on his face was cast away. And he laughed good and long. “You think you’re tired of going to church all the time, my dear, try living at one.” She laughed along with him but then quickly covered her mouth as if a bird was liable to fly out next. “No, no, it’s fine,” Buck told her. “Imagine not only do I have to live in a prim and staid old church, house of truth and perpetual glory by Savior’s name – though it may be – but prim and staid it is nonetheless. Not only do I have to live in a place such as that but my task is to travel back and forth to hundreds just like it. Susan, since you’ve decided to be honest with me I aim to return in kind; ministers get tired of church more than anybody.” He puts his hand to his heart. “Word true. I find it hard to get my dreams in the holy house. Too quiet for me. The most comfortable sleep I get is out in the dark of the land next to a dying fire looking up at the all tranklements that our Savior sees fit to shine over us. That’s one of the reasons why I travel so much I suppose… But I admit it freely, church can be a stifle to the part of ourselves that seek the comfort of disturbance.”
Her brow creased. “Disturbance?”
“Oh yes, disturbance…the music of the night.”
“Oh, right, I see now.” With a slight bit much of enthusiasm she gave with some more nodding.
“Tell me, Susan, what sort of music keeps you comforted while you’re away from church at night?”
Her eyes swelled. “…Music?” The coffee kettle sang and she screamed. When Buck chuckled at her she signed then joined him. “I’m sorry, that scared me.”
“I keep telling you, nothing to be sorry for. Nothing you’ve told me so far should give you fear.”
“Thank you, Minister, I’m gonna get that coffee.”
And as she left the table the shadow kept me on Buck sitting back in his chair. He seemed to be looking straight at me. Impossible but he was. The expression on his pale face seemed as empty as an animal. Reptilian almost. But then his lips curled and he grinned some and despite my better reasoning I could have sworn he was showing teeth right at me, his audience, who knew exactly what sort of show it was that he was putting on.
Susan came back into view and sat down a clay covered mug in front of her guest. Buck blew on the coffee first before he chanced a sip. “Why, that is sweet,” he told her. On the opposite side of the mug were raised letters what spelled the word father. Buck turned the mug around and took himself a squiz.
“Sorry, only other clean cup.” Susan turned her own mug around to show off the accompanying message, mother. “I’m sure Len won’t mind. He’d probably be downright honored to have a minister as famous as you having had drunk from his cup.”
“Famous…” He took another sip. “If you’d do me the kindness of indulging me, what have you heard about me?”
“Well, everybody knows about Minister Buck Caleb. I suspect even if you hadn’t had made this visit of yours, which was right kindly, and introduced yourself I’d have heard you were in Red Coin the minute anyone caught sight of y—” She faded off, seeming to realize the conversational cul-de-sac her words had steered her to.
“It’s alright, child. I’ve looked this distinguished my whole life and done much on top of my appearance to further distinguish myself. It sits fine with me. I like standing out. Some would say I stick out a little too much, especially for a minister. But I know it’s right with Savior so that means it’s quite alright with me. Now this husband of yours, Len, he’s at the Red Coin Church as of right now, that right?”
“Well, if he ain’t then he’s gonna have to answer to you and me.” She brought the mug up to her lips.
“I like that. ‘You and me.’ You got a drollness about you. Playfulness. That’s good. Believe it or not, I too have a bit of a playfulness. And believe it or not, so does the Savior. Just look at some of his creations for evidence of it. I’ve never had the nerve to ask him myself but some of the people I’ve encountered in my many travels lead me to believe that they only exist to amuse the Savior.”
“Oh, Minister…”
“Take for instance this church of yours, the Church of Red Coin: fine place, fine people. The minister who runs it—”
“Minister Malcolm.”
“Minister Malcolm, he’s a fine man. A good servant. But the breath on that man sets my eyes to spinning.” Susan laughed at that. “Minister has the smell on him of hot fish when he opens his mouth. Now is that just random occurrence or is that the way it’s set I ask you?”
She laughed some more. “…It happens more than it don’t I must report.”
“Hmm… And the old woman, plays the organ…”
“That’s Bernice. I think I know what you’re going to say.”
“I know she feels the love of God in her heart but she must not hear it much in her ears anymore… I heard her play, I thought she was working it out on the spot, writing some new misguided cacophony in the Savior’s name, it wasn’t until the choir joined in that I recognized the song for the standard it was supposed to be.”
Susan was still laughing. “It’s true, oh my, is it true.”
“No offense meant to this child of god Bernice but she needs to step away from the instrument and seek out another means of expression for her gratitude towards the creator. And she needs to do it soon for she has not much time left in these Good Lands with us.” The black minister, ever the charmer, took a swig off the coffee as Susan’s laughter died down. He held the mug up in his black glove, ran his thumb over the word engraved therein. “Your daughter made these didn’t she?”
“Yes, it was a gift from her last year.”
“Fine work, that. Like poor Bernice in a way, your daughter…Johanna, that’s her name isn’t it? I believe Minister Malcolm said it was Johanna…”
“Yes, Johanna is our child.”
“Yes, well, like poor Bernice your daughter Johanna seeks to honor those who made her; you and your husband. And in doing so she honors her ultimate creator our Savior. All good things come from honoring where we come from, you see? Because it is what’s truest in us all. Before the distractions and disturbances lead us away from where we belong.” Susan had her eyes down, staring into her damn coffee like it was a reflecting pool. Buck kept on with it. “And I will say – since you and I have developed this habit of speaking truths to one another – that your daughter shows a much greater aptitude for mug making than our dear Bernice does for music making. Easier on the eyes than Bernice is to the ears anyhow.”
“I think I understand what you’re getting at, Minister.”
“Do you now?”
“Yes, about how people get led away from where they belong and all.”
He took another sip. “Your church misses you. When I spoke with Minister Malcolm he told me you and your husband were hoping to have another child.”
“Oh yes, we’d love that more than almost anything, is that why you’re here? Does the Church send somebody like you whenever someone is hoping for a second child and…they’re finding it difficult? I can’t imagine my troubles are important enough for them to fetch you.”
“What, you think you’re not important enough for a visit from me?”
“…I just never heard of a famous minister such as yourself coming down to ‘ol Red Coin to visit a Churchgoer like me.”
“Churchmember, you are a Churchmember now. Have been for…how old is your Johanna, fourteen?”
“Yes, she’s fourteen…fourteen already.”
“So that’s fifteen years as a member of the Church – not a mere ‘goer – important distinction I think.” He raised his mug up again as if he was going to toast her. “I think it’s a beautiful, faithful thing to want to bring more children into this world, Susan, I do. There are still so few of us in this land, I hope the Savior sees it fit to bless many more to share it with us. I do. But of course, if you want to get on his good side, you’re going to have to get to church a bit more often.” She nodded solemnly and the minister continued. “And remember, even though I am a traveler and you do not go to the church where I live that does not mean that I don’t make your salvation of the utmost importance to me personally. After all, we are all the same in the eye of the Savior, are we not?” He tapped the insignia on his collar, an eye made from a sideways letter W connected to a sideways letter M. Savior’s Eye.
“I feel bad, I do. I’m sorr—” She caught herself. “What I mean to say is that I’ll be at church, I won’t miss any more days.”
“Maybe I’ll suggest to Minister Malcolm – from a safe distance now – that he retire poor Bernice? See if we can’t get some more invigorating music for the next gathering? How’s that sit with you?”
“Sits just fine, Minister. But ol’ Bernice ain’t so bad I suppose.”
He took himself an uncommon generous sip off his coffee. “Really? Surprised to hear you say that, I must admit. See, I’ve been told you’ve a discerning ear when it comes to music?”
Her head tilted. “Oh, who might have told you that? …Len?”
“Tell me, with this discerning ear of yours, Susan, how do you like recorded music?”
“Recorded music?”
“Go get your gramophone.”
She brought her mug up to her lip. “I’m not sure what you mean, Minis—” Her mug exploded into her face. For a moment the arc of coffee and blood hung in the air along with the sound of the shatter. It happened so fast that even though I knew firsthand how quick he was I was still unprepared for it. It happened so fast I had to figure out what exactly had happened after the fact. Buck had shattered her mug with his own. Susan’s face below her nose was covered in red with pieces of the clay mug sticking out of her skin in spots. The letters m, o, t and h clung to her jaw for a bit until falling off when she tucked her chin down.
“Go get your gramophone.”
She didn’t look up, both of her hands were held in the air shaking like eggs ‘bout to hatch. Buck took in a long breath and right about when it sounded like he was going to speak again Susan got up out of her chair and headed back behind the kitchen towards her bedroom. Buck waited and we both listened. Hearing the sound her dress made as she got to her knees, heard her moving something, maybe reaching under her bed. That’s where they tended to hide them. Like children with some cherished forbidden object tucked away foolishly in the first place father was to look. The handle to the clay mug was still intact in the palm of the minister’s hand and then – again – like he knew I was watching – he let it drop to the table. And as Susan kept busy Buck entertained himself with a game of moving the remaining letters of his shattered mug about. Spelling out words. From father he found f, a, t, e.
Susan came back into view and under her arms there was a small red suitcase. She held it up to him like a servant would with a dinner platter. Bloodied face downturned, offering it balanced atop her upturned palms. “Place it on the table, open it,” Buck instructed. The suitcase unlocked with a hiss and a snap and out from it she took a small copper colored gramophone replete with hand crank and metal horn. Made in the Lowlands, Circus Town craftsmanship at its finest. It was a new model, I could tell by the shape of the horn. Next she took out a vinyl record contained in a crisp but slightly dog-eared jacket. “Spin the black circle for me,” Buck told her. She looked up from her bowed head, not believing it. “Let’s hear it,” he assured her.
With her hands still a-shake she pulled the record from its sleeve and slipped it on the turntable. As she winded the crank, Buck reached over and picked himself up the emptied record sleeve. I don’t have to tell you but it was my face and my name on that sleeve. And watching him run the fingers of his gloves along the cover almost reverently made every part of me twist in revulsion. The record was called Heretic Prayer. It was my first. Most folks, they start with that one. It’s not my favorite but I can see the appeal. I could see what Buck liked about it too. On the cover there was an image of me with my checkerboard scarf on, which was nothing uncommon of course but around that was painted six red guitar strings standing up, feeding into an illustration of the guitar neck that hovered above my likeness. Buck smiled at it, admiring his handiwork I suppose. Then Susan stopped with the winding of the crank and put down the player’s stylus. Regardless of the circumstance I found myself admiring the ritual of it all. The way I always did. Out from the flower mouth of the horn came the crackle alive of music. The sound of an old wooden guitar, one I lost a long time ago. Up from the wooly murk of the recording came a voice you’d never forget. Even if you couldn’t much make out a single word it was saying. I don’t see much reason in modesty. I sounded damn fine on this. That old record of mine still had fangs.
“What do you feel when you hear music?” Buck asked her. She wasn’t so half-soaked as to actually answer the man, I gave her that. So Buck answered for her. “Music is magic, isn’t it? Maybe the only magic. Unexplainable. Its power to affect us, to hold us under its sway. For those who can make it it’s the closest any of us will ever come to talking like God. Of course, I can’t make music. Don’t have the ear for it. Or the throat. Though I will admit a considerable amount of pride in my footwork. Yes…” He looked out, not quite at me but out. “I do love to dance.” There was a knock at the door. “Ask them, they’ll tell you.” It was true. I hated the black minister more than anything but yes, the man could dance. He moved like no other. I often warmed at the thought of one day taking his legs from him. “That’s my small connection to the magic and maybe divinity of music. Which is why it pains me so to hear this folksinger Leatherberry and her perversions of divine art committed to wax cylinder and set upon the once innocent ears of so many Churchgoing folks like yourself, Susan.” He tossed the record sleeve down to the table. Another knock. “Guess we caused a disturbance… Enter, brothers.”
One by one the other three ministers came in, surrounding her at the table in all four directions. Unlike Buck they kept their minister’s gasmasks on. They looked down at her with empty black lenses for eyes. Each was dressed in a long black rubber turnout coat hanging below the knee like folded leather wings. Hands fitted with shining dark glove. Some of which gripped flamethrowers – their faithgivers – with hoses attached reaching into tanks that hung on their backs. Susan looked over each one seeming to wait for it to start. But they just stood there looking back like patient bats loitering in her kitchen. Buck looked up at the latecomers. “Brothers, I appreciate your theatrics as I’m sure Susan does as well, but the time for masks has passed, where are your manners?”
“I only kept the helmet on to keep out that caterwauling heathen screech.” That was Brother Vernon Caleb.
“That thing doesn’t even sound like a woman.” Brother Sara Caleb.
“Doesn’t look like one either.” Brother Remus Caleb.
“Can’t say it sounds much like a human being is supposed to sound at all.” Brother Vernon again.
“Brothers…” Buck said and the three brothers of the ministry corked it and took off their masks. “Turn it off,” Buck told her and Susan did what he said. “Now, I see with this gramophone – which you know is forbidden in itself – and the particular music you’ve selected – that you think you no longer need a Savior. Or perhaps you think you’ve found a new one? Let me ask you, do you think this folksinger is going to save you?” She looked like she stopped herself from answering right away. Buck continued. “Do you think Leatherberry would even if she could?”
And you know what this half-soaked poor woman said? “…Yes.” She said, yes. Gazzits.
Buck’s eyes glinted. “Good, good Susan. Good to know that you are capable of such belief. Because so many aren’t. So many have closed hearts. But not you.” His smile spread and he pointed a finger at her. “Not you, and not me.” He got up out his chair. Leaned over her just inches from her face. “Susan, it is my belief that you can be saved…tonight.” Susan’s hands hovered over her lap and then I saw it, hoped that Buck didn’t. “Now take out whatever you had hidden with that gramophone of yours in the bed and now currently have hidden in your dress and place it on the table. Do it now.” But he did. With shaking hands she brought up a black handled knife and dropped it to the table. She wasn’t that half-soaked turned out. “Tell me, Susan, are you afraid?” Buck asked.
“No.” The woman had sand.
“That’s an admirable lie. But I see through it. And if I can see through you then you better believe that he sees through you.” At this he tapped the sideways eye insignia on his collar. “God’s eye can always see behind your eyes.”
“There is no god, Minister.”
“Heresy and horseshit!” Buck let out a holler and a giggle. His brothers joined in.
She steadied her voice. “You know that, right? The truth, what Mal Leatherberry is singing about… Your god… Your Church. This whole world…it’s all skrobble. Man made God in his image, not the other way ‘round.” She stammered the last of it out and those were my words she was using. From that scrammed record of mine she had hidden.
Buck picked up the vinyl record and spun it atop his finger. “Now at last we’re finally getting somewhere.” The black disc spun some more. “But how can you say God isn’t real when you’ve seen him with your own two eyes. When he’s blessed you with a child with his own two hands.” The record spun off to the floor and Buck didn’t bother trying to catch it. “When you’ve heard his voice and seen his face in your own head? How can something you feel not be real?” The minister opened his palms presenting the question to the room. Offering it to her in the air.
And then I heard the music, the singing coming from outside. This was how it usually happened. Buck seemed to notice but didn’t hurry along any. He took out a flask from his turnout cloak. “Baptismal oil,” he said and removed the cap. “Fire is the only thing that can wash an unrepentant sinner of their sins. As you know this is called a second baptism. Susan, do you believe me when I say I’ve performed thousands of these baptisms as a minister of the Church?” She nodded. He let his flask spill a bit onto the table between them. “Hell is an ocean of fire, unending, always storming, where souls churn as embers in agony with no end. And it is only the faithful to Savior that will be spared that flame. And Susan, I want you to be spared the flame.”
“I will not confess, I’ve committed no crime. I fear no devil.”
“The Holy Liber makes no mention of a devil in Hell or here above. Hell is simply an estrangement from the creator. Now, that’s the Liber.” The singing from outside grew louder, closer and Buck showed teeth. “But what I always say is there’s no devils but us.” Susan could no longer keep up the act, she was weeping and shaking. I would have been too, word true. “Since I know you’re a woman of faith,” Buck said. “Even if it’s misplaced faith in this folksinger and her heretic notions, I will appeal to your faith and ask you to believe me when I say I will set your body on fire in order to save your immortal soul.” He took out a match, struck it and dropped it to the table which went up in burning. Susan pulled back away from it. “Imagine burning for all eternity. ‘Cause it’s real. Real as this fire between us. Hell is always so close…it’s all around us. And I will do terrible, terrible things to keep you from it, child.”
Through her tears Susan managed to tell him, “I will never confess.”
The singing was right outside her door now. “Do you know what happens to the orphans of heretics?” Buck asked her. “Do you know what will happen to your daughter Johanna?”
“Orphan? What about her father?”
Buck took out a metal wedding band, looked at Susan then threw it to the fire. “Oh, did you suspect it him that told on you?” Well, if she didn’t I admit that I did.
“So what then? If I don’t confess, what? Are you ministers threatening to murder my child?”
“Goodness no. I’m informing you that you will wish I had killed her after hearing what she is to endure after your gloriously unrepentant heretic death.” The fire on the table was starting to swell to the edge. Buck stood up and walked over to stand behind her. He put one of his hands on her shoulder and the two of them stared into the fire together. “The orphans of dead heretics become wards of the Church. Some grow up and become Churchmembers, some even grow up and become ministers themselves. But some, the ones whose mothers and fathers never admitted their guilt to their families and neighbors, some of the girls… They grow up to become painted women for the ministers.”
“But…you take vows…you’re not supposed to…”
“Some of the boys too. Whores of every cast are needed. But yes, we take vows never to take a spouse or to have a family, but this sort of thing is permitted and sanctioned by the Church. Most folks in the lower territories and the more removed areas of the Good Lands know all about these houses – red houses,– we call them. But I can imagine a sheltered and spoiled little town mouse like you who’s too busy playing revolutionary would have never heard of the hardships that some people have to live with when they don’t have the luxury of boredom to incite them to riot.” She wept some more and the bastard kept talking. “It’s not the worst life imaginable for your daughter. They won’t touch her until she’s of age and then she will go about her day servicing the desires and lower urges of various ministers, ministers like my brothers and myself here. True, she will be tossed around and shared like a pecker spittoon by holy men such as myself. She will never be a mother like you, she will never be allowed membership into the Church but she will know the satisfaction of living a life on her knees relieving brothers of the faith of their earthly frustrations.” Buck released his grip on her and then unclasped his turnout cloak with a matador’s flourish to drape over the fire and extinguish it. “It’s a sad thing. But that is what happens to little girls whose mothers are too proud to admit when they are wrong.”
Then the singing stopped and there was a knock on the door. Susan didn’t look up at him, just said, “…Don’t touch her. I will do anything you ask. But don’t touch her.”
The black minister picked up his cloak from the table sending a plume of smoke wafting up like some magician’s trick. “We’re ready to begin,” Buck called out and then he walked over and opened the door.
Outside were Susan’s neighbors, her kinfolk, folks she saw every day; all of them waiting for her. It was a church night so I figured it was a quick thing gathering them all up. As Buck took Susan out into the streets everyone started up with the singing again. The Churchmembers all wore white robes and the rest of the ‘goers, mostly younger folk, they were in their finest suits and dresses. All singing together, the same old song. Buck lead Susan by the hand like she was a debutante at her first ball. The other ministers followed in tow and the crowd trailed close behind them. The drums were coming on louder now and I heard a horn that sounded a might off. Made me wonder if that was old Bernice, no better on the brass than she was with keys. No matter, Susan marched along as her new beau showed her the steps.
When they arrived at the stake in town square there was her man, her husband Len. Up against a black stake, strapped to it and decorated with snapped branches and a careful construction of wooden kindle. His face with blood all over, and I squizzed his left hand was missing its ring and pointer finger. Blood still dripping from the missing meat there. And now Susan was carrying on and trying to tell Len – who looked like he’d been beat something awful – that she was sorry and that she loved him. Most the words didn’t come out exactly right but the sentiment was easy to pick up. But then Buck hushed her and his brothers put her to a stake next to Len. The whole time Buck just held her hand like he was some kind of caring, trusted friend and not the black minister at all.
I don’t know what exactly Susan saw when she looked out then. I imagined she squizzed a sea of familiar faces. People she’d known her entire life. Some might have looked solemn, some maybe furious. Some even stricken with carnival glee and grim anticipation. I didn’t know, I could only look on her face and I wished I didn’t have to do that. Of course I could see the black minister as well as he motioned to the crowd. The people parted and up to the square walked a young girl about fourteen years old, with straw colored hair who looked a bit like Susan. “Johanna, thank you for coming,” Buck told her. “And thank you for your help in saving your dear parents’ souls.” And at that Susan sunk her head and her chest heaved. That was one of the worst parts of the shadow showing me all this. Because it was always like that, people never suspecting their own family, especially their own children being the ones who turned them in. Never thinking what they made themselves could be their own undoing. This girl, Johanna, I could see her now and at first she was smiling. I don’t think she saw her folks just yet. She was too busy looking up at Buck, soaking up his admiration. He was probably her hero, stupid little ‘goer like her. The girl was probably still gassed off the same admiration from the crowd and all the members of her church. But then Susan’s head came back up and the look on it – beyond the blood – the look itself, it was unmistakable. The girl saw that and then saw her pa – him being so mangled that he barely looked alive – and the girl she upped and stopped her smiling. Her eyes went wet and her lips started quivering. A lot of the times the children of heretics, they’re little sunrays the whole way through. Content and pleased in the knowledge that they’re sending ma and pa up to heaven to save them a seat and wait for them to arrive at a later time. But not this Johanna. I could tell right then she knew what she had done was wrong. The look on her face also seemed to suggest what was worse, that it was too late to take back too. Mostly that’s the way that is with things.
The girl reached out a hand for her mother but Buck gave a look and his brother Sara took the girl back to stand at the front of the crowd. With her out of his way Buck raised his hand and the singing and the drumming stopped. All you could hear for a moment was a legion of cicadas out in the dark and beneath that the girl, and Susan and Len all whimpering to themselves, almost harmonizing. Then Buck said, “Now you see, Susan, that your new savior, this minstrel, this folksinger is a false savior who has abandoned you in your time of need. But I haven’t, and neither has He.” He tapped his collar. “Now speak his name and ask him for his forgiveness.
For a moment I didn’t think she would say anything or maybe she’d even have the sand to tell the black minister to have a suck on a Banapple but instead what she said was, “…I am guilty, guilty of heresy. Guilty of betraying the Church and our Savior…”
I could hear Buck whispering to her. “Speak his name, child. Do it now.”
“I have betrayed our Savior Wes Mackabree, the one true God, and I beg for his forgiveness and Savior’s mercy.”
This made the minister happy and he said some empty holy words as was the practice. “The veil is thin when lifted.” And then the crowd repeated the passage to him.
But then Susan said, “I love you, Len. I love you, Jo.”
And the minister looked altogether less pleased. With the hand that wasn’t holding Susan’s own Buck took out a match and dropped it into the kindle and the fire came to life. “‘It is only through fear that we find truth, and it is only through truth that we find salvation’ from your Holy Liber, First Book,” he told the crowd and then he held Susan’s hand for a bit longer as the fire climbed, eating up her toes and her legs. She screamed at first, then thrashed. Buck still held her hand and looked over to another minister who put Len to the flame too. And then I watched Buck keep the woman’s hand in his grasp for a little more, until you could see the skin on her face start to change color and bubble like it was honey in a pot. Then he let go and walked down to where Johanna was. I understood why Susan had done it. Why she had begged for Savior Mackabree’s forgiveness. But I took no satisfaction that it made much difference for the life of her daughter. It wasn’t that Buck wouldn’t keep his word, I didn’t think he would send the girl to the red houses. It wasn’t that. It was that now I could see Buck behind the girl as she watched the result of what she’d done. The price of her betrayal. And even though she had tears running down her face I couldn’t tell if they were tears from the horror of it all or just tears of relief for the choice to finally be made. Finally knowing which side you were on and knowing that now there was no turning back. I knew those tears.
The shadow started to fade now, sound was getting low. Soon the vision would fade with it and then I’d be back. Returned to my body. Wondering how long until the dark decided to take me once again. The last thing I heard before I left sounded like the howl of a wammel in the distance. It could no doubt smell all the cooking flesh and probably wanted some. Or some more I guessed. I couldn’t tell if Buck heard it too or if he even cared. After all, he had already shared what he wanted to with the beast. But maybe it wasn’t the sound of the beast at all, maybe it was just the babble of the fire itself. Singing its secrets out into the night. Not that it made any difference, because soon the sound had faded, and with it the sight. And then I was free from my shadow, for a little while longer.
The Bleeding Tree Trilogy is 3 new novels of mine coming out in late March that you can pre-order now at my shop.
Here is the prologue and first chapter of the first installment in the series Higher Climbs The Fire.
Higher Climbs the FireSIDE IIntroitus Hanging from a bent black branch were six guitar strings with a girl on the end of them. Atop an upturned snare drum that was fixing to wobble she was standing with the strings tight around her neck. She was breathing but couldn’t use her voice. Only a steady rhythm of short, sharp gasps in its place. The sickly simple iambic of complete and total panic. Bound behind her were her wrists and with every slight shift of the drum the guitar strings coiled tighter into her throat. Her chin and her eyes were fixed upward to an empty heaven, and framed against the perfect afternoon sky the dark red hair on her head looked like a blood-soaked cloud. Dirt kicked up, hitting her legs and ringing against the drum and she tried again to find her voice. But it wasn’t there, only the sound of a horse and its rider leaving her behind on the tree before they could witness the end of the opera. And after they went to such lengths putting on the production. The girl on the strings listened to the horse’s stiff steady gallop getting further and further from her. Then it was just her, the black tree and the endless empty surround of the desert.
When the drum finally got to rolling, this girl, she tried to stop it but her toes just danced in the air touching nothing. Then the strings cut through the outside of her neck and the blood poured down just like spilled milk. And now she couldn’t make any sound at all. And because she was a singer, with her own guitar strings what were strangling the life from her, the thing that troubled her most was that she couldn’t hear her voice. One last time, to sing, cry, scream, even pray. But who would she pray to? Blue empty endless above. But this girl, she prayed anyway, as her own hot blood covered her dress and dripped down to her toes. She prayed in silence. And she prayed for nothing more than for her own voice.
The drum below kept spinning in smaller and smaller circles. Finally it came to a stop just below her with a loud crack off the skin of the rim when it settled. And then her eyes rolled back, and her toes stopped dancing and there was only the sound of blood dripping down onto the drum.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
…
Snap.
The branch broke and her body hit the ground fast with the crash of a cymbal that had been left below, the overdue stinger to this entire ugly old joke.
Then the desert was all quiet. There was no sound at all. Not a thing. But then, this girl breathed in. She cried out. But there was only a noise now that wasn’t her voice. This noise, it wasn’t like any voice at all. Any voice a person was supposed to have anyhow. More like the sound of some bad dream coming true. So she screamed. And the sound was the same now only worse. She kept on screaming. Because she knew she’d never hear her old voice again. That voice was lost. Lost for good. Now she had a new voice.
My voice.
- The Folksinger (6:33)Past tense, future tenser.
_From “Tomorrow Mourning”
By Mal Leatherberry
Nobody could ever tell what I really was. But then that just let me know exactly what they were. Not that I gave a scram but they’d always work themselves up into such a bother in trying to figure me all out. So I had to make sure a long time ago of exactly what I wasn’t, so as not to let them be the ones doing the deciding of what I was. Because they will if you let ‘em. Believe that. There’s lots of things they’ll try and hang you on. Just you watch. Ideas, identities, institutions, even supposed illuminations, they’ll try and get you hung up on each and every one. Even when it all shakes out the same; somebody else telling you what to do. How to live. How to think. Somebody else telling you who you are. To keep you under thumb they’ll try and hang you on all sorts of things. If you get really out of line they’ll try a tree…
Listen, long as I could recall everybody was always trying to tell me what I was and what I wasn’t. She’s a fool, they’d say. No, she’s a genius. Or she’s a prophet, or she’s a devil. She’s a boy. He’s a girl. And all other manner of half-soaked high foolishness.
They’re always looking to put a word to the things they don’t understand. Not that I’m such an unusual case either; chances are they don’t understand you no better. And with all their little words they’re fixing to put you in a neat nice little box, so as you don’t go nowhere else, don’t grow too big. Only thing fit for a box – you ask me – is something that don’t plan on growing at all no more; something dead. They want a word for everything. Because not having a word for something scares the shit out of them. Because it reminds them how worthless all the other words that they already got really are. Words are imprecise and ill-fitting, approximations at best, abominations at worst. Words are dead. Ghosts we hang on real living things so that we can make out their shape better in all this dark. Words are especially useless if you’re hoping for them to show you the truth. For truth you need music.
Truth was, I didn’t rightly know if there was a word for what I really was but the term most generally agreed upon was folksinger. The curly words stamped down on the dead wax of all those spinning vinyl records claimed my name was Mal Leatherberry, and if you believe that then you’re liable to believe the rest of this. I suppose the beginning’s as good a place as any to get started. But don’t worry, I’m not gonna waste your time going over all the things that everybody already knows about. All the boring historical bits like The Great Reckoning, the Banapple virus or the Old Electric World falling to heap, nor the subsequent resurrection and supposed salvation of mankind or the things that happened after that which were even worse. Don’t worry, I’m gonna skip on ahead of all that bullshit.
You’re welcome.
I’m a take you right to the good part. Namely, myself. When I started figuring into things. Now, I don’t know how far ahead or behind you might be when you get this…so I’m going to go ahead for your sake and take my time explaining who I am and what I was up to. You most likely already heard of me, no matter how far up ahead or back behind you are, I was famous in my day. But even if you do know the name Mal Leatherberry you probably don’t know a bit of truth about me. Not even from the records I recorded myself. Not even from my own singing voice. Music is the truth, believe that, but it’s only the big truth. Not the little truth. That tiny, day to day truth. That hasn’t been told. Which is what I aim to rectify here. But I’m most accustomed to telling my stories through song, so do me a kindness and don’t forget your patience as I’m setting down this account. See a song – a good one anyhow – is a distillation of the most of a given thing. The most beauty, the most ugly, the most absurd, the most holy. And a really good song, well, it gets it all mixed up until you can’t tell where one of those things begins and another takes over. I’ve written a lot of songs, even some of your favorites, not that you’d know it. Some of them weren’t even half bad. But this is how I come to write the finest song ever that’s been written. Well, maybe it’s not fair to say I wrote it, leastways entirely on my own, but I at the minimal worked up my own version of it. Changed some parts, fiddled with the register and tempo, rewrote the words where it needed it; made it my very own. See, there’s plenty of people who’ll delight in telling you that you can’t change the world. Especially with something as fugacious and tenuous as a song. But I say just because you haven’t noticed doesn’t mean the world hasn’t already changed. Maybe it just left you back behind when you couldn’t keep up?
Which is how I was feeling around the time just before I started composing what would become my masterpiece. Like the world was leaving me behind. To tell it to you true, I was feeling like I was still hung up on that tree with them strings around my neck. Like I had no voice anymore. But of course now I did have a voice, an uncommon one. I just didn’t have a scammed thing to say with it.
Which is probably why I decided to get high.
All of us was dressed up in our finest dilapidations like we were getting sent to church in the morning or at the very least setting to do some front row coffin gawking. Both of which we were, after a fashion. But no one there really wanted much to talk about it, even though it was the reason for the revelry. Which happened a lot actually. No one wanting to admit why they were there. For what could be said? So instead they danced and they drank and they dressed in rags. There were tailors and ragdolls at any inch you’d aim your eye. Tatterdemalions of all stripes stretching their heads and getting good and warbled off the togs they was wearing. The air in the place was a thick red fog of ragweed smoke for those who couldn’t afford or tolerate the unspooling narcotic clothing. Music was being played from a fleet of gramophones that lined the floor of the barn in a corner. They had begun synchronized and such, the horde of them playing the same record at the same time to make a massive swell of sound but now the stomping and dancing had shook off a good number of the players and the result was the same song being played at two dozen different speeds and with two dozen different parts all at once and the same time. It sounded like the world coming to an end to me, or maybe another one trying to push its way on through. But everyone who was dancing continued doing it, no one seemed to mind the ugly old sound at all. Least of all me. Which might have been because it was my voice that was on those records overlapping itself. My voice stuttering, split into countless different shards and then singing back in legion most eerily at points when it seemed of the highest improbability. I walked through the ragparty and thought what I heard might have been an improvement.
You’d understand if you’d heard my singing voice. Or maybe you wouldn’t, now that I think on it. For folks seemed to take to it, despite it not being traditionally what was thought of as a good voice. Especially when it came to singing. Nothing about it was traditional. It was a remarkable instrument, I’ll admit, albeit an unadorned and severe one at times. And if I sound self-satisfied here, well, I don’t take much credit for the way I sound. It wasn’t at all my doing, not by a damn sight. So I can discuss it as if it wasn’t my own because plainly it didn’t sound like it was most of the time. My voice was uncommon weird, a specimen entirely unique to itself. It didn’t sound much at all like what a person was supposed to. At least what one person sounded like. If anything, having all the music broken up like this with all those scrammed gramophones, it was just a sort of exaggeration of what my singing voice already did on its own and to such uncanny precision: When I sang it was as if I was singing with more than one voice at a time. Like there was a whole choir sitting down in my throat lending their voices. And not all of the voices belonged to human beings either. Now, with the riot of drunken gramophones, the sound that slurred out from the horns just sounded much like that voice of mine brought to its logical conclusion. The quality of it was just being made blatant. Despite the disagreeableness my voice had a certain sway to it, it sounded unnatural and maybe it caused unnatural reactions. Of course you couldn’t understand a word I was saying but damn it if everything I said didn’t sound just like the truth anyhow. Which was a shame because I put a lot of care into making it so the words of all those songs fit perfect and precise so as to achieve maximum and absolute confusion. Least folks could do was try to suss ‘em out some and appreciate how frustrating I was working to be. Truth was – try as I might – folks went and found meaning in what I put down no matter how hard I tried to make that trouble for them. Mostly I did this because if you didn’t dress the truth a bit and make it mysterious and a little bit sideways – why – no one would take your word that you were being honest. So you had to say it crooked, had to say it in some way like it wasn’t what you were really saying. But it didn’t matter no more, I reasoned that I didn’t have much of anything to not actually say anymore anyhow.
We were throwing the ragparty in an often-overlooked farmhouse not far from the town of Yont Nellum, lower territory just above the Blind River. It was a frequent haunt for types like us. Ragdolls and such. Over my black frock coat and under my dress shirt I had on the tattered remains of a large rag shawl, a sort of tawny colored rebozo next to my flesh. The remnants of it were steadily disintegrating and the garment hung down in long strands over my waist giving it the appearance of a dead jellyfish slung over my shoulder. I had this rag rebozo tucked into my collar too so it could also hang down over the flesh of my back. Rag on your flesh felt warm, like that first bit of fever – that with some perversion – you actually looked forward to. It was a bit of boffle wearing the rebozo and keeping my checkerboard scarf around my neck but I never took the scarf off. Never. The rebozo was a tolerable bit of medicine but still wasn’t enough revelry for me so I supported it with a burning quirley stuffed with ragweed. It hung from my lip and I puffed it incessantly. I liked to watch the red plumes coming off the end of it so I looked back behind me to see how they had trailed me. There was a red hazy line from the path I had cut through the crowd. Which wasn’t bad to look at but made me easy to follow. So did the fact that I was the only one in sunglasses. “Hey, Karlin’s looking for you.”
I turned. “Well, I ain’t looking for her.”
It was the circus kid, Snowy. Of all the people who bothered me Snowy was the one who bothered me least. He had his own quirley hanging from his lip, a might spliff that burned out like a sconce or maybe even an upturned lighthouse. Despite having not smoked down my own but halfway I took it upon myself to relieve Snowy of his considerable burden and stole myself a good long drag from his spliff. Smoke webbed out of my mouth. Snowy was all business though. “What should I tell her if she come asking me up again about you?”
I put my own quirley back to my lip and Snowy snatched him his spliff. “Tell her to stay put.”
“You gonna go to her?”
“No. No I am not.” I turned to depart but then Snowy came up from behind and gave me a big sloppy hug. The kid could still act the cuttooth at times. “You must have fog between your ears,” I told him. “You know how much I don’t like having someone’s arms around me unless the rest of us are likewise intertwined.”
“Don’t mean it like that, Mal. Come on, it’s a party, let’s you and me hide from Karlin together, maybe get some of them ragdolls to come along too, I’ll let you have your pick.”
I had to show teeth at that. “I do believe the rag has soaked you through, young man. Have my pick, how you talk, Snowy? There’s not a chance in the world that I wouldn’t already get my pick even without your charity. Kind as it was for you to extend…” I took a drag from my quirley. “Besides, without me even the most ragged woman in this collection is liable to send you back to Circus Town to play with your own pizzle. Not even old enough for scruff.” I put a hand back to his chin, scratched at it then gave it a small slap. “Now boffle me no longer.”
Snowy released me and coughed out that little laugh of his. “You use words like I use my sword.”
“Don’t insult me, my words have actually cut down their targets.”
As I walked away Snowy said, “Calliope Slade is here tonight too.”
“Oh?”
“She looking for you, same as Karlin.”
I didn’t say nothing back, just slipped away into the crowd. I was floating hard on the rag now with its numbing hum circulating out from my center. The sounds and smells of the world intermingled and got fairly indistinguishable and I celebrated with another drag from my quirley. The faces in the room stretched and blurred some, not on account of the rag mind you, just the rapid movement and the flickering lamp lights. Everybody was grinning and hollering like they were desperate to convince anyone who happened upon watching them that they were having a good time. That they weren’t afraid. They did a tolerable good job putting on with the show which only made it all that much worse. So I decided to get to a quieter room. Their eyes here gave them all away.
There was no dancing in the next room but there were still plenty of eyes fixed on me when I entered. I could hear ‘em too, bits of conversation at least, the words the folksinger coming to me from all over. Near the entrance there was some cuttooth girl standing on top of an upturned bucket performing pontification about knowing who the true enemy is. I squizzed down at the girl’s toes on the bucket then adjusted my checkerboard scarf around my neck. “Sister, who isn’t the true enemy?” I think I said, the rag sometimes made it hard to know what words were inside and which you let out. Either way the girl didn’t acknowledge it, just kept on with her sermon. Then some drunk, whose rags had fallen away to total disrepair and who was without his pants, ran past me and the bucket girl giggling. His gleaming white ass bumped into my shoulder and I laughed at this ragdoll and moved my quirley out of his way. I took a moment to ponder whether or not the pantless scram had taken off his legwear or if they had been rag pants that had simply given out over the night? Rag pants? I was well and warbled if I was trading in skrobble thoughts such as that. I was so far out I even considered picking up on his fashion cues but everyone was already too damn invested on finding out what I wore to my first trip to the hospital.
It never was just on account of the voice either. Even before it had changed folks wondered a lot about me. I didn’t fit, there wasn’t room made for me. I even wondered myself sometimes. I was never one or the other with anything, who was? To me, I was most comfortable somewhere in between or outside all of it. I figured if folks would just forget about sussing it all out they’d reach the conclusion that it was best thinking of me as a bit of both. Maybe they’d be even more comfortable if they started thinking of themselves likewise? But mostly I was sick of them thinking of me at all. I was growing tired of telling truths. More and more it just got me feeling like some scrammed minister myself.
Now bucket girl was finally paying me mind and looking down trying to say something. Most likely she was wanting me to expound on what she was on up there railing about and such. Or worse, she’d want me to pick apart and explain the words to one of my damn songs. These types, cuttooths, they always wanted everything explained. So instead of letting her keep on squawking I held a finger up and corked her. “Listen, you hear that? Silence. That’s god trying to talk to you.” Bucket girl was quiet for a measure but then started to ask me what that meant? Did I believe in god? What about the true enemy? And such and so on. I kept on moving.
The lamps hung high in the room and the candle light gave off a jaundiced sort of glow to everyone and everything in it. Jaundiced was one of those forgotten words I collected from the Old Electric World. Snowy would always dismiss them as nothing but bafflegab but I couldn’t help myself. Being a folksinger and all I made it my concern the procuring of words. The more unusual the better. I was always looking for more language. More shiny and useless words that wouldn’t even be heard when they were delivered by my scrammed, unnatural voice. But even if they were mostly ignored, and utterly useless, I still put a lot of thought into what words I used. They might be useless but they were the best we had I supposed. Besides, I liked to read. Snowy might have given me the business about my habit but whenever he stumbled upon some old tome or other piece of worded detritus scattered out in the Lowlands he’d bring it back to me. I’d find some of these books and what all myself sometimes when I was below the Blind River but I was never as good as Snowy at rustling them up. Of course Snowy was happy to hand them over seeing as he couldn’t read himself. Most of the Circus Kin were like that, they never saw much use in the practice, books being bound deceptions and so forth. I didn’t see it that way though. It wasn’t a deception if you agreed up front that it was all pretend, right? Besides, the world outside of books had just as much bound deceptions and agreed upon fictions with society and all its half-soaked restrictions as any other story you’d read. My favorite book I had in my possession was called The Dictionary. Took me a bit to figure out what the story was supposed to be but dog my cats if it didn’t give me plenty of colorful uselessness to put over my guitar. It was Snowy that found me that one of course.
I made my way through all the eyes, affixed to me like they was afraid if they turned away I’d disappear. That’d be something, wouldn’t it? It was something I was mostly accustomed to but when the rag was taking me hard like this I’d forget not to notice. No one had enough sand to actually come and say something to me so I slummocked my way eventually to the center of the room where sat a great black piano. I stuffed myself behind it, hiding behind it like a raised fortress wall. I didn’t have any intention or desire to play, I just needed to get off my sticks. Standing up was becoming an intolerable labor. But sure enough some hushed voice speculated on whether or not the folksinger was going to play them a song. Then another rang in with their prediction. I didn’t look up to answer anyone. Because there was something worse than just the rag trying to hold me down. I could feel it starting to crawl all up my spine. The way it always did when it came for me. It was like I was running towards a light which blasted my shadow out behind me and made my own shape some stretched black beast that was doing the chasing. I knew I just needed to get to the light and knock it over so that the beast would be banished. But I never could reach it and the closer I got the larger the shadow grew.
I clutched onto my scarf hanging down over the black and white teeth of the piano. Looked like those two wore the same dress to the party. I decided then that I wasn’t gonna let that shadow get me. Not now, not this time. I concentrated, tried to settle myself down. I focused past the scarf and saw below it my shrinking, dissolving rag rebozo. Sometimes the rag was good at keeping the shadow from getting me. So I tried to think on only that. But the shadow was still there. Then I heard someone say that the folksinger was too warbled on rag to stand let alone play the piano. Well, seemed like that was just the sort of perceptive critique to bring me back from where I was headed. Before I could hurl out a rejoinder to thank them for keeping me from falling in with the shadow someone else shouted something else in general agreement. Then yet another voice laughed. One woman said they’d seen me forget half the words to one of my very own compositions just last month ago at a performance. I was just impressed that she could tell. For sure though, I could remember that performance, but I was still foggy on some of the song in question’s words. Voices kept churning up now. They were getting loud, no one the least bit afraid that I might hear ‘em. I suppose they suspected me too far gone to hear or they simply didn’t care if I did? There was a ragdoll with a particularly loud voice and he said rather matter-of-factly that I had made my last good song nearly a year prior. I don’t need to tell you but that brought my head up right quick. Not that it deterred anyone. Another argued it had been two years since I put out a record of merit. That was the word they used too, merit. One especially boisterous voice challenged that I hadn’t made any work of worth since my first. I wish I could say that this was greatly disagreed with but it wasn’t. I was about to risk the calamity of standing up on my own two feet so I could tell these scram to have a suck on a Banapple but then a voice said, “When was the last time she made a record period?”
This was a voice I knew. I had heard it every imaginable variance. Every conceivable permutation, if you’d permit the bafflegab. It didn’t matter what it was saying ‘cause it always sounded the same. It was finely crafted, every syllable measured carefully and exact. It was educated, arrogant and sharpened to a point through years of never being told the word “no” when it asked for a thing. But when it sang none of that mattered, because it was louder and darker than a black waterfall.
I looked and there was Calliope Slade, looking just like her record cover. The crowd parted for her like she was on fire. The heels on her boots made her taller than she really was, taller than everyone else in the room. The stones of her eyes looked almost black in the candlelight. “What do you say, Leatherberry? When was the last time you wrote a song?” She had a smirk like not having one would have caused her to fall ill.
“I believe the last songs I wrote were all the songs that you sang on your last record.” Now I was the one smirking. “So I guess it stands to ask you, when was the last time you wrote a song?” The crowd started murmuring like crowds like this always did. So I pressed on, “I mean have you ever even written a song? Now that I’m not writing ‘em who you got scribbling their lines out for you? Tell me it ain’t Karlin? Now, she won’t admit it to me but I suspect she has some hand behind your new material.”
“You know as well as I that we wrote those songs together. That is, you and I.”
The ragdolls around us were all gawking. “Example of writing process,” I said. “Calliope: Mal, I’d like a song in this key.” I tapped a tooth of the piano. “Mal: Here’s that key. Calliope: Now what should I sing about? Mal: Never mind that, here’s a finished song, I’ll sing it for you and then you can just follow what I done, only make sure you suck out any of the sand, soul and other intangibles that make the song my song and fill it instead with that big, pretty, empty opera house voice of yours.”
Calliope didn’t look upset, she never looked upset. She just put a hand on her hip and held her chin up. “So I suppose we’re not going to be singing a duet together now for these people then?”
“That why you’re here?”
“No. You’re in no state to sing, especially with me.” She tilted her head toward the crowd. “Besides, I hear you don’t have much memory for the words to the songs you sing, even the ones you purportedly pen.” The crowd started up again, someone asked for her to sing something all by herself. She gave a little grin but shook her head. “Sorry dears, no music tonight.” And with that they dispersed, groveling some as they retreated to the corners of the room and some back out to the larger rooms where all the prerecorded Mal Leatherberries were happy to pluck a tune for them no matter their state. Calliope took advantage of what passed for privacy for us and she slinked over to the piano bench and leaned down to me. She spoke quietly, not softly. “I’m here because we need to talk. I got something, something big that I want you to be a part of.”
I showed some teeth. “That makes two of us.”
“Oh, please. In what world are you living?” Her hand was on my shoulder now, voice back to being that whisper of hers. “Get serious, sugar. Something big is happening and you’re going to have to decide how far you’re willing to go to win this.”
“Who said I wanted to win?”
Her hand was off my shoulder. “I’ve forgotten how needlessly tiresome you can make things.” I was happy then to find that my quirley was still lit and in my possession, so I took a last drag from what little was left of it then dropped it down to squash beneath my boot. Calliope mistook my clear disinterest as a plea for her to keep talking. People are always doing that. I’ve even been told I’m a great listener, though I don’t recall who exactly by. “Listen, you,” she told me. “You showed me the way…the truth. About how it is and even who I am.” She paused after this like an actor was supposed to and then she sat down on the bench with me. Past her shoulder I could squiz some of the others still stealing their looks and exchanging whispering amongst themselves. But I also caught sight of someone new giving me the look over. This was a tall woman with a very serious face standing in the doorway at the corner of the room. She sent me a stare of unrivaled hatred. Not much I could do with that so I took out my reticule, pulled from it three pinches of ragweed that smelled like cinnamon and citrus – fresh rag – and then I took out a malnourished looking copy of the Holy Liber. I opened to the Fourth Book, verse six, and then I tore out the silver-gilded page and set to rolling a new quirley. Calliope took the page from my hand and I was set to protest but then saw she was just commandeering the rolling of it. Like she used to. So I put away my holy book and set the reticule back into my frock coat and just sat back and admired the show. Calliope didn’t disappoint, she rolled the quirley good and tight then took her tongue across the length of it so as to seal it. “Tell me if that’s wet enough for you?” She looked at me in a certain way, the little actress.
When she stuck it my mouth I played my part, told her, “Oh, I surely will.” I watched over Calliope’s shoulder as my admirer with the serious face caught sight of that scene and left the room in an uncommon hurry. “Who’s that, she’s new.”
Calliope didn’t even turn around. “She is new, that is she’s no cuttooth but she’s new to me. She’s alright, she’s just a bit…”
“Serious.”
“Yes, serious as a sermon.” Calliope was a still a cuttooth herself, so her deciding on who is and ain’t was a laugh but I didn’t call her on it. Spoonies like her always thought they were the authority on whatever new lifestyle they tried on at the moment. “Now I want to tell you about this thing I’m working on. This is it, this is the one.”
“Slade, I got enough people putting the squeeze on me to write new material for my own records. You understand? Even if I wanted to write for you, which I don’t, I can’t do it.”
She didn’t ask permission – just like a spoony – and she reached into my coat and found my reticule before I could accuse her of getting fresh. Then took from it a long match and struck it against the side of the piano. She gave my quirley some torch and then blew out the flame in her choreographed sort of way. “I’m talking about something bigger than music.”
“Blasphemer.”
“I want you to be a part of this,” she said, ignoring me. “This could be what we’ve all been waiting for. Word true.”
“Heard that song before, recently matter of fact, Karlin’s got these notions. You seen her? She’s chasing me too. Tell me, how am I supposed to compose these great pieces of propaganda when I can’t be let alone long enough to even strum a guitar or sit down to a piano without being solicited to revolution myself.”
“Karlin?” Calliope laughed. “Karlin doesn’t even–” I blew some red smoke over Calliope’s face on accident but pretended it was my intention. I was tired, I looked past the opera singer and the room had returned to its previous state of dreadful revelry. Calliope was still talking of course. Nothing in the Good Lands or the Low could stop that, but I was occupying myself watching the menagerie have their fun. I even spotted the scram with his ass hanging out trying to persuade the bucket girl to come down off her perch and join him in pleasures lower than her position suggested her capable of currently enjoying. He wasn’t being pushy about it or such, just whiny like most drunk pantless men were when they weren’t being pushy. Bucket girl told him something that turned him around and curled his face and I decided she didn’t need any of my interfering. “You want to change the world, right?” Calliope whispered, she must have gotten tired of being ignored at some point ‘cause her face was close enough to mine that our noses brushed.
I took the quirley from my lip, waited a beat then told her, “Oh, you’re serious?” I could be an actor too when I wanted. “I want to change the world? Whatever put that half-soaked notion into your head.”
Calliope pulled back. “You did. If you think this is all such a laugh then what are you even doing any of this for?”
I returned the quirley to its rightful place. “…I think you might have caught yourself some of that seriousness that’s been afflicting your friend what was watching us earlier.”
Calliope stood. “I thought I missed you, Leatherberry, you believe that?”
“Careful, I hear that serious sickness can travel through the sluice, better not lick your fingers as you’re regularly inclined to. Pity, I know.”
“But now I think I just missed your songs.”
“Now that I believe.”
“Even if you never meant a word of them they meant the world to me.” She smiled and looked around the room. “Them too.” They were watching us again now. Calliope got up from the piano. “You should write again, Leatherberry, you really should.” She smiled down at me. “But if you don’t – or can’t, you should have the decency to die while your death could still mean something.”
I don’t need to tell you but she was still smiling as she turned and left me there at my piano.
As she was going Anika Karlin was walking into the room. They shared some sort of brief exchange that I couldn’t quite make out but then they went their separate trajectories: Calliope out of the room and Karlin straight for me. I crooked my head to look for possible escape routes but Karlin marched right up to me and my piano before I could get crawling. She had me, there was no way I was getting out of here alive. With my fate decided I turned and started tapping on the keys of the piano absently. The blood in my ears was chugging at an uncommon decibel and I could feel myself falling into the rag more. Which wasn’t ideal but it suited me better than that old shadow which was still lurking off in the corners of my brain. No, I wouldn’t give it no mind. That’s how it got you. So I let myself slip further into the rag and when I looked up all the faces in the room they were webbed together in some grotesque tapestry. The walls surrounding swelled, the ground below crawled. By the time Karlin loomed over to speak at me I was getting sick all over the keys of the piano. And for some reason I kept playing through my own mess, hitting the keys in a particularly jolly sounding if not truly melodious manner. The music itself punctuated by the sloppy wet sound my fingers made working through all the muck. I was lost to the rag and I got sick again when Karlin pulled me on off the bench. When I looked up I saw that Snowy was there now too. All the people in the room were chattering amongst themselves at the sight of me in this state which made it hard to hear but I made out Karlin telling Snowy to take me out of there. Which is what he did.
Snowy and me were in the grain silo now outside the barn. There wasn’t any grain in it which made it a good place to record. Reverb in the place was something else. I had Snowy fetch the recording gramophone for me and he had the horn pointed my way. Snowy was good in that way. I had told him after he dragged me out of the barn that I wanted to make some music. I informed him of this intention while not being able to stand under my own power unless he held me up. But he agreed. He told me that I had a gruesome smear of red rag sick splayed across my mouth like a clown’s maw but I had managed to roll myself a new quirley. I puffed on it even if it wasn’t actually lit and he took one look and knew I was in the proper condition to make a Mal Leatherberry recording.
I sat there with my back against the wall and my guitar in my lap. Snowy had removed the last of my rebozo and buttoned up my frock coat for me to keep my dignity. He was fiddling with the gramophone, muttering cuss under his breath at something not being to his liking. “Come on, you scram, let’s make another masterpiece,” I shouted for encouragement.
“…You’re not going to play that guitar. I know it and you know it. You’re just gonna yammer and blow bate.”
“That’s bloviate – but good word either way.”
“And then you’ll lose your thoughts and I’m just gonna sit here with you until you pass out instead of with some of those ragdolls that had been giving me the business earlier this evening. That’s all.”
“That all?”
“That’s all it ever is anymore.”
I scratched at the corners of my eyes like it was big important for me to do it. “Everybody’s always on me to record something new and then when I set to doing it they don’t want me to?”
“Okay, Mal.” He stood up then hunched over to start the device. “Let’s record, I assume we’re going to begin with some words?”
“That’s not a bad notion. Just give me the signal.” He started the machine up then pointed at me. I vomited almost on cue. Snowy had a good ear for melody and promptly stopped the recording.
“Gazzits, man,” he shouted.
“…Did we get it?”
“Find this funny, do you?” He kicked at my boot.
“Alright.” I took the edge of my sleeves and started wiping away the bits of fresh sick stuck to my face.
And Snowy left me to it. Which is what I deserved of course. The only help he offered was mild suggestion. “Just use your scarf.”
“Don’t fucking touch my scarf.” I didn’t mean to snarl like that at him but it just happened that way.
“I wasn’t touching, I was just offering up the idea is all.”
I should have told him it wasn’t his fault but instead I said, “I’m not yet so desperate for an idea as to start stealing them from the likes of you.” I gave him a grin so as to let him know that we were square and he returned it to let me know it was so. I went to take off my dark sunglasses but then realized they had already been removed so I took a puff off my unlit quirley and Snowy started up the gramophone once more. He gave me the signal and I held the ends of my scarf in my fingertips and for the second time that night I felt that shadow calling to me. I ignored it as best I could.
I saw Snowy mouthing to me without sound, “Words? Words!”
It was time to sing. “Words, right. They want a word for everything… See words are useless if you want them to show any truth. For truth you need music.” I ran a thumb over my guitar strings – it didn’t sound so bad for a guitar full of vomit. I strummed a bit, finding my way but then hit a poor note and just let the instrument drop. Before Snowy could turn off the machine I held my hand up. “And I can’t seem to make music anymore. As you can hear for yourself. Word true, it’s been a miserable stretch since last I could. And even if it’s what corked me up to begin with… I can understand all your expectations.” I watched the black vinyl circle making its way around while my words were cut into its skin in rippled rolling grooves like what stone skipping over water makes. “What does the audience expect? The audience expects everything like it’s already theirs and hell, maybe it is? They want you to tell them how they feel better than they can themselves. They want you to take apart their heart and split open their mind with your own and they want you to do it with delicacy and like you weren’t trying.” All this sorta lurched out of me and for a moment there I forgot about my shadow and fooled myself into thinking I was about to say something important. Something someone needed to hear. Me most of all. “The audience wants more than they expected. They want a communion with something more than themselves. And not in that cheap way that the Church offers it. Man made god after his own image but damn it if he don’t like to linger too long at the reflection. But I already said that before… Audience doesn’t want to hear that, they want something new. No, they want something real. Something sacred and if you can manage it, they’d like it under four minutes. So hurry up and get to the chorus… Infinity is singing and they want you to show them their words so they can sing along.” Sounded like I knew what I was talking about didn’t it? At the time I remember being fairly satisfied with it. I even reached into my coat, pulled out my reticule, took out a match and lit up my quirley and took a long, heroic drag.
But I sensed that my shadow was still there. Waiting for me, right at the base of my spine. And it was losing its patience. I kept on talking. “But sometimes, when I had too much rag and soaked up too much smoke between my ears, I think what the audience – what anyone – really wants – is just to see me fail.” I put a hand to my hair, lost some of the fingers as I adjusted the coif. “Hokum and horseshit, heresy and hearsay, I sometimes suspect that people like the idea of me better than the reality. Suppose that’s the same for most things though. I wonder if they got a word for that yet?” I took a less heroic drag from the quirley, sighed. “You get all that?” I asked Snowy.
“No,” he said. “I turned it off about the time you started feeling sorry for yourself.”
I showed teeth. “So in other words you didn’t get any of it?”
I had me a laugh but Snowy didn’t join in. He picked up that scrammed horn of his and set to leave and I to trying to persuade him otherwise. “Come on, Snow. Where you going? You really going to leave me in here by myself? I know, go fetch some of them ragdolls you were plotting over early. I’ll talk you up right, me too. Make ‘em think the both of us were proper tatterdemalions. Snow, what do you say? Snowy?”
He was already to the door. “You can’t even stand.” I wiggled one of my sticks to prove his point for him. “Look, it’s late and we have a big day ahead of us. Best be getting us both some rest. I can carry you to a bed if you like?”
My shadow started its climb. “I don’t want anyone seeing me when…like I am.”
“I didn’t think so. Look, I’ll come by in the morning, first thing.”
It was like a spider was crawling up my back, between my shoulders and now it was sitting on my scalp, legs tapping, waiting to dig its way in. “Snowy, there’s something…something’s coming for me. I know it.”
“Mal, what are you talking about?” I had never told him about it…this shadow of mine. Never told anyone.
“It’s like a drip into my head but it ain’t like it too…it’s different and it’s always the same and it’s horrible and I can’t stop it.”
“Come on, that’s too much rag. Got you paranoid, delusional, conjuring up all sorts of scary bogens and devils. Next you’ll be saying you’ve seen visions of scratch witches and the like.”
“It’s real, you scram.” I clutched at Snowy’s leg. “It’s him, the black minister. Always him. He’s coming for me.”
At the mention of his name Snowy’s expression changed, but only for a second. Then he kept on like before. “Of course he is. But he ain’t here now. If he were I’d run him through with my sword, word true. Now get some rest, Mal. And lay off the rag. It’s got you talking like some cuttooth just arrived south of the Blind River. Honestly, you’re worrying me.” He wrestled his leg out from my grip. I was still too warbled to make another grab.
“You should be worried. I’m not making this up. It’s my curse. The black minister… I have a window in my mind that makes me see him there at times. The things he does… And I’m trapped there in these thoughts, stuck like a lamb in the brambles. Made to watch while he revels in his work. I have to watch him as he–”
But Snowy was closing the door. I screamed out to no use, just let my strange voice fill the silo. It sounded like a bunch of animals on some killing floor howling in grim assessment of their newly discovered part in the proceedings. The shadow had me now. Like in the old story, the one about the boy who would never die but whose shadow had slipped away from him. And the girl who stitched it back on for him and then for reward he took her with him to the land of never. Only for me the story was all turned around. And I couldn't rip these stitches out fast enough and my shadow was the one chasing after me. Taking me with it to different lands of never. Places I never wanted to be taken. Places I was afraid that from which I'd never return.
Note* These are paperback novels NOT comics!
Note* This a pre-order, the novels will ship by the end of March.
ORDER HERE
THESE BOOKS SHOULD BE READ LOUD
NOT ALOUD...
LOUD
A folk rock fantasy western that reads like Mark Twain’s Dune, The Bleeding Tree Trilogy.
In a future primitive where most of the Old Electric World has been lost, Mal Leatherberry is a folksinger cursed with an uncommon
singing voice. A voice which holds an otherworldly sway over almost everyone who hears its song.
She’s used it to make herself the symbol for a heretic rebellion against a fascist, religious empire known simply as The Church.
But now she’s starting to lose her lack of faith.
And maybe even worse, her musical inspiration.
Mythic, elemental...irresponsible, The Bleeding Tree Trilogy takes readers for a weird ride into a world of ragparty revelries,
murderous ministers and gramophone ghastlies.
Author Tony McMillen (Lumen, Serious Creatures, Attaboy, An Augmented Fourth) creates a series that mixes the low fidelity mystery of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes with the dreamlike delights
of Stephen King’s Dark Tower.
The three books are: Higher Climbs the Fire, Scratch Witch Hymns and Songs From Scissor City. They're $ 10 bucks individually but with this preorder you save $5.00 of the total price and will get all 3 books signed for only $25.00 plus shipping!
I will release The Bleeding Tree Trilogy early this year.
I’ve been working on these three novels for more than 4 years and I’m very excited to finally be able to share them with you.
They read like Mark Twain’s Dune or maybe Stephen King’s Dark Tower if it starred Bob Dylan
The three books are:
Higher Climbs the Fire
Scratch Witch Hymns
Songs From Scissor City
They will be released simultaneously and there should be a discounted bundle options for readers who snag all 3 at once.
They will also be available digitally if you’re cool like that.
Here’s cover art for the three books and some back copy for book 1.
Check out this thoughtful and thorough video review of my comic Lumen by awesome cartoonist Daniel Moler on his show Psychonaut Sessions!
And then check out the rest of his episodes as well as his own comics work! https://www.danielmolerweb.com/psychonaut-presents
I'll be tabling on Saturday August 28th! I'll have copies of my oversized comic Attaboy as well as my regular sized Serious Creatures and Lumen and will be drawing ink sketches all day long. Come by and say howdy.
But what is Mini-MICE?
It’s an outdoor comic convention on August 28 – 29, 2021 from 12 – 4:30PM at Starlight Square in Cambridge. The open-air summer market will feature 64 Massachusetts-based comic creators with a different exhibitor roster on Saturday and Sunday.
Here’s the list of exhibitors and some more info:
https://www.micexpo.org/exhibitors/?fbclid=IwAR0YSozA4fi0CWTEkk6Cf5NZPvm9jUZq5z7xR9H1_V4c7aD7-tbeILQX91k
I hope I see you soon.
I was lucky enough to get to sit down and talk with Ryan Balkam over at The Comic Lounge; we talk about Attaboy, Serious Creatures, Image Grand Disaster and comics in general.
The first review for my new comic (coming to Kickstarter in June 15th) is over at Horror Fuel.com
Read it here.
My new comic book Attaboy will be on Kickstarter next week on Tuesday but you can sign up now to be notified when it launches.
Check out this gnarly looking new novel from one of my fave authors David James Keaton. I did not do the cover art but did provide a bunch of black and white interior illustrations to this puppy.
Dave writes some of the best dialogue I've ever read and his plots are madman ravings waving their dicks at three act structures.
Preorder it here!
I recommend not reading this unless you’ve read all six issues of the comic but here is my detailed look at the making of Serious Creatures.
Read here.
A new written interview with me where I discuss Serious Creatures and get into my love of the perfect film JAWS.
I got to be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts (seriously, I subscribe) to discuss (easily) one of my favorite films of all time.
THE THING!!!
Listen here.
I have had a busy dance card as of late.
I have an interview over at Nerds from the Crypt where I talk about my love of horror as a whole:
And I talk a lot about making comics over at Storycomic.
And last but not least I make my third appearance at the Ghoulish Podcast with Max Booth III and we dish about blue collar horror.
This is the most in depth interview I've ever done! My Aunt Sue, Aunt JoAnne and Uncle Pat even show up to corroborate my stories. We get into it! Comics, novels, music, everything.
It’s 1974, Bobby Feckle is fourteen years old and sneaking onto the set of some movie about a shark terrorizing a New England tourist town.
The movie will change Hollywood and Bobby’s life.
…If they can just get the damn animatronic shark to stop sinking.
The Kickstarter for the collection of my comic Serious Creatures is live and doing rather well (completely funded in under 48 hours!)
You can get your copy there as well as a bunch of other swell rewards like original art and behind the scenes stuff. There’s also special tiers just for retailers so can get my comics into your shop at a discounted rate.
Check it out here: http://kck.st/2Zgmfr5
Thanks.
Serious Creatures Issue 2
“Lifecast”
Cover
The cover for this issue is an homage to this classic Post cover by Stevan Dohanos, NOT Norman Rockwell. I think I found it looking online for Rockwell covers though.
Credits Page
Dedicated to my Mom because this is the motherfucking Mom issue! …Weird to use motherfucking now isn’t it?
...It is.
Page 1
It was really easy to lapse into monster philosophy and using masks as metaphors with this story but instead of avoiding it I steered right into it.
And my answer to the favorite universal monster question is honestly Dracula because I’m very unsympathetic to myself BUT I wish it was the Gillman because he’s just so damn groovy looking.
This page makes me want to make a Monster Squad fan comics STAT.
Page 2
I decided early on to do the Tom and Jerry thing and never show the mom’s boyfriends’ faces because the point is they’re so interchangeable.
Panel 6, note the TV playing the original It Knocks movie on the screen. Which is a little nod to John Carpenter’s Halloween where the original The Thing is playing on a TV in a scene. Carpenter going on to make the remake made that such a slick little detail. Oh, my wife Taylor was the one who thought of the film title It Knocks and it pisses me off because it’s so damn good.
Page 3
It felt important to have the abusive, drunk idiot boyfriend figure also be the one to clumsily give Bobby a crooked compliment. Because in my experience some of the worst people in your life are also the ones who tell you some of the sweetest things you’ll ever hear.
Page 4
Growing up I had a lot of friends who I confused by telling them I didn’t want to play with them at times. It wasn’t anything against them I just liked being alone sometimes. In fact I needed to be alone at times. Because it let me get lost in my imagination.
The washes in Tucson Arizona were a big part of my growing up, exploring the tunnels there, daring myself to go deeper into the dark than the last time I was there….Well, it was Arizona, maybe I was just trying to hide from the sun…
Speaking of hiding from the sun there’s a reason why Bobby doesn’t see his reflection in the last panel there.
Page 5
Harper Feckle is based on my own mother in almost every way, including her look. Which made me realize how much my mom looks like Lucille Ball. She’s named Harper after Harper Lee because To Kill a Mockingbird was one of my mother’s favorite books as a young woman.
Page 6
This isn’t any kind of exaggeration; this is my mom. She was pretty hardcore. If anything, this is tame compared to some of the other stuff she’s done.
Also, there was a period after writing this page that “shitneck” occupied a top position in my insult lexicon.
Page 7
This is of course an homage to the original King Kong poster art -which I love and which is iconic -but yeah, the proportions on the airplanes and the girl in Kong’s hands are way off. So I thought I’d have Bobby comment on that in case people thought I was just being lazy as an artist.
This also continues the trend of having Bobby posed as a prominent damsel/and or female character from a movie poster which will culminate in his sexy Princess Leia pose next issue.
I looked up the Hollywood sign from 1975 just in case it looked different that year (there have been a few variations throughout the years) and sure enough it was in a terrible state that year and a few others. Letters had been burnt and it looked very Mad Maxy and whatnot; so that’s why it’s all wonked up here.
“The director I worked with on that terrible raunchy ape flick…” is a reference to John Landis and his first movie Schlock, which is also one of Rick Baker’s first movies he headed up special fx on too.
Rick Baker is a deep appreciator of apes and ape characters and has revisited the topic time and time again throughout his career.
Page 8
John Landis was the first “Beard” I knew had to have an analogue to make this story work; thus Wolf Beard. The film with the cocaine budget was Blues Brothers.
Page 9
I like the layout on this page, it’s playful but still easily readable. I stand by my unifying dork theory.
Page 11
This is when I realized how many directors were white guys with beards and glasses and how that sucks for real life social reasons; as well as for art itself; because if most of a medium comes from one similar swathe of people that gets boring quick but most importantly; this hegemony sucks for me as the guy who had to draw a book full of these white, bespectacled and bearded men. Because how the fuck was I going to make them look different from one another?
The trick is to try and latch on to individual visual cues and then ratchet them up to eleven. So, Shark Beard always has a baseball cap. Wolf Beard is always in suit (even though Landis is usually a suit guy only while working) Near Beard is always smoking…
No Beard was a bit of a problem because before starting this project I had only really seen Joe Dante as he is now; an older guy without his enormous fish tank glasses he used to rock back when he made Gremlins and The Howling. And it turns out that with his longer hair and those glasses he looks an awful lot like Bobby Feckle!
But I figured out to make him and Bobby look different; I gave the Dante analogue blue hair instead of grey.
Oh, and the character of No Beard’s real name is Moe Virgil because I’m a genius; and when I see the name Dante I think of Dante’s Inferno and Dante is of escorted through the underworld by Virgil.
GENIUS.
Page 12
The ocean’s a big part of this book; so I had to work in a mention of sirens.
Page 15
Ronnie! I think Ronnie’s got some of the best fashion sense in the book so that’s fun to draw. She doesn’t get too much to do in this issue but later I enjoyed giving her more to say and do. She became one of my favorites quickly.
Page 16 and 17 spread
I went through my Spawn issues 3 and 4 to loom over the spreads that McFarlane did there because they had POV character’s hands large in the foreground on them and I wanted to see how to make that work with big spreads.
Obviously, this was a blast to draw and surprisingly for such a potential Easter egg hunt type of shot there’s really only a few; most of these ghouls are just original creeps.
The big one is the homage to the Kirby created OMAC and its “Build-A-Friend” severed woman in a box nightmare image.
The creature just above her can easily be one of the Crepusculoids from my other comic Lumen. And there’s a couple of creatures here or there that will reappear years later in the space bar sequence which we’ll see next issue.
Page 18
Lon Chaney Jr. Jr. name is for the ages. I love drawing Scottish Terriers.
Page 19
Jack Barber destroying a mask he just worked on that looks great is actually inspired by something that Rob Bottin did (not Rick Baker) according to the book Rubberhead by Steve Johnson. Steve Johnson is a special fx artist known for work on Ghostbusters, Fright Night, Big Trouble in Little China and he worked under both Rick Baker and Rob Bottin on American Werewolf and The Howling. Johnson tells a story about working on The Howling and Bottin destroying a perfectly great looking werewolf sculpture he made himself with a sledgehammer. Johnson is aghast afterwards and asks Bottin, "Why did you do that?" and Bottin coolly replies, “I can do better.”
It also reminds me a bit of something else I wrote, Nefarious Twit, when a writer burns an unsatisfactory draft of his own manuscript in front of someone who thought it was great. The writer tells him something like, “We have to destroy it in order to move on from it.”
Page 20
Trying my hand at a Frank Miller 16 panel Dark Knight grid. To me this worked because it’s basically a montage scene.
The Orwellian Blacksploitation film Bigger Brotha isn’t based on anything really, I just thought it sounded awesome and could have a righteous Curtis Mayfield or The Brothers Johnson soundtrack.
I did have an Uncle Mike and he was a Vietnam vet.
This is the first mention of Cab Reynolds who’s the Roger Corman of our world.
The last couple panels with Jack going method on playing a monkey (yes, ape, I know, I know) that’s just another nod to Rick Baker’s affection of simians and their portrayal. Plus, he did wear the suit for the King Kong remake so I figure he went full Dustin Hoffman for the role.
Page 21
Wolf Beard…fucking Wolf Beard. Okay, Landis did really insist on having the wolf in his flick be on all fours and he and Rick Baker had been working on the project for years before it ever got greenlit.
My challenge here was to make the character of Wolf Beard not so obnoxious or toxic that the reader just out and out hated him. Because then it becomes too easy not to care about his movie happening or not. And because the real guy he’s based on is a fairly charismatic guy despite being a deeply fucked up person. His humor was sardonic and rode that Chevy Chase wave of being right to the hilt of full on asshole but goddamn it-he was funny.
So I went through a few drafts trying to find his voice.
Page 22
I think I’m just trying to talk about what it’s like being an artistic, creative kid in a family that doesn’t know quite what to do with that. No one outwardly discourages you, they want to support you, but it’s like you’re speaking an entirely different language. Also note, another headless boyfriend for mom.
Page 23
There are a couple “family” shots with Bobby at the movies with Jack and Ronnie and later on the rest of their extended adopted family; I think he looks happiest in these shots.
Page 24
The gothic candles are supposed to be a little hint at a dark initiation into a fraternal order of occult goings-on or something sort of vibe. Just playing up Bobby’s whole monster, vampire outlook at growing up and becoming an artist and becoming more and more estranged from his family…
The song “Frankenstein” will forever remind me of the intro to Wayne’s World 2.
“Party on, Wayne.”
Cartoonist Commentary
My book is not about Rob Bottin.
But there would be no book without Rob Bottin.
His career and legend served as inspiration for this story, but I have no interest in trying to tell his story.
I’m much more interested in telling the story of someone who lived a life similar to Rob but also similar to myself.
And also, not at all similar to either one of us.
Because it’s only behind masks that we’re finally able to face ourselves.
…whoa.
Cover
The cover for issue one is an homage to Basil Gogos’ Werewolf of London cover for Famous Monsters of Filmland #115.
Basil Gogos was a big influence on the coloring of this entire comic.
Credits Page
I think the concept of a rating for each issue and it being the credits page came pretty early on once I decided that I was going to make the story a comic book and not a novel. Of course, then I had to think of a clever rating for each issue that reflected the story, didn’t give away too much of it and maybe had a couple stand-alone jokes in there.
I also decided that since the first issue revolved around the brother and sister dynamic of Bobby and Laney I would dedicate issue one to my own sister Allison. Allison’s middle name is Lane (Ali Lane, get it? She named one of her sons that too) so I figured I’d include her middle name in the dedication, so you’d see the origin of the character Laney’s name.
Oh, the first arc’s title “Never Been to California” is also the title of a song from my old band Bicycle Fight. The song’s title came from the fact that I had lived in Tucson Arizona since age 11 but at the time I wrote the song (age 21-22?) I had still never been to the neighboring golden state.
Oh, oh! And I always wanted to do the Kurt Vonnegut/ Stanley Kubrick thing of having an alternative title a la Dr. Strangelove Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb or Slaughterhouse Five Or, The Children’s Crusade.
Page 1
I had just read Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads and was taken by its extensive use of the 9-panel grid. Which of course reminded me of Watchmen’s masterful use of it, so I wanted to try my hand at it. But I also was not gonna use it on every fucking page! No thanks. But I did like the idea of opening the issues with it and using it as a pacesetter for getting people into an issue. The only problem was I was also a big fan of splash page intros followed by double page splashes for pages two and three! Erik Larsen of Savage Dragon does this a lot and learned it from 70s era Kirby. But back to Mister Miracle, that book reminded me that you can break up a big single image with a grid and still get that pacing while also the wow factor of one big image to set the reader on notice.
Best of both worlds, right?
This 9 panel first page thing also led to me making every single issue open with a nine-word sentence. Which sounds restrictive but actually helped me a lot. Sometimes perimeters pave the way for possibilities.
On to the page itself, gotta go with the Jaws poster, right?
I was just beginning to write this as a novel, I got one chapter in and I kept thinking about the possibilities making it a comic would open up. The surreal imagery, the subconscious of Bobby Feckle and the symbolism a special FX artist might conjure up…I kept thinking of this iconic poster but with Bobby as the soon to be devoured swimmer….had to do it.
Also, drawing sharks is fun as hell. At least from this angle.
Page 2
The first pages were done as an experiment to see if I liked this story better as a comic than novel. Before I drew them, I also did a three-pager detailing Rob Bottin’s infamous space cantina George Lucas run-in. (Later adapted again in issue 3) Both that three pager and these four pages I posted online and then, once deciding to keep going and make this a full comic, I recolored these four pages drastically from that earlier online version.
These four pages are me stumbling into how the coloring of the comic was going to work; how it would soften and offset the harshness of my linework, how it would give it a dreamier feel. By the time we get to page 5 I feel like it’s starting to look like the book I wanted to make.
Panel 2, the comedy/tragedy mask monster is of course based on one of the forms of the Rob Bottin’s alien in The Thing. I chose it because Bottin fans would know it, Thing fans would too, but also it resonates with the duality of this story. Plus, it was a good time to draw. This was drawn separately and added later after bipping up the original panel.
Panel 9, this and the presiding panel mark the first appearance of the forebodies! Their look reminds me of Jason Voorhees or the Shy Guys from Super Mario 2 with their big circular eyes. Panel 9 reminds me of an Edward Gorey pose.
Page 3
Panel 1, Ben Cooper Masks were a little before my time, but I had some older cousins who rocked them for Halloween. I think the packaging is iconic, so I used it and I liked it so much I used it again for the cover of issue 5.
Panel 2, our first shot of Bobby Feckle’s face. When I first drew Bobby, I think he looked about 15 or 16, knowing he was only going to be 14 here I had to figure out how to age down my design. With my style and my lack of experience as a cartoonist I eventually settled on a rounder face to denote his youth. I also decided to give him big ears -like really big honking ears -this was done not only to help show his youth but also because I just like them. I think they help make him identifiable and it goes towards that Mickey Mouse/ Astro Boy/ Bart Simpson silhouette character design theory sorta thing.
It didn’t occur to me until after this issue came out how similar this feels to panels from Understanding Comics where he breaks down why a simple happy face can be easier to connect with than a well rendered face.
Page 4
Ithink every single line of text in these first 4 or 5 pages is straight from my novel version’s chapter one rough draft. With maybe a little punch up.
Page 5
Removing the holding line on the issue title was a good choice and I use it off and on throughout the issue, on the next panel and the bottom of the page I use it on the car. Which gives it a more painterly look, I think.
Once I decided I was going to go full Gaiman/Moore and do quotes I quickly thought of this line from one of my all-time favorite Dylan songs.
I was also excited to do title pages with the words incorporated into the art. I had recently reread Swamp Thing and really liked the way Bissette and Toltiben would do that.
The reason I used the song “Seasons in the Sun”was because it was a hit around 1974 and I could see people getting sick of it being played too many times.
Bobby’s sketch pad shows his pencil drawing of a shark, presumably based on the book cover for the novel Fin. This is the first time I made the choice to show Bobby’s drawings in pencil, so they stand out against the rest of my artwork.
Page 6
First appearance of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. I went with the London After Midnight cover because it’s wonderful and could still be understood small scale.
Fucking 8 track! Yes, I referenced a player, yes, I also referenced the Dark Side of the Moon 8 track itself. NO, it does not show even a little.
You’re welcome.
Pages 7, 8
Not gonna lie, I felt like I was a fucking genius when I discovered that the shark’s head from the Jaws poster was a triangle and that it could be formed from the pyramid of the Dark Side album cover.
Speaking of the Floyd I’ve had this idea for the “Dark Forebodies” for a while. It all stems from John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp. In Garp one of the protagonist’s kids mishears his parents’ warning of being dragged down by the undertow of the ocean as the “under toad” and the under toad becomes a running joke and a symbolic boogeyman throughout the rest of the story.
Page 9
Ladies and gentlemen, Steven Spielberg! ...I mean Shark Beard. This is one of the major parts of Bobby’s life and career that diverges from Rob Bottin’s story. Neither Bottin nor Rick Baker were ever on the set of Jaws. But knowing that I was going to be telling my story with analogues it opened it up to having Bobby have a front row seat for the dawn of the blockbuster era of filmmaking with the movie that started it all.
Also knowing how troubled of a set it was, especially in regard to the mechanical shark special FX...it had to go in the book. This was an early choice, in fact when the opening line, “In the end it was all the shark’s fault,” came to me; that’s when I knew I had a story. When this entire 12 issue saga is complete (someday) you’ll see the final impact of that line...no spoilers.
Page 10
Jack Barber is not Rick Baker like Bobby’s Feckle is not Rob Bottin. But his look is a lot closer to a young a Baker than Bobby is to a young Rob. Rick Baker was cute! Still is, but I am not a fan of ponytails...sorry Rick, just me talking, sir. But I really loved the look of Rick Baker in the 70s and 80s, cool hair, good beard, great sharp nose which is fun to draw. He looks a little bit like Shaggy from Scooby Doo in this first issue to me.
Jack Barber is named after my first best friend I ever had, back in 2nd and 3rd grade. His name was Jackson Barber. We used to play video games and draw stage plans for our own games together.
Bobby Feckle shares the last name of cop character I played in a later in life best friend’s indie movie entitled Two Young Cops (not a porno). This best friend’s name is Peter Leon and he is credited on the movie poster for Fin at the tail end (get it? …fuck you , you get it) of this issue.
Panel 2, these 6 little portraits of iconic special fx characters were done on separate pieces of paper and shrunk down here.
The previous page was the first mention of The Beards and this is the first mention of both Mitch Gillis and Grady Miller. I wanted to lay the groundwork for a larger world in this first issue as organically as possible while also not bogging down the story at hand. Writing in first person POV is good for that sort of thing because asides feel more natural in that storytelling mode.
Page 11
A few people have told me that they enjoy the “wish fulfillment” aspect of this story; and while part of that is true, when I tell them that Rob Bottin and Rick Baker both become apprentices in movie special fx by sending in fanart and fan mail or showing an established artist photos of their homemade make-up effects people are a little shocked. As I was too when I first read about it. So yeah, it’s wish fulfillment for me, but it also was just how it worked for a small window of time for some talented, tenacious and lucky guys back in the 70s.
Page 12
One of the challenges and fun of making this comic was making conversations visually interesting; usually the answering was staging and layouts. I like this one; I also enjoy this lowbrow gag with Laney because it really reveals how her and Bobby work off each other.
Page 13
I tried to give this page an underwater feel when they bring in the sunken mechanical shark. Getting to show the Forebodie in the mouth of the shark was one of the moments where I realized the book was going to work. At least for me as an artist; it would be weird enough, and emotional enough that moments like this could have weight and deepen the story in a way that wouldn’t be the same if this was told as a novel. These panels felt like I was on the right track.
Page 14
Panel 1, 'ole! I like how round and awful the teeth look here, I looked at a bunch of set photos of Bruce after his many sinking episodes while filming Jaws. I also think there was a bit of the Mouse of Minsk (from An American Tail) in the look here. But hey, Shark Beard was involved with that too, right?
Page 16
Panel 1, in reality Bottin at age 14 sent Rick Baker a fan letter and included a sketch of Lon Chaney Sr. from the film Mockery, not Phantom of the Opera. But the Phantom works is more identifiable and works better storywise (bit of a hint for a later issue not yet published)
I really enjoyed seeing the Basil Gogos rainbow oil slick colors surrounding the bare pencils on these pages.
Page 18
The Plymouth Fingerblaster from Hot Wheels should be available by the time you read this. Just cut out your coupon and send money for shipping to the address included in Serious Creatures issue #0.
Page 21
“What? Don’t I look surprised?” I wasn’t sure if the visual gag of having Bobby missing his eyebrows and saying this would land since my art style tends to make eyes and their brows a little abstract (see, Zorroesque “Z” slashes) but I think it works?
The gag is a bit of a rip-off of the Modest Mouse lyric from, “Lampshades on Fire” “Shaved off my eyebrows when I fall to the ground, so I can’t look surprised right now.”
Page 22
Here’s a good example of how I weaved in biographical elements of my life into this comic. I never collected Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, by the time I came on the scene the monster magazine of choice was Fangoria but I was and still am a huge comic book reader. My sister Allison moved from Arizona to Ohio to live with our Aunt Susie when she was 15 or 16 making me around age 11 or 12. In a gesture I’m still touched by (even though it is my own and that’s really narcissistic) before she left I gave her my prized possession; the comic book Spawn, issue # 1, bagged and boarded; near mint. I told her that I wanted her to hold on to it for me, that I wasn’t giving it to her, but that it was proof that we would see each other again. I was a very dramatic 12-year-old, ask anyone.
What I didn’t tell my sister or include in Serious Creatures was that a few weeks later I pulled together some more scratch and scored another copy of Spawn #1 just in case this whole sibling thing went tits up and my sister lost my first copy of McFarlane’s masterpiece.
Page 23
Every once in a while I like to pull back from the colors and go minimal or no color at all. I think it really works to great effect here. Also, it’s slightly easier than coloring everything.
Note, there’s a figure walking past Bobby and Laney just behind Bobby’s back, that was supposed to be a nun with a suitcase smoking. Which is something I find funny. But the way I drew her with the hunchback makes her look at best like a Bene Gesserit or maybe even Detta the Science Witch from my comic Lumen?
Page 24 and the Fin back cover
This is the beginning of me realizing the amount of possibilities the great white shark possessed as a symbol and visual motif. I think every kid at some point realizes that airplanes look a lot like sharks (hence those awesome nose art shark paint jobs on WW2 planes) but doing this page at the end of issue one is supposed to tip off the reader that shit is going to get even weirder. And that the shark and the forebodies are here to stay.
The Fin poster was a challenge in that Jaws has probably the most recognizable and iconic movie poster of all time - and I already ripped it off for page one! So, what do you do? Realizing on the title page inside the book that the word “fin” could smuggle in a fin shape underneath the letter “n” gave me something to hinge the poster on. But I think the tagline (which is good, come on, it’s fucking good) is what really made me want to make the poster. I wasn’t planning originally to do every back cover as a movie poster but after making this and see how it enhanced the world inside the comic I knew I was going to waste a lot of time thinking of brilliant taglines for utter bullshit make believe. Story of my life.
Also, the small text is nothing to gloss over, I was inspired by all the legal boilerplate on the inside covers of Sam Keith’s Maxx where he’d always stuff in a bunch of jokes and weird ramblings.
Here’s a really fun interview with me on the new site the Comic Lounge. It was a good time and I think that’s evident in my answers.
Check out the rest of the site too, lots of interviews with comic creators I admire and enjoy.
Read it here.
I got to write about my favorite monthly comic in the pages of the sacred text that is the Wizerd Zine, put out by the good folks at Cosmic Lion Productions. And since the zine is already sold out I thought I’d share my contribution here.
The artwork is like a cave painting only scrawled on a smashed spaceship with the fluorescent blood of whatever now dead angel was stupid enough to crawl from the crash to ask a local for directions.
Yes, I’m finally writing about Copra. Michel Fiffe’s masterclass in beautiful brutalism now being published in monthly lesson plans courtesy of Image Comics. The long running indie comic has returned with a new issue number 1, a new publisher and even a new sense of commitment from its creator. So what better time than now to introduce you to your new favorite comic book, that is if you’re one of the unacquainted.
Which is what one would suppose creator Fiffe is banking on by going to Image and restarting his comic (previously up to issue 31) back at number 1. Despite this I’m happy to report that the issue works fine as both an introduction to the overall story while also reading just like the next issue of Copra.
Yes, I have already freebased the Kool-Aid and been a fan of this cult comic for years so maybe it’s impossible for me to remain truly objective but honestly, this issue reminds me a lot of the actual (previous) first issue of Copra. There too we were dropped in the middle of a story already in progress but done so with the care and precision of a deliberate storyteller. Now with this new number 1 leftover cliffhangers from issues previous are finally landed (or plummeted) old plot threads further cat cradled and, in general, Fiffe nails the high wire seesaw act of keeping things accessible but also not slowing down his returning diehard loyalists who already know everybody at this party.
So, who is at this party?
The short answer bandied around a bunch in what’s already been written about Copra is that it exists as an extended example of Ostrander’s Suicide Squad fanfiction. But such a reductive summation does a huge disservice to both works. At least I imagine it does, comic reader confession time: I have never read any of Ostrander’s Suicide Squad and I still love the hell out of Copra.
Why?
Because a tribute band this is not. For sure, many of the characters and the general setup of superpowered and/or costumed mercs sent out on black ops missions - to often fatal results - does owe an obvious debt to the Suicide Squad comic as I understand it, but, like all the best works involving analogues and composite characters, Copra’s cast and story have stretched beyond the source material and metastasized into its own gloriously battle damaged strikingly unique shape.
Which means even if you have a Copra character like Boomer who is a clear analogue for Captain Boomerang, that’s only the starting point. It’s like when Led Zeppelin mutated a Willie Dixon’s blues song into their “Whole Lotta Love.” Yeah, the bones are the same but even they get broken and reset eventually and pretty soon you’ll have to squint to catch the resemblance.
Also, unlike Led Zep, Fiffe is on the up and up with giving credit to his inspirations. In fact the previous 31 issues of Copra have at times seemed like a tour through whatever current comics muse was treading over the creator’s brain. Meaning that you have your old school Doom Patrol issues of Copra, you have your Ditko Dr. Strange blacklight poster Copra. You have your JRJR/ Ann Nocenti Punisher and Daredevil tone poem issues. Halfway through the run you’re struck by the obvious now but somehow quite obfuscated up front idea that the Ochizon (the big, overarching, otherworldly menace storyline running through all these comics) is a lot like Kirby’s Fourth World stuff. And that team member Guthie, despite having green hair and a druthers for machine guns might just be Fiffe’s take on Big Barda.
The reason any of this works and still feels so damn authentic, original and personal is because Copra is told by a one of a kind storyteller in a one of kind way. I’m not just talking about the singular artwork here. The Tony Scott /Michael Mann sunset porn mixed with geometric honeycomb acid tab page layouts or the frantic, ugly smudges that festoon action scenes. I’m talking about the words in the balloons too. I’m talking about the heartbreak and the humor that is traded between the members of Coprawhile on a mission or that follows them back home while they’re practicing their own personal brands of self-destruction and moral sabotage during a little down time. These characters all feel like real people, hell, Gracie, the badass Copra member who is based on Grace Jones feels more like a flesh and blood real person to me than Grace Jones ever does! No disrespect to Grace Jones there either, it’s just that Ms. Jones is like a comic book character freed from the pages and set loose through our mundane world whereas Gracie of Copra is just a complicated wiseass with a killer bodysuit, substance abuse problems who’d way too easily bored.
Fiffe has found a way to conjure up that old monthly comic book magic of having very real, grounded characters exist in a heightened superhero environment yet never getting so navel gazing that the comic becomes some cold, Watchmen wannabe deconstruction or a mere nostalgia comfort food slog. This comic takes what was good from the old and sharpens its fangs to breathe new life into the past’s long buried bones. It’s like if that murderous Cro-Magnon Rembrandt from the painfully extended simile at the top of this article has now learned how to fix up and fly that smashed spaceship and taking the ramshackle vessel places neither him nor it have ever been.
A werewolf in a closet caught me masturbating once.
Spoiler, that’s probably going to be the opening line to issue 5 of Serious Creatures. But it’s also true and probably the reason I’m making this comic to begin with.
I was fifteen years old or so when the werewolf incident happened. It was Halloween night and I had gone out and raised minimal hell with my friends: scored some candy begrudgingly from adults who thought we were too old to still be trick or treating and drank some stolen booze (proving their point) so now I was winding down for the evening. Which -since I was fifteen – meant masturbating viciously. I shared a room with my little brother but luckily we had bunk beds and he was dead asleep or at the very least gracious enough to pretend to be so in order for his older brother in the bottom bunk to commit what I’m sure were weird sounding atrocities to himself in the silent darkness of our room.
I was just getting started (what would have been a marathon two minute session of self-discovery I’m sure) when I thought I heard a rustling sound coming from the closet directly across from the bed. I don’t think I stopped what I was doing under (thankfully under) the covers at first but then I heard the sound again and I stopped completely.
Was there someone in my closet?
I remember trying to rationalize with myself that it was Halloween and even though I was fifteen and too old to be such a wuss maybe I had gotten a little spooked over the course of the night and now I was hearing things. But I was fifteen now, way too old for this spooky nonsense. So I went back to whacking off.
And that’s when my closet doors flew open and a werewolf exploded out in a snarl. My brother above me startled awake and I think I might have yelped and then quickly moved my leg up to shield my fear resilient boner. The werewolf loomed over my bed for a moment, the streetlight from my window swallowing most of his shape in shadow, and then he dropped his claws to his side and said, “Stop pulling your pud, buddy.” And he laughed with the voice of my mom’s boyfriend.
I had never seen this werewolf mask of his, I think he bought it just to do this. I have no idea how long he was waiting in my closet. When he left, my brother, who was just coming to, asked me what the hell that was all about and I had no answers for him. I went to bed praying that my mom’s boyfriend at the very least wouldn’t tell my mom. When I woke up I waited until I heard his truck leave for work before I risked leaving my room to get a bowl of cereal but when my mom whipped around the corner and saw me she just burst into laughter at the sight of me.
The werewolf kept no secrets.
Year later or so I caught him beating off to porn on our couch at night when I woke up to use the bathroom. We just laughed. But I totally told my mom on him too.
What does that have to do with my comic about a teenage special fx artist making movies in the 70s and 80s? Before Serious Creatures was a comic it was a very long short story (I forget the word count but it was around 60 pages on typing paper) entitled The Malfunctioning Werewolf and the inciting incident in that story involved our teenage hero getting caught beating it on set by a dickhead actor wearing one of the werewolf masks that our hero had designed. The story has changed a lot since then but even in that early state I was combining my real life with movie lore and complete fiction to make something which shifts between all three constantly.
The short story involves Bobby (I don’t even remember if he was still named Bobby in that old story) working on the set of a werewolf filmed entitled The Snarling (now shortened to Snarl in the comic) and him trying to juggle working in an adult world as a talented but naïve kid as well as navigating talking to girls for the first time. There was a tough guy Australian stuntman who Bobby was applying werewolf makeup to that takes Bobby under his wing and teaches him how to talk to chicks and be a badass and of course none of it works and Bobby grows up a little and learns to be his own man.
I wrote the story a long time ago, more than ten years ago, after one of the first drafts of my debut novel Nefarious Twit. So I was probably 27 or 28 years old when I wrote it. I always liked it, knew it needed some polishing but I liked it nonetheless. But I didn’t really think of expanding it into a full length story (let alone comic) until a few years ago.
See, I often think about the types of stories I like and what I would like to do within that type. Like, what would my people boarded up somewhere and monsters are trying to get them story be? My novel An Augmented Fourth was the answer. What would my epic fantasy sci-fi sprawling saga be? My upcoming Bleeding Tree Trilogy will be my response. But one story type I always wanted to do was a story about someone with a very singular, almost innate talent and how that helps and hinders them personally. Weird examples being Tommy by The Who and Boogie Nights by P.T. Anderson.
I also am a sucker for a good rise and fall of something type of story. Especially if it reflects a lost period in history. Eventually I remembered my special fx kid story, which was already loosely inspired by the career of Rob Bottin and I started seeing the potential for it. I also at this point had written five novels, had two published and also made a comic book series and carved a very small but loyal audience…but also had no real success finically or critically. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not losing money and the reviews I get tend to be positive but at the same time I am nowhere close to being able to quit my day job and create stories full time. So in that very real sense I’m a failure. Not that I’m going to quit, I’m obsessed. I love it.
Which got me thinking about what it might have been like if I had some success, some huge success, especially when I was younger. Would I still be as obsessed? Or more so? And what if it didn’t make much of a difference? What if I would still be a failure only in a different way?
I started looking at the life of someone like Rob Bottin, hitting the big time at age 14! What could that be like? Your dream becoming real so early. But then you’re twenty one, you’ve finished what will become your most celebrated work (The Thing) and everyone hates it. Worse they ignore it. So what do you do?
You keep working.
Maybe people catch up with your work later, recognize it as genius.
But maybe that’s just as the entire art you practice becomes obsolete.
Maybe that just cements your legend.
Maybe that’s why you quit and no one can find you.
Or maybe you just grew up finally.
Or does growing up mean you still do what you love, even if no one else ever sees it?
Maybe.
I don’t know yet. I’ll tell you when I finish my book.
I hope I have an answer, hope the werewolf was wrong and I’m not still just pulling my pud.
Today we sit down with the creative team behind the runaway hit comic book Serious Creatures and discuss the origins of the book, the genesis of the concept as well as the Sega of their collaboration and find out how this team of rakish rogues is able to quell their divergent and discordant personalities enough to make a 24 page full color comic book every month.
So, let’s get to know the creative team:
Writer, Tony McMillen: ‘Sup, sluts.
Artist, Tony McMillen: Heeeyyyyy.
Colorist, Tony McMillen: What’s going?
Letterer, Tony McMillen : My job is last and I’m least good at it.
How would you describe Serious Creatures to the small contingent of unwashed virgins who have yet to read it?
Tony McMillen, Writer:
It’s a comic about the especially impractical people behind practical effects.
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Oh god, that sounds so canned and phony.
Tony McMillen, Writer:
What? You need an elevator pitch!
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Your shit’s more like an escalator pitch.
Tony McMillen, Colorist:
What does that even mean?
Tony McMillen, Artist:
It means it’s slower than turtle gravy.
Tony McMillen, Colorist:
What the hell? That’s not a saying.
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Well, I just said it.
Tony McMillen, Writer:
It’s a saying now, that’s going in the book.
Tony McMillen, Letterer:
One word or two? Turtlegravy looks kinda cool but does it read?
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Do you? Two more typos last issue.
…So, the book is about special effects?
Tony McMillen, Writer:
It’s about Bobby Feckle, a teenage special FX artist growing up alongside the movie industry he’s helping to create in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Tony McMillen, Artist:
“Three decades of life in the special FX industry.” We get it, you saw Goodfellas.
Is he like this all the time?
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Like what?! Don’t make me run up on you, fool!
Tony McMillen, Colorist:
Fool? Run up on you?! You don’t talk like that. You’re from Akron Ohio.
Tony McMillen, Writer:
He just rewatched Friday again…it’s reactivated something long dormant deep inside of him.
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Yay, Yay! …That’s an Ice Cube thing. I was doing Cube.
I see…the comic is about a teenager who works on movies making special effects back when that work was done more with rubber masks and animatronics and the like…basically before the advent of CGI. Your comic likewise is handmade without computers, correct?
Tony McMillen, Colorist:
Where are you getting that from? No, I color every page of this thing using a computer. I try to make it look like it was done with watercolors and crayons but it’s done on an iPad Pro with an apple pencil and before that a mouse.
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Yeah, computers are cool. Make shit way easier. What’s your beef with computers?
Tony McMillen, Letterer:
I letter the book using a font created from a handwritten font of my own but it’s still using a computer.
Tony McMillen, Artist:
….seriously….who hurt you? Did you have a computer for a stepdad? Did he rough you up? Was he mean to your moms?
Tony McMillen, Writer:
Worse. Was he good to you. Did he love you but then one day…bamf! He left. Just like your real dad.
….I don’t see what that has to do with…..sob….how did you know?
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Called it! Stepdad was a Commodore 64.
Tony McMillen, Writer:
Dude, that’s a video game console, not a computer?
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Oh word?
I…let’s take a break, I have to process this…
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Hey….you don’t have to do that alone. Come on, let’s get our cry on.
(We all go into a huddle and start weeping profusely. Tony McMillen, Artist, despite his bad boy façade is the most tender of all of us. I feel cared for when he holds me. I feel seen. After the interview wraps I will give him my number. I don’t know if he’ll call. I don’t know if I want him to. I just know that I am compromised. I have left all objectivity behind. And I don’t care. I want to be seen. I want to be seen by him.)
Later…
Tony McMillen, Writer:
I will say the spectre of CGI does hang over the characters and their world throughout the story. It’ll come into play much more for the second half of the comic, issues 7-12. Because that’ll take place in the 80s and 90s. This first half is mostly concerned with the 70s. The big overarching plot piece is the character of Wolf Beard wanting to make the greatest werewolf transformation in film history. Wolf Beard is the nickname for the director who in the world of Serious Creatures will go on to direct the film A Connecticut Werewolf in King Arthur’s Court. He tasks Jack Barber, our main character Bobby’s mentor, with the seemingly impossible task of creating this heretofore unrealized special effect. Turning a man into a monster on film in full light with no time lapse and minimal cutaways.
Tony McMillen, Colorist:
And if you know your movie history you know that this bit doesn’t sound too far off from the behind the scenes trajectory of the movie An American Werewolf in London.
Tony McMillen, Artist:
Or the parallel production of The Howling.
(Did he look at me? Has he always been looking at me?)
Tony McMillen, Writer:
Right. The characters of Bobby Feckle and Jack Barber are loosely based on the real life careers of Rob Bottin and Rick Baker. Loosely because I only really took their career arcs as raw material and left all the personal stuff off the table. I don’t know either of those guys and that’s not my concern. I can make up that stuff. What I was interested in was Rob Bottin being a 14 year old kid becoming an apprentice for Rick Baker (then only in his early 20s) and them working on a slew of important and iconic movies together and then separately. I was really compelled by the fact that they both made important werewolf movies in the same year using some of the same techniques. Even if the reality isn’t that salacious or dramatic a helluva yarn could be conducted around that event.
(Now Tony McMillen, Artist is looking at Tony McMillen, Writer like he sued to look at me! DESPAIR!)
How does an issue of Serious Creatures get made, start to finish?
TO BE CONCLUDED
Yes, issue 3 is coming out in about a week so what’s with all this issue 6 talk? Well, I got excited after drawing this and just wanted to show it off.
So far I’ve unveiled the covers for every issue except issue 5, so maybe I’ll leave that one a mystery until publication?
I dunno.
Issue 6 should be out by early March and will mark the end of the first arc of the overall Serious Creatures story, so we might as well go out with a sockdolager of a cover, right?
The question is, when the series starts up again with 2nd and final arc do I just continue the numbering (issue 7) or do we have a new number 1?
I’m leaning towards continuing the number since this is all really one piece.
Anyways, if you haven’t already subscribe to Serious Creatures here.
Hey Gang (you’re in a a gang now) issue 3 (The Star Wars issue) is upon us and it’s poised to make Baby Yoda look like House Party 1. Buy the issue or subscribe to the whole series here.
And here are a few pages to get your blaster…blastin?
Oh god.
October 19 and 20th I’ll be shaking babies and kissing hands over at my table B80 at MICE this year. Come by, get a sketch, buy a comic, look through every page of a comic and say, looks great then walk away forever. You know, whatever you’re into.
It’s the month of masks so of course we have a new issue of Serious Creatures to ring it in with. Issue 2 follows Bobby Feckle as he plots to somehow leave his home state of Arizona to live in California so he can begin his apprenticeship with Jack Barber, special FX artist and Shaggy lookalike.
We got Monsters, mayhem, moms, moving and more.
Available in floppy or digital form over at my Etsy shop.
Issue 1 of my comic book series is out and some folks have been jawing over it.
Here’s some highlights:
Just did a wonderful, polished and professional podcast interview over at Ghoulish:
Indie Comics with Tony McMillen!LitReactor review:
Indie Comics Review: 'Serious Creatures' by Tony McMillenSequart has an Interview with me:
Tony McMillen on Serious CreaturesHorror Fuel Review:
Comic Book Review: Serious Creatures Issue 1Bizarro Central has an interview with me:
How I Weird: Tony McMillen
Yes, I am part of a pizza themed horror anthology. Yes, there are puns.
The toppings: Terror and torment.
The crust: Stuffed with dread and despair.
And the sauce: Well, the sauce is always red.
Whether you’re in the mood for a Chicago-style deep dish of darkness, or prefer a New York wide slice of thin-crusted carnage, or if you just have a hankering for the cheap, cheesy charms of cardboard-crusted, delivered-to-your-door devilry; we have just the slice for you.
Bring your most monstrous of appetites, because we’re serving suspense and horrors both chillingly cosmic and morbidly mundane from acclaimed horror authors such as Brian Evenson, Jessica McHugh, and Cody Goodfellow, as well as up-and-coming literary threats like Craig Wallwork, Sheri White, and Tony McMillen.
Tales from the Crust, stories you can devour in thirty minutes or less or the next one’s free. Whatever that means.
Tales from the Crust will be delivered to your door on August 27th, and it's currently available for pre-order over on Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing's website. It's available not only in paperback and digital formats, but they're also offering a Special Delivery Edition consisting of the anthology printed as a 8 1/2 inch square hardbound book, plus a variety of bonuses including a pizza cutter, coaster, stickers, keychain, and a pen shipped in an authentic pizza box. Now that’s a spicy anthology! The Special Delivery Edition box set is limited to 100 copies, so order yours before supplies run out!
Pre-order "Tales From the Crust" Now!George Cotronis created the paperback front cover, and Lori Michelle conjured up the hardback artwork.
This is an immense, in depth interview I did with Sam Goss for his his site Sam Wrote It. Sam did his due diligence and researched me and my project Lumen and it really shows in the interview. We discuss Lumen and its origins primarily but we get into my artstyle and a few other juicy topics. After you read my interview hang around his website and check out some of the interviews and write ups he’s done on his site, you won’t be disappointed. Read the interview here.
Purchase at Etsy.
Meet Bobby Feckle, a teenage special effects wizard growing up alongside the movie industry of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Witness the glorious rise and even more fantastic fall of the practical effects industry through the eyes of the 14-year-old wunderkind who helped shaped both.
Serious Creatures is a love letter to monster movies, blockbusters, special effects and coming of age stories. It has the decades long scope of works like Goodfellas and Boogie Nights but also the in-over-his-head working kid charm of Almost Famous or...Doogie Howser, I guess?
Issues 1-6 comprise the first of two volumes which will tell the complete saga of Bobby Feckle, his mentor Jack Barber, their rival Grady Miller, Bobby's big sister Laney, Nancy the scream-queen, Simulation Jim or the Jimulator, the stuntman who practices ballet and all the masks and monsters each of them make for themselves and each other.
Each issue is full color, drawn and written by me, at least 24 pages long and will make you happy to be alive for such a time in comics!
The subscription also saves you some cash: Each issue usually costs $ 5 bucks plus $3 bucks for shipping which will give you a grand sum of $ 48 bucks if you buy each issue one by one. So, for having faith in me that this book's gonna rock and buying all the books at once upfront, it will only cost you $44 bucks AND I will mail each issue with a small ink drawing (like the ones I've done with Lumen in the past.
The issues will come out monthly (ish) issue one will be released in September.
I wrote an article for LitReactor detailing the differences between writing books and writing comics books.
I am obviously an expert on both so prepare for wisdom barnacles to fall off of me at an ever accelerating rate.
Read that jazz over at LitReactor!
“The story has many of the best elements of a fairy tale – a magical destiny, a witch, a quest, even an animal companion and a pretty girl – while still managing to feel entirely new and unique.”
Read more the review at their site here.
Issue 4 is the conclusion to the "Fallen Stars" storyline which finds young Esteban battling for survival in the bowels of the "fungeon."
Each issue will be signed by me, get them while they last.
This issue will be released and shipped in early January.
Buy this issue and any of the rest here at my Etsy shop.
BIP!
I’m about to publish the third issue of my comic book series! Feels good, gang, feels good. In issue 3 we go “into the fungeon” as part 3 of the “Fallen Stars” storyline continues. A lot of stuff goes down in this issue, some new characters, some more explanations of previous characters and a lot more questions brim to the surface here.
I think I’m proudest of this issue so far, mostly because I stretched my muscles a little further with this one.
Which is a big part of why doing Lumen has been so rewarding for me, I’m a lifelong comic book reader and have been an artist for most of the time as well but I never really committed to trying sequential art all by myself before. Well, I’m real happy I did.
Because these are different muscles than the ones used for writing stories with prose, or for penning lyrics or making guitar riffs or creating a melody or anything else I’ve dabbled (mastered the fuck out of) in. On top of that I’m right in the sweet spot of still being overall excited about making the work and not yet dragged down by self-inflicted criticism or self-doubt. Not that those are bad things per se, just as long as they make you work harder to make better work and don’t cause you to quit altogether.
Which I don’t see myself doing with any of the stuff I like to do. I’ve already written a trilogy of novels which I hope to have ready for release next year, I have maybe 7-9 songs almost ready to work up with a band and then record, and I have lots more ideas for Lumen and other comics.
The way I think this will shake out is after issue 4 comes out at the end of December, I’ll take a 3-month break, work on some novel stuff (maybe a whole new book) and then in 4 month’s time you’ll see issue 5 of Lumen. I’ll put up a subscription offer for the next 4 issues and then we’ll continue the process and see how it goes.
Oh, and I might do a trade collecting the first 4 issues too in the meantime.
Thanks again for sketching along my underbelly.
No, you’re the onewho made this weird.
Order issue 3 here.
Issue 2 in a 4 issue series.
Lumen is the story of a world of endless night and a hero with a lantern.
Also an apple owl.
Full color action, adventure, fantasy and sci-fi. Each issue is written, drawn, colored and lettered by me, Tony McMillen.
Issue 2 is a 26 page barn burner featuring our hero Esteban and his trusty apple owl...um, Apple-Owl, facing off against "Fun Guys" galore in an attempt to make things right with Marisol.
Each issue will be signed by me, get them while they last.
This issue will be released and shipped in October.
Order on Etsy here.
Or get a digital copy for only 3 bucks here.
Here’s a little preview of issue 2:
Listen Here.
An excellent review of the first issue of Lumen is up at the podcast Microphones of Madness. These gents were swell enough to also review my last novel An Augmented Fourth and there's some residual rancor from my trouncing of Ronnie James Dio in that book which finds its way into their review of this new comic; which is adorable.
But beyond that bitter feud this is a fun, insightful and thoughtful review of the new comic. The fellas really seem to get the project and what I'm going for and what works and what maybe needs a little work too.
Check it out.
Lumen, issue 1 is available for preorder!
36 pages, full color, action adventure comics from yours truly for 5 bucks.
Each copy will be signed and gently caressed by me.
The issue will be released and shipped out by me in September. If you're going to get one please order a copy at either my shop here on my website or the shop on my etsy which you'll find in the comments below.
Ordering now gives me a better idea on how many copies to get printed, so get on it.
Thanks.
https://www.tonymcmillen.com/shop/lumen-issue-1
or
https://www.etsy.com/…/lumen-issue-1-signed-limited-edition…
You can check out a 6 page preview of issue 1 in the comics section on this site.
If it wasn’t rated R then we weren’t fucking watching it. If the VHS cover art didn’t promise at least two scenes with someone running away then finally pulled off the ground in a desperate and heroic leap by the force from a massive fiery explosion then we were skipping it. If the trailer didn’t have four swift kills each accompanied with a respective dead-pan one liner from the death dealing good guy you were wasting our time. If it didn’t star a musclebound, dead eyed, living action figure who despite possessing some indefinable tincture of charm had no business acting in a dinner theatre troupe let alone a major motion picture…then what was the point?
Me and my little brother wouldn’t just watch anything - I was 12 years old and he was 8 - we only could be bothered with the best. We wanted Arnold and preferably Arnold with a flat top (those films are just better), but would settle for a floppy haired Arnold murder-fest or even a majestically mulleted Stallone as long as he killed a bunch of guys and wore a bandana to distract from the haircut.
It was the early 90s and me and my brother had been raised by a series of disgruntled cops who now took the law into their own hands; by a succession of Vietnam vets who had returned from the war shattered, seeking only to restart a quiet civilian life but had to contend with a new war at home as well as the other war that had never truly left them;by a menagerie of muscular madmen who were the best of the best, lethal living weapons, who could only be pushed so far until they pushed back and got payback, avenged their dead partners, won back the hearts of their ex-wives, convinced a hostage they freed from a psycho or terrorist to have sex with them or even saved their kids. Our mom had a couple husbands and a few long-term boyfriends throughout these years but none of them were as consistent as this cavalcade of carnage bringers.
“Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. It would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there. And it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.”
-Sarah Conner, Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Me and my brother grew up in the 80s and early 90s addicted to action. Aiding and enabling our addiction was our mother who was cool enough to let us watch R-rated movies as long as there was no titties. But man, were there titties.
Here are the first 6 pages of my upcoming comic book Lumen, issue 1. They serve as a prologue for the whole saga. If you've read the 12 page comic I put up a few weeks ago these are the 6 pages preceding that which gives us a total of 18 pages towards an extra big 36 page first issue.
The plan is to make 4 issues, print them and put them out monthly, selling some in local comic shops but most online through either my squarespace shop or my etsy.
They will be a super limited small print run, each signed and numbered by famous author and artist Tony McMillen.
Get excited.
A Pop culture break (with pop culture references) real life, bicycles, everybody had a shitty childhood but mine is shittier than yours, also why I quit Blockbuster Video and why I later came crawling back.
Want some candy? I watch the new predator trailer and debate whether or not I should write Alien fan-fic and save the franchise or just turn it into my own wholly original story and let the multi-million dollar dynasty wither and die.
Part 2 we're I discuss the good and bad early Image titles as well as discuss how I could make a Pitt reboot awesome and a possibly terrible /great idea for a new Gen 13 title. We're talking Spawn, we're talking The Maxx, we're talking Shadowhawk....'friggin' Shadowhawk!?
The merits of early Image comics and 90s comics in general. Why damaged or maybe "unsheltered" kids need entertainment made just for them, Robocop and Spawn as father figures. Touch the Wonder is back, Bloodstrike is back....RUB THE WONDER!
Very pleased to share that I’ll have a table over at the second annual South Shore Comic Con from 10am to 3pm on December 2nd. I’ll be selling books (including a new limited run sketchbook of mine called Bounce House) drawing pictures and even taking part in a panel with creators Raúl Gonzalez III, Donna Martinez and Ludgy Jean-Baptiste called We Did It Our Way at 11:30am.
Shit, it’s gonna be exciting.
This thing is free to the public so you have no excuse (seriously, I will accept none) but to come down here and see some imagination artifacts on display.
Here’s the address:
SOUTH SHORE ART CENTER
119 Ripley Road
Cohasset, MA 02025
Tel: 781 383 2787 Fax: 781 383 2964
Web: www.ssac.org
Email: info@ssac.org
Here’s some background info:
“South Shore Art Center presents its second South Shore Comic Con! Featuring over 25 comic artists, signing and selling their zines, original art, and talking about the craft of comic book storytelling. Panels and workshops will be in the art studios throughout the day. Costumes encouraged!
Artists include: E. J. Barnes, Beth Barnett, Dennis Burke, LB Cassell, Jimmy Curtis, Griffin Ess, Mike Doherty, Krystal Dube, Jerel Dye, Barrington Edwards/Studio Vexer, Raul Gonzalez, Brian Hall, Ludgy Jean-Baptiste, Richard Keenan, Daniel Kern, Cathy Leamy, Jesse Lonergan, Kyri Lorenz, Cagen Luse, Donna Martinez, Tony McMillen, James Mobius, Dave Ortega, Joey Peters, Ryan Sullivan, Crispin Wood
Open to the public, suggested donation of $5.”
1. Red Heat
Best flat top of his career. And when we’re discussing Arnold’s hair, the flattop is the first thing that comes to mind. The man can rock many looks (as you’ll see) but the flattop is Arnold at his most iconic. Of course what’s strange about this being his top look is that Red Heat itself is far from his best film. It’s actually one of his forgettable flicks nestled in the middle of his best period. Sort of like the Running Man only nowhere as what-the-fuck interesting. His hair here really is the best thing about Red Heat. It’s red as hell and so tall it basically looks like a perpetual explosion on top of his head that never goes out. Which is exactly what Arnold Schwarzenegger is to a young child who is obessed with his hyper violent hilarious films. But seriously, that hair, so much height! It looks like he’s starring in an Austrian remake of House Party 2: The Pajama Jam. You know, Hausparty Zwei : Das Schlafanzug Schlafanzug.
- T2
This is basically how we will always picture Arnold in our hearts and minds and it’s Arnold’s second best flat top. The hair like the whole film really is an improvement over the first Terminator. Well, mostly. Instead of having to start with default Arnie flop hair that gets singed off (along with his eyebrows) into a severe I did it myself punker flat top Arnold begins this film with perfect hair. Jet black, sharp and a little tall on top. Perfect. Only Red Heat’s hair is perfecter.
- Predator
Third best flat top. Also a carrot top like in Red Heat but a more practical height this time around. There’s a bit of a chow-chow blow out fuzz to it at times -possibly due to the humidity of the jungle setting – but it works wonderfully especially as an accompinament to Arnold’s handsome as hell stubble chinstrap he’s got going in this film. Arnold’s jaw is one of a kind and can grant his face a noble simian type of air -which I mean as a compliment. The stubble on top of that plays down the severity of his massive jaw and also frames his face under his cheekbones which are quite striking and maybe his best feature. This look as one complete packqage along with the costuming makes for easily Arnold’s sexisest look. Which is not something a lot of folks probably associate with the big guy.
Okay, his sexisest look is probably buck naked in T2 but if we’re going clothed, carrot top merc smoking cigars and pulling ropes wearing gloves and no shirt with his other massive dude brethren in the jungle is easily the way to go.
4. Conan
Beautiful, natural long locks. Not a shitty wig like in part 2. Okay, maybe he's rocking extensions in part 1 now that I look at it. Doesn't matter. Only reason this isn't number 1 is in the same movie James Earl Jones' Rick James wig puts Arnold's natural locks to shame.
5. Commando**
Fourth best flat top of Arnold's career and yes, they’re all very different and distinct. The problem with this one is that it’s a little short for my tastes, kind of dweebs him up too much for me. But still, even if this isn’t the best execution of the style it’s a perfect fit for the shape of the man's head.
- Terminator, Kindergarten Cop, Twins, Total Recall and the rest
ormal Arnold hair is too damn floppy and not rigid enough dammit. He looks like he has a half cooked ramen block on his head half the time. In T1 (as previously mentioned) it especially pisses me off because he starts out with normcore flop head
and then it gets burnt down to a shitneck, near soccer mullet that makes him look like a roadie for Dire Straits.
I will admit though that he looks pretty ragman cool at the beginning of Kindergarten Cop with the stubble and sunglasses. The flop hair sort of works paired with those two things. Also, it looks like he’s playing some Bizarro version of Stallone’s Cobra (Yeah, his name is Cobra) in the vein of the whole role reverse switchero gag from The Last Action Hero.
Update:
This list is now null and void, I just caught sight of Arnold's look from Around the World in 80 Days, needless to say, we have a new winner.
I was interviewed over at Clash, the first question was:
"1) If your new book does well can you do a nu-metal sequel titled “The Seventh String of Satan is The Real Mother Fucking Deal Y’all”?
My response was:
"Are you saying you’re down with the litness? "
And it goes on like this for 9 more questions and answers.
You're welcome.
Read it here.
In this stunning conclusion to my podcast interview I reveal the secrets of my best failure (ooooh) why Augmented Fourth is different than Nefarious Twit (different spelling and word choices for the titles) and why we all need to read Wesley Snipes' new horror fiction debut. (Obviously)
Listen here
Let’s count our chickens before they hatch; hell, let’s count them before the hen is even remotely interested in that cute rooster with the confident strut marching with aplomb right up to her, looking her right in her twitchy weird dinosaur eye and saying, “Girl, you want some dipping sauce to go with that two piece nugget?” (And yeah, before you ask, this chicken is charmed by this. Charmed. She’s a fucking chicken; roosters usually don’t go to the trouble of even trying to drop game let alone noticing her nuggets.)
So let’s cast a movie version of my new novel An Augmented Fourth now while absolutely no one is trying to make it a reality. Least not yet.
Thinking about adaptations of my novels is something I do as a fun mental exercise with my wife (life partner in crime) from time to time. Now you get to have the fun of being my wife, you’re welcome, Internet. Well, not all the fun.
Right out the gate, before we cast this thing we gotta talk about directing. Because you can have awesome source material (check) an awesome script (let’s assume, check) and a great cast (you will soon see, check) but if the direction is shit you might as well have made a shot for shot remake of Battlefield Earth only everyone in it is now played by either CGI blue catperson from Avatar or a racist stereotype bot from Transformers.
Naw, I’d watch that actually.
An Augmented Fourth requires someone who can handle horror, comedy, surprising pathos, psychedelic, otherworldly visuals and above all; someone who makes films that feel like rock and roll. Ladies and gents, I submit one Edgar Wright.
Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, World’s End, Scott Pilgrim, his latest Baby Driver; all prove his wide knowledge of exciting cinema and how to use music - rock music in particular - to add the crucial tincture that makes a film come alive. But beyond that, look at his TV work like Spaced and his fake trailer contribution to the Grindhouse feature titled Don’t:
Bothshow that he knows how late 60s, early 70s and early 80s horror films should look and feel. He’s also proven he knows how to utilize voice over narration to help and not hinder a film. Much of the flavor of AAF (I am not gonna be bothered to type out the full title of my book anymore, peasants) comes from Codger telling the tale himself. So Edgar Wright seems like a given behind the camera but who will he be directing in his adaptation?
Main Cast:
Codger Burton
For our lead, the lord of low end himself, we need someone who can handle navel gazing preposterousness one minute as well as the endearingly permachill stoner Zen of a heavy metal lyricist bass player; being able to handle a Brummie accent would be a plus too. Cillian Murphy (Scarecrow from Batman and 28 Days Later dude) might fit the bill. And he has done the brummie accent before with his work on Peaky Blinders. Though I’ve read that some real life Brummies have taken umbrage at the accents attempted by Murphy and some of the rest of the cast. Which brings up the other contender, Murphy’s Peaky Blinders castmate Tom Hardy.
Either could work but I think Cillian might be a more surprising and unorthodox choice with his more delicate looks and this not being the first thing you think of when casting a role like this. On the other hand Tom Hardy seems a more obvious fit, having demonstrated similar characteristics of the loquacious but mumble mouthed in other roles; and having a knack for humor and weird physical ticks. But he’s also a bit over exposed it feels nowadays, right? Not that he’s done any bad work but it feels like he’s everywhere all the time (or maybe it’s just all the Tom Hardy lookalike knock offs that keep cropping up; the Creed and Seven Mary Threes to Tom Hardy’s Pearl Jam. The kid with the pouting lips in the last X-Men movie who played Cyclops, the Kroger brand Tom Hardy in Prometheus who played the dumb, dickhead scientist boyfriend; maybe they’re to blame and not Tom for saturating the cinema pool with Hardy light derivative drivel?
Ten Years Ago
Codger is an over the hill rock star burnout yes, but he’s only in his mid 30s (like this author…shit) so unfortunately frequent Edgar Wright collaborator Simon Pegg is just too damn old now to play Codger, but he would have been perfect just a decade earlier. Likewise to The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt, who actually resembles the Codger who resides in my mind the most of any of the actors mentioned here.
Rikki Spectre
The punk Goth high priestess worried about becoming a flash in the pan prima donna needs to have salt, sand, intelligence and a rough sense of humor. Quick with the putdowns and someone who despite their youth can carry their own next to the older Codger and Marcus. One option is Nathalie Emmanuel from Game of Thrones. She’s got the look no doubt and while she’s a fine actress I’ve only seen her in GOT and her role there is far too soft spoken and even tempered to fit Rikki Spectre’s brash, know-it-all type of bravado. But like I said, I haven’t seen much else she’s done, and she may very well possess and have already presented the qualities needed for Rikki in other roles.
The other choice for this role goes to Zendaya who I just watched in Spider-Man Homecoming and thought was tremendous with what little they gave her to do.
She totally has the sass and brains to be a know-it-all, could-give-a-shit punk rock queen. Her character in Spidey even had a penchant for Sylvia Plath and I figure Rikki would be a big fan of hers. Zendaya is also a musician and performer so she could be more than convincing on that front too. The one thing I’ll say against Zendaya is she is a little young for the role, but it’s really only by a few years and this film will not be made for at least a few (decades) so she has time to mature into the role.
Rikki is a composite character based on some real figures as well as just a creation of mine; but the real life figures she is based on the most are Siouxie Sioux and Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex.
Like Poly, Rikki is half white and half Somali so it would it be nice to have an actress of mixed ancestry at the very least if not have someone with some actual Somali heritage. But I admit I don’t know much about most actors' ethnic makeup and have a total hole in my knowledge for any actresses with a Somali background.
Marcus Wilkes
The two choices here really present two very different takes on the character. On one side we have Terry Crews; a hilarious comedic actor who has also shown a knack for stepping up to the plate for dramatic moments when scenes called for it. Crews besides being funny as all get out could additionally easily convey the physical factor needed for the rock and roll bodyguard character that is loosely based on real life Doors and Rolling Stones bodyguard and Vietnam vet now turned writer Tony Funches.
The other option I’m circling is Anthony Mackie, The Falcon dude from Marvel movies and the dude from The Hurt Locker and other stuff. Mackie is a more traditional serious actor than Crews but he also has great comedic timing and can deliver the sort of rapid-fire, dude giving orders and laying out what’s what type of thing that Marcus does in the book so often. Mackie’s tackled military vets dealing with the ghosts of the battlefield before in previous roles and knows how to play a smart guy who happens to be tough which is essential for this part.
The Kid (Jon Lopez)
The bellhop, metal head, mega fan, who seems to know everything about Frivolous Black but still wants to ask Codger about it just to hear the grizzled rock star speak; this is the toughest role for me to cast mostly because I am getting old as shit and don’t know who the good young actors are anymore. Jon is young, 16-18, he needs to have tons of nervous energy and also a bit of a dark side. Jon is an American with Puerto Rican heritage and needs to look good but dorkly affable with long hair and braces. The onlyactors that I can think of are Tony Revolori (I seriously just saw Spider-Man Homecoming, what can I say?) and the dude already played a bellhop in Grand Budapest Hotel. He was very much like Jon in that Hotel role; playing the sort of naïve and sweet straight man to an older, pushy crank who had his own schemes. Revolori displayed a bit of mean streak in Spidey as well and showed he knows how to land a joke at his own expense, which is key to Jon’s character.
But again, like with Rikki, the character is Puerto Rican and this actor is an American with Guatemalan heritage; so maybe it's more fair to all the American actors with Puerto Rican roots that the role goes to them? The different types of Latino, Latinx people aren't just interchangeable and it’s not like there are a plethora of good roles for any Latino, Latinx actors in Hollywood movies right now so it makes sense to me that if a role was written to be an American kid with Puerto Rican heritage we should cast a kid like that. But maybe I’m over thinking this? I’m a white dude straight dude so I’ve never had to worry about representation for myself on the big screen.
Actor Jake T. Austin is a young American Puerto Rican actor who looks like he could play the part but I haven’t seem him act in shit. I know he’s done a bunch of TV and family stuff and the clips I watched all suffered from that Nickelodeon, ABC/Disney Channel over acting shit. But that might not be on him, you get that dude away from the clutches of cloying family friendly junk and he might just shine.
The Smaller Roles:
Frankie Gideon
Tilda Swinton has been itching to play or just be Bowie for years, she’d nail this transformative role.
The Road Manager
This is barely a cameo, it could just be a voice on the phone. I think either Nick Frost or Simon Pegg would be fun here. Or, we give it to the man gifted with the voice of God’s cock, like some sort of below the waist Metatron, Matt Berry. “Father!” (Just imagine him saying “Codger!” like that)
The Witch
This role has no lines so it relies entirely on the look and someone who can move in a weird Marilyn Manson crip-walk sort of way, model Idina Moncreiffe has got the 70s LP girl look down, she’s beautiful and a little strange, if she can use her skills on the catwalk towards contorting her body in unsettling ways the witch scene might be a standout creep out moment in the film.
Frivolous Black
The rest of Codger’s cohorts in musical darkness appear in flashback form throughout the book so they’ll have to be cast too. For Sully Sullivan, I was thinking Ron fucking Weasly. Rupert Grint has somehow aged into having that Ozzy angelic drug monster look and vibe. I got no ideas for the rest of the band (Vinnie and Burt) , maybe they should all be strung out looking former Potter alumni too?
Minor spoilers for remaining small roles, cameos
It occurs to me it might be fun to have real life metal musicians or just rockstars in these roles. The one problem might be that a lot of these are other bands back in the day so they’ll be young (ish) musicians and obviously all new music sucks (I kid, I kid, but most metal I know now is made by dudes and non-dudes at least in their 30s) so who would you pick for any of these roles? These would be analogues to these bands and artists back in the halcyon days of 1980.
(NOT) Van Halen
If only I had written this book 15 years ago and it got turned into a movie then so we could cast Sam Rockwell circa Hitchhiker’s Guide as our Diamond Dave stand in.
(NOT) Dio
No one who was not on the set of a porno being shot in a dungeon in the 70s has ever looked like this guy. Not saying that’s good or bad, just sayin;.
(Not) The Eagles
White dude who looks good with an Afro plus 4 other 8 track playing smooth douche types? Impossible task or do we just cast Adam Levine and make everyone sad?
(Not) Randy Rhoades
I actually got one for this; for Sully Sullivan’s bostin’ new American guitar player we’ll do some wish fulfillment for a real life rock star (they have dreams too, you know) and cast Mastodon’s drummer/singer Brann Dailor as the ill-fated face melting six string master. Brann is an enormous Rhoades freak and I’m sure he’d jump at the chance.
(Actually John Lennon)
I didn’t bother with an analogue for this one because it’s fucking John Lennon. He only appears in mention by Codger in the opening of the book but I think it'd be fun to have Paul Rudd play him again, (he dida masterful version of him in the critical darling Walk Hard and I think it’d be neat to have him don the circular specs once again. Plus, it’d be a Yank playing the Beatle and funny as hell to hear Codger get riled up about how much he can’t stand Americans especially after they murdered his homeland hero knowing that he was mourning an American actor.
So that’s what I got? Did I bip it up? Got some better ideas than me? Let me know?
We gab Sabbath or maybe Black Gabbath or.. something better? Honestly, this interview was awesome, great conversation about my novel Augmented 4th, horror and heavy metal. And I lose half my fanbase (both of you) over whether I'm a Dio or Ozzy guy.
Listen here.
Pleased as punch to make this reading list.
And while you're there check out the site, great stuff there about comics and all other types of cool junk written by folks who know their biz.
Funny as hell and very in depth review of An Augmented Fourth done by the dudes at Microphones of Madness. They get down to the heart of the book in this one, the cold fried chicken, my unrelenting bashing of Dio and why that makes me an asshole and ultimately why this book is only The Thing meets Black Sabbath on the surface and why it goes much deeper than that and why that's a good thing.
Total pleasure for me to listen to this and I think you'll like it almost as much, Listen here.
New Review
"If you think you'd dig watching a psychedelia-infused version of 'The Thing' while blasting awesome tunes and having a great acid trip, then you need to pick this one up."
Author Gabino Iglesias does a great write up of my new novel over at LitReactor.
Check it out.
New Review
"Tony McMillen’s An Augmented Fourth (2017) is heavy metal rock and roll horror at its wailing-guitar best. Set in 1980, the point of transition from heavy metal to punk, An Augmented Fourth blends inter-dimensional eldritch horror, David-Cronenberg-movie grotesquerie, and psychedelia in a thrash-metal twenty-minute-guitar-solo of a story."
Check out this great review by Marion Deeds over at Fantasy Literature.
Today's the day. An Augmented Fourth, a novel of the Lord Of Low End is available now.
Thanks to my publisher Ross Lockhart at Word Horde, thanks to my beta readers and authors who read and blurbed the book and thanks to my wife Taylor who listens to me as I talk about my stories over and over.
Also thanks to you, my readers. In general people want me to succeed, I have no problem with this. Here's the best way to help me if you are so inclined:
Thanks, you can buy the book at Amazon.com here.
"The individual elements of character, setting and description are intertwined like a strand of DNA to give this tale life and readers a quality read. Unlike so many of the rock and roll heroes of yore, Tony McMillen’s second release delivers on the promise made with his debut. And it cements his place as an author with a reputation as a wonderful storyteller."
Read the rest of this outstanding review over at This Is Horror.
Published Author and Married Adult Human Person Tony McMillen
Book selfie contest go! Whoever can take the most metal book selfie wins. My new book An Augmented Fourth comes out Tuesday and to celebrate I'm looking for metal book selfies with your copy of my book to be posted leading up to August 4th (Aug 4th, marketing) where I will announce the winner. You will get two pieces of my original art of your choosing as well as an Augmented 4th Tee shirt. Now here's a pic of me setting the metal bar impossibly high.
Good luck, shred tightly.
Pretty neat, huh? Download the song for free here.
If you've had a chance to watch the snazzy new book trailer for the novel An Augmented Fourth you might have heard some choogling doomy tunes playing during it that you will have found yourself headbanging along to almost as if against your will. These are the unearthed tracks from the masters of metal, England's Frivolous Black, the first and mightiest metal band of them all. And whose bass player and lyricist Codger Burton finds himself as the main character thrown in the darkness and danger of the novel An Augmented Fourth.
These exhumed lost classics are now available as free downloads, so rejoice you black hearted children of the gloaming.
"Beyond This Sleepless Dream" was the first single off Friv's legendary third album Summoner of Sorrows released in 1973; widely regarded critically as the group's finest effort.
The other lost necro nugget is the song entitled "Frivolous Black " from the band Frivolous Black which was also the first number on their debut album of the name Frivolous Black. Fuck you Bad Company, they did it first.
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out June 27th.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is me, motherfucker. Yes, yes, I use swears. If you've had a chance to watch the snazzy new book trailer for the novel you might have heard some choogling doomy tunes playing during it that you will have found yourself to headbanging along to almost against your will. These are the unearthed tracks from the masters of metal, England's Frivolous Black, the first and mightiest metal band of them all. And whose bass player and lyricist Codger Burton finds himself as the main character in my novel An Augmented Fourth. I hate to be a tease but you're going to have to wait just a little longer to hear these fabulous Friv tunes in their entirety. But how long depends on you....
Next week I will make the first of these exhumed lost classics available as a free download, if you don't want to wait for your metal injection then share the video trailer on Facebook, Twitter or go door to door informing folks, film that and then post it on Facebook. Once this thing hits 50 shares Frivolous Black will be banging away on your earballs and for free. Would you really pay for something like that? Of course you would.
So next week I'll be debuting the main song used in the trailer which is called, "Beyond This Sleepless Dream" which was the first single off their legendary album Summoner of Sorrows from 1973; widely regarded critically as the group's finest effort. And as the book release is less than two weeks away I'll be releasing the other lost necro nugg, the song entitled "Frivolous Black " from the band Frivolous Black which was also the first number on their debut album of the name Frivolous Black. Fuck you Bad Company, they did it first.
Here's the link to share off the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXFvFwxdFSc&index=1&list=PL8msPuKmX09QPEPvRfQVE_MycZcC29OSq
Behold! Here is the heavy rocking trailer for my upcoming novel An Augmented Fourth Dig those snazzy tunes? That original music is from heavy metal legends Frivolous Black (the band from the book itself) and will be available soon for free download in their entirety. For now enjoy listening to tasty portions of "Beyond This Sleepless Dream" and the eponymous Frivolous Black song itself.
The Summer of Sorrows keeps on a-rolling.
I'm doing a book tour that will stretch from Somerville to the edge of Somerville. July 8th at Comicazi and Aug 4th at Porter Square Books more details on both soon as well as keep that the Aug 4th in mid, we got something special planned for that as well.
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is from the renowned fantasy artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones, whom Frazetta once called, "the greatest living painter."
Here's a very interesting documentary about the artist that I have yet to see but will be watching soon.
Get out your metal detectors!
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
Alistair Book, the anthropomorphic book that reviews other - obviously less interesting - books took the time to interview me about my novels, comics, artwork, music, etc...
Watch below and feel you heart grow three sizes .
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is the Czech Ghost Church! This is an eerie and weirdly beautiful art installation built into an abandoned old dilapidated church in the Czech Republic. Artist Jakub Hadrava created the paranormal parishioners and in doing so raised enough funds to have the roof fixed on the St George Church after four decades of abandonment after the ceiling fell in and caused locals to believe a bad omen had befallen the church.
Check out this video tour of the church:
Get out your metal detectors!
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new novel An Augmented Fourth is now available for preorder at Word Horde and to draw attention to that fact and also just use as an excuse to rock the fuck out I'm bringing you a smattering of solid heavy rock with some era and thematically appropriate curveballs that could coexist nicely in a soundtrack for my book.
An Augmented Fourth is about Codger Burton, bassist and lyricist for Frivolous Black, the heaviest heavy metal band to ever come out of the UK, who awakens to find his hotel snowed in, his band mates evacuated, and monsters roaming the hotel. It's a love letter to Sabbath and the underrated genius of Geezer Butler -all of that is obvious -but I'm also a huge fan of rock in general so there's other characters like Rikki Spectre who comes from an early punk, early goth/ new romantics background. There's the character Marcus who's loosely inspired by Tony Funches, the bodyguard for numerous high profile rockstars of the 60s and 70s, most famously Jim Morrison. There's even an appearance from Frankie Gideon, my glam rock Bowie/Peter Gabriel composite character who appeared in the comic book Oblivion Suite by Catalina Rufin and me. Catalina even gave Frankie his first name. This is an alternate universe Frankie I think, so he's a bit different but the point here is we're gonna have some glam up in our metal too.
Before we begin it should be noted that basically any song off of Black Sabbath's first 5 records could be used as a soundtrack to this book. Except for "After Forever" (too pushy about its Christianity, seriously) and "Fluff' (Fluff would be fine if it was a minute long, it just keeps on going, "FX" is just as bad but at least.....no, now "FX' is on the no fly list too.)
And if you want to just hear everything while you read here's the youtube playlist.
Since Sabbath is a given I'll just include one track up front and then a few more choice numbers at the end of the list.
Black Sabbath "Sabbra Cadabra"
Sabbath finally gets laid! And they're singing about it! And they're fucking peppy and it fucking works! Who'd have thunk it? This is off the criminally underrated Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album.
Deep Purple "Black Knight"
There are many toasty Purp jam but this one feels like a good song to play while Codger and co are raiding the kitchen for weapons or food.
Death "Where Do We Go From Here"
There's a lot of running from monsters in this book so we need some music for that. Here's a great cut from this proto punk outfit from Detroit that's not The Stooges.
Mort Garson "Deja Vu"
This book is indebted to John Carpenter's early films so it seems fitting we have a cool creepy synth song. Mort Garson has a shit-ton of albums and songs from the 70s that are all trippy and dark as hell. Here's the first one I heard.
Blue Oyster Cult "Then Came The Last Days of May"
BOC has a lot of different sides and their desert road at night side is one of my favorites. This is an airy introspective tune for the similar portions of this story.
XRay Spex -"Oh Bondage! Up Yours!"
One of my favorite characters to write in Augmented was Rikki Spectre, a punk rocker loosely based on Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene of XRay Spex. A fun part of this book is that it takes place in 1980 at the apex of the metal vs punk thing right before the two seemingly disparate groups would come to their senses and fuse to create thrash metal.
The Pretty Things "Old Man Going"
Let's get weird. Before metal was metal there was only heavy and this song is heavy as all get-out.
The Doors "The Changeling"
One of my favorite latter day Doors' cuts and it's called 'The Changeling"?! Too perfect for this book with a character (Marcus) who used to bodyguard for The Lizard King and now has to deal with some seriously augmented people.
Thin Lizzy "Whiskey in the Jar"
Despite the cosmic horror and requite spills and thrills there's also a lot of good times in Augmented as well an examination of the hangover at the end of the party when you've stayed way too long. Which is what I figure the year 1980 must have been like for 60s and 70s rockers, especially the first few days after John Lennon was killed. The opening lines of the book read:
December 12th, 1980, three days after some Yank shot
John Lennon dead on the street in New York City like
some unloved dog, and there I was, trapped, snowed
in at a hotel in Boston certain that someone was coming to kill
me next.
The Stooges "1970"
Speaking of the 70s here's the ultimate ode to the darkness and abandon of the time that would also suit the mayhem of the novel quite nicely. Plus, you got Iggy screaming "BLOW!" Sure, it's an instruction to a probably terrified saxophonist but it's also hard not to think it might be a request to whoever was holding the drugs to give Mr. Pop some more snow. Cocaine and the frenzy of it is another large factor of the novel.
Van Halen "Light Up The Sky"
The Halen is mentioned once in the book in an allusion to the infamous joint tour they did with Sab near the end of Ozzy's tenure when the fresh to the stage Van Halen blew the older metal masters off the stage routinely. Here is ball blaster from the early days with an uncharacteristically cosmic, other worldly lyric from Diamond Dave.
Siouxsie and the Banshees "Switch"
I can see Rikki Spectre rocking this into dust. Pure punk darkness.
Bowie "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)"
Released in the year 1980 this tune is tailormade for this book.
Traffic "Dear Mr. Fantasy"
I think every rock casualty can relate to this song about the shaman/ martyr role that rockstars fulfill in the modern world.
Black Sabbath "The Mob Rules"
There are several jokes hurled at Dio throughout the book, but I can't front on some of his work, including this roaring Sab tune.
Further Sabbath:
Like I said earlier, almost any early Sab tune works in this book but to single out a few more here are:
Snowblind = winter,cocaine. This could be the title sequence of the Augmented movie.
Because it rules.
Possibly their finest song. One of the most classic deal with the devil songs only this time the deal is eternal love? Oh yeah.
Black Sabbath's " Black Sabbath"
Metal ground zero. That sinister guitar you're hearing, what he's playing is a tritone also known as an augmented fourth. Wonder if that'll come up in the book?
Preorder your copy of An Augmented Fourth here.
My new novel An Augmented Fourth is now available for preorder at Word Horde. Take a gander at the beautiful cover art by Alan M. Clark and the kind blurbing of Jeremy Robert Johnson David James Keaton Nathan Carson Peter Bebergal and Chris Irvin.
Here's the official propaganda:
COMING IN JUNE! From the twisted mind of Tony McMillen comes the hilarious rock and roll horror novel An Augmented Fourth, a novel of The Lord of Low End.
"Tony McMillen’s rock and roll fantasy is a fucking blast." —Nathan Carson, author of Starr Creek
"The Thing meets Black Sabbath riffing Thunderhorse cranked to 11. You guys are in for a treat come June." —Chris Irvin, author of Ragged
"An Augmented Fourth is a strange, sludgy, progged-out blast!" —Jeremy Robert Johnson, author of Skullcrack City
"This Is Spinal Tap meets The Thing meets From Beyond." —David James Keaton, author of The Last Projector
"Tony McMillen’s novel is love letter pastiche to the occult mythos of rock…" —Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll
Get your copy and stay tuned for more news, tour dates, a contest and some really cool and totally free extras we'll be throwing at you.
Prepare yourself, the Summer of Sorrows begins now...
Preorder your copy here
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal comes from Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin and his depiction of the New Testament's "Massacre of the Innocents" where King Herod pulled a Skynet and tried to John Conner ol' Jesus (T2 style, he lacked a time machine) but only managed to kill a shit ton of non messiah, all human, no powers poor babies instead.
Read about more awesome fucked up shit in your Bible today!
Back to business:
Get out your metal detectors!
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is creepy architecture and in particular the Riverside Museum in Glasgow Scotland. It's like Black Manta's creepy necro clamshell or something. Love it.
Get out your metal detectors!
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is jean jackets. Seriously. Canadian chainmail, Midwest mithril, cowboy camouflage. Sure, jean jackets aren't solely a metal accoutrement, punks wear jean jackets, regular rockers too, rappers rock denim, whatever the fuck is going to come on down the way, grimewave dungeon ska twitch pop - which is probably already an actual scene that's already dead and passe -point is - everyone rocks jean jackets, but to me, jean jackets will always mean metal.
This might be all on account of one man: Cliff Burton, bass player for Metallica.
It seemed like his jean jacket was his fucking Venom symbiote that powered him but had bonded to him so that he could never remove it. Whenever I actually find a photo of Cliff not wearing a jean jacket he doesn't look right to me. It's like John Lennon without his glasses.
What I love about Cliff was that he looked just like his fans, all of Metallica did back then. But Cliff, with that damn jacket and that shrimpy moustache looked like every other hesher I ever hung out with when I was 14 years old. He looked like me actually. Skinny gangle limbs and wispy 'stache and all.
This is famous author Tony McMillen at age 17 lock up your daugh... actually they'll be fine. He has no game.
People will tell you leather is the true uniform of the metalhead, fuck that. Leather costs too much damn money. A real metalhead steals his big sister's jean jacket, tears the sleeves off and draws the Mercyful Fate logo on the back with magic marker.
I have soft spot for Cliff like a lot of metal fans do, partly because he died young and partly I suspect because he seemed like one of us. I did name the main character of my book Codger Burton, after all.
Cliff 'Em All.
Get out your metal detectors!
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
Dark Moon Digest was kind enough to post my review of this masterful collection of short stories. Read the review over there.
Bubo, baby.
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is motherfucking owls. The owls are exactly what they seem and that's metal as hell and don't let any severed wood loving broad tell you different.
Owls are beautiful and sinister often carrying the connotation of wisdom in myth and story and beyond all that a lot of them can rotate their heads all the way around making them the ultimate headbangers.
Special attention must be paid to my kid, Bubo from Clash of the Titans. Bubo, an owl made of metal that was steampunk before jagbags at county fairs ruined that for everyone.
Here's some gorgeous shots of owl carnage, pairs well with Deftones, Faith No More and early Slayer.
Wheeeeeeeeee....murder.
Get out your metal detectors!
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is the work of Danish artist and writer Don Kenn. He also goes by John Kenn Mortensen for some reason. Here's me holding his first book Sticky Monsters.
It's no exaggeration to say that he's one of my favorite artists I've personally discovered over the last few years. His work is often compared to Edward Gorey which makes sense seeing as they share some Edwardian sensibilities and often depict children in peril but Kenn's work is a lot more overtly sinister than Gorey's. He will full on show melted face monsters being fed charred human bodies, Whereas Gorey hints at horror more than anything.
Kenn is rather explicit which is what makes his work so metal. It's still charming, even whimsical at times but there is a pervading occultish flavor that seeps into the bones of what he's doing.
Oh, and most of his early work is drawn entirely on sticky notes!
He has a few more books but so far they're hard to purchase here in the states. I hope that changes soon. Check out more of his work at his site.
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
This week's found metal comes from a reader, Michael Cirone was awesome enough to share this nugget of brutality with us and will be thusly rewarded. I'll be sending him some fiction or art once I find out his preference.
Apparently from this picture some graffito artist took it upon themselves to vandalize this unsuspecting espresso machine box by adding the letter "s" to the word "layer" thus spelling out the name of the metal group "Slayer" whom I'm told are somewhat well known.
Get out your metal detectors!
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnamable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is old people
Old people are surprising metal as fuck. Just look at them.
Each one is a grim reminder of the ravages that time has in store for each and every one of us. Also they’re badass. They’re by definition survivors, and the best ones have that “sans fucks” attitude of, "I might die any day so I’m just going to say whatever inappropriate thing worms its way into my noodle."
Old people are the closest thing we have in real life to an Iron Maiden album cover.
Eddddddddddddiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeee.
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is a scary fucking building and is brought to us by a reader! Sorta. My friend Michael Chaisson told me I should use scary buildings - which I did -but he didn't recommend this bad boy in particular so he only gets a partial credit. Which means he'll receive 1/4 of a prize.
Or 100% of nothing.
Shit's tough in the blogosphere.
Anyways, this beautiful structure is is the Wedding Palace, Ashgabat, located in Turkmenistan.
And without the red lighting it actually doesn't look too menacing at all.
Wonderful, no?
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
Hail, hail
12 Ways The “King of the Dudes” Kept His Crown
Before cultural shepherds Kenan and Kel dropped their identity politics truth bomb Good Burger and its irrefutable maxim of “I’m a dude, he’s a dude, she’s a dude, we’re all dudes, yeah” the word “dude” used to actually mean something. And what it meant was insulting. To be a dude was to be a man overly preoccupied by your appearance and dress. Otherwise known as a clotheshorse, a coxcomb, a fancy Dan, in other words: being a dude meant you were a dandy. Dude was an insult hurled at you from real men who had real jobs back in the 1800s (dragonslayer, indigenous people remover, general inequality division supervisor) men who didn’t get all tarted up and whisker-trimmed just to go preening about at the latest monocle gala. Harrumph. But there was one man who took back the word dude, who wore it proudly (the way he wore everything) his name was Evander Berry Wall and in 1888 he was crowned “king of the dudes” after winning a brutal, months long duel of the dandies in New York City that the papers dubbed the “Battle of the Dudes.”
How is this not already a Coens Brother movie?
Yes, Evander Berry Wall was King Dude, here are his bona fides.
Dude Never Had a Real Job
Evander Berry Wall was such a dude. He never even really worked a day in his life, at the age of 18 he received two separate million dollar and more inheritances, one from his father and the other from grandfathers. Wall lost all of this money by 29. And he did it in style.
Literally.
Almost his entire fortune was spent towards his flights of fashion. According to various sources Wall owned 500 different and complete outfits, 365 suits, and 5,000 neckties. Supposedly he changed his necktie six times a day.
Dude.
Dude Claimed to Never Drink Water, Only Champagne
Before entering hipster Thunderdome in 1888 Wall was already on the rise as a New York curiosity due to the printed press’ minor infatuation with him. Living up to his descriptions in the New York Times and the like, Wall would not only wear the newest and most extravagant suits he also made many bizarre and weirdly endearing claims, one being that he only drank champagne. Later during the “Battle of the Dudes” when Wall became strapped for cash, champagne companies actually paid him to sponsor their drinks! Which if you were a finely tailored, upper class but nearly penniless sparkling wine vampire, is a win/win.
Dude Met His Match in 1887
Wall’s fetching ensemble soon became a national concern thanks to Blakely Hall, a reporter who was routinely desperate for something to fill his pages. Every other week, Hall would print a new article centered around Wall and some of the lesser dudes and their conquests in clothing and gadabouting through Gotham. These stories traveled the country as more and more newspapers picked them up.
Apparently shit else was happening in the world during 1887-1888.
Well, just like in regular Gotham, a finely costumed champion appearing can only breed colorful competition. Eventually another reporter started doing stories about some other dude, an actor named Robert "Handsome Bob" Hilliard. This dude was flashy as all get out and Wall and Hall (tell me their folk album is still available in the CVS bargain bin) decided it was time to declare war.
Dudes Ran a Furious and Fabulous Campaign During the “Battle of the Dudes”
The “Battle of the Dudes” made the “Battle of Helm’s Deep” look like a polite disagreement at a Lilith Fair concert. Shit got fierce. Basically both combatants used the streets of N.Y.C as their extended catwalk and tried to out-dress one another in an ever escalating arms race of finer and finer dudery. And they were serious as slacks about it.
Wall’s regular tailor went insane from stress and our dude had to send for another from London. Handsome Bob conversely developed a plan to win over the ethnic melting pot that was turn of the century New York by paying tribute to their various home countries and their respective styles of dress. I’m sure it was about as culturally sensitive as Trader Joe’s and their various ethnic themed sub-brands, i.e. Trader Jose’s, Trader Giuseppe’s and (Jesus) Trader Ming’s.
Dude Won the “Battle of the Dudes” Wearing Patent Leather Boots That Went All the Way Up to His Hips…Or Did He?
But despite Handsome Bob’s one man reenactment of the racist cavalcade of ethnic stereotype mice from the boat scene in An American Tail, the dude lost the battle. Probably. What stopped the fighting was the Great Blizzard of 1888. According to the Times, Wall finally defeated Handsome Bob once and for all by showing up in the middle of the blizzard at Hoffman House bar like some kinky BDSM Eskimo replete with shining black patent leather boots that extended up to his hips.
There are, however, a vocal minority who claim it was actually Handsome Bob who donned these high boots and bested Wall. They claim that this attire was actually part of a Western costume that Bob was using in a play he was acting in.
But even if Wall was bested here he’s still the genuine King Dude and won the true battle by duding it up until his death in 1940.
Dude Made More Crazy Ass Claims
Oh yeah, besides drinking nothing but champagne Wall also says he was the first American to wear a dinner jacket, also known as a tuxedo. And there’s actually someone to corroborate his story.
Basically, back in the 1880s, the only acceptable evening wear for dudes all featured a tailcoat. Then the Prince of Wales (a real dude’s dude) and his crew started rocking tailless coats.
Henry Poole, a big time tailor and dude behind the dude sent one of these cutting edge numbers to Wall. Wall took the puppy out for a spin at an opera house and was promptly thrown out for looking like some common flightless ice bird. But the seeds had been sown and boom, flash forward to 1889, after Wall had won his crown as King Dude and gentlemen were now being permitted to wear tuxes whenever to whatever dude-hang they wanted.
Dude Made Even More Crazy Claims
Oh, Wall also said he was a champion amateur walker with a seven minute and thirteen second mile. What? Yeah, after the Civil War when more and more people moved to the cities to live “pedestrianism,” that is competitive walking matches, became a thing. A big thing. There was no better way to pass the time. Have you hugged your internet provider today?
Dude Once Won a Bet that He Couldn’t Change his Clothes 40s Times Between Breakfast and Dinner
After donning his final new outfit and arriving at a veranda to claim his victory a band there startedplaying, “Hail the Conquering Hero Comes” and Wall, King Dude that he was, claimed his money (which he really needed at that point) and continued in his duding duties.
Dude’s Wife Wrote an Entire Memoir from the Perspective of their Chow Chow
His wife Lomie Wall’s book was titled, “The Memoirs of Chi-Chi The Chow” and yes, it was entirely written from the dog’s point of view. Wall himself once wrote: “If you are ever really cold, snuggle up to a chow and like it.”
Dude Pulled the “I Don’t Know Her” on Handsome Bob Way Before Mariah Carey Ever Did
Wall wrote his own memoir titled, Neither Pest Nor Puritan in his 70s and in it he never mentions Handsome Bob or the Battle of the Dudes at all. In a total queen bitch move, Wall only seems to reference Bob slightly by stating, “Soon a lot of actors and racing men and sharps began imitating me, and I began to stay away from Broadway.”
Dude, I Forgot, Dude Once Wore the Same Outfit as the Another Dude in Dude Battle
Apparently in the midst of the great battle one day Wall and Handsome Bob were both walking down Fifth Avenue towards one another and realized that they were wearing almost exactly the same outfits. Naturally, reality ceased to exist for a sliver of a second and God himself wept openly, embarrassing the angels and some of the more uptight Episcopalians up in heaven. But all The New York Sun reported from this meeting was:
“Mr. Hilliard smiled very slightly and said casually: “Good mawning.”
“How-do,” said Mr. Wall, serenely, with just the suggestion of a smile, and a gentle beaming of the eyes.
Then they both skulked away and were later seen wearing completely different outfits.
Dude Died Having Spent Almost His Entire Fortune “Pursuing Pleasure”
Evander Berry Wall died in Monte Carlo on May 5th 1940 with only $12,608 to his name. He outlived his wife as well as their beloved chow-chows. But he is reported to have had died happily. Before his wife’s death The Walls were known to dine out every night, and both had an enormous amount of friends; Wall himself was considered by some to be one of the best dancers in Paris. Plus, dude lived to 80 back in a time when reaching middle age meant when you graduated high school nowadays.
At the outbreak of WWI The Walls remained in France rather than kennel their chow, Chi-Chi (dude, it’s a fucking show dog; besides, it wasn’t like it was WW2) but eventually the seriousness of the first world war struck home and Berry and Lomie both became involved with raising funds for the wounded and in particular raising funds for blinded servicemen. They were even each awarded the Legion of Honor in recognition of their charitable activities after the war.
Dude.
Wall once said, “Fashions change, what is vital never does.”
Dude.
Pizza, way more metal than spaghetti.
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is pizza. Because pizza is metal. …and I’m not sure why but I’m certain that it is. At first I thought maybe this was just a personal connotation, that for some reason I was seeing a bond between the two when there wasn’t one. I was wrong.
There is a bond and everyone sees it. They just won’t admit it. Every type of music has a perfect pairing or a one true pairing (OTP for my fanfic kids) whether it’s punk rock, gangsta rap, Swedish line dancing cabaret; there is a food that works the best for each of them. Works when eaten while listening to the corresponding music as well as food that best represents the fanbase and qualities of said music. Pizza is metal on all accounts.
I’m not saying that people who don’t like metal can't like pizza. Everyone likes pizza. Even if you say you don’t like pizza, secretly you like pizza. Maybe you don’t love it, but you like it. I’s impossible not to. ...it's pizza. So yes, punkers, hip-hop enthusiasts, techno rave kids, everyone likes pizza. But pizza isn’t the perfect food for any of those styles. Having a slice while listening to Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool doesn’t work as well as macking on a pie while blaring Master of Puppets.
Pizzaaaaaruh
It just doesn’t. Sorry, I’ve been to the lab, I’ve checked the beakers, the results have been tabulated. Pizza also represents metal listeners in a lot of ways. Pizza has European roots that have been totally bastardized with American influence. Pizza can be as commercial and soulless as a cardboard slice from Chuck-E-Cheese or as delicious and soulful as a stuffed crust pie from Pizza Hut.
Alright, I’m just yanking you there but there is of course some amazing authentic and some equally awesome Americanized pizza from all sorts of non-chain restaurants. Or even better, some homemade stuff made with the freshest ingredients. But no matter what, good, bad, stuffed crust; it’s all pizza.
And speaking of stuffed crust, the sheer muchness of pizza, the more is more approach, the excess of toppings, the weird novelties having to do with injecting crust with all manner of unnecessary filler, all smacks of metal's excess. Even the simple average pizza is an assault on the senses when compared to other subtler foods; all of this reflects metal music’s lack of subtlety. And not only in a bad way. Sometimes subtlety is called for but sometimes bombast is what’s needed. Pizza and metal hold nothing back and that’s why we love them. Also you can throw anything on top of them, anchovies, pesto sauce, Fred Durst, and it remains pizza/metal. It might be godawful but it’s still metal.
Forget what gatekeeper snobs have told you:
There is no false pizza.
So my question is: if pizza is metal, which I feel I’ve proven without a shadow of doubt that it is, what are other musical genre’s food pairings?
I don’t feel like an authority enough to say Atlanta hip hop is_______
Ska punk is _______
Glam rock is _________
So what do you think?
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
This week's found metal comes from Alessandro Biffignandi, an Italian artist known best for his work in "Sexy Fumetti" a genre of Italian erotic horror comics mostly from the 1970s.
Ah, Italy in the 70s, what a time to be a perv and also into spooky shit. I was born in the wrong time and place.
Biffigandi has an enormous body of work. If you're not into creepy cheesecake and some occulty S/M motif, lesbian vampire exploitation it might not be your jam but I think it's hard to argue that isn't well made. A lot of it is actually kind of playful, sort of EC comics meets Penthouse forum type of vibe.
"I never thought it would happen to me but there I was, dead, on the slab, when Vicki, the dungeon keeper's flirty assistant crawled on top of me..."
Here are some more of my favorites:
"....it wasn't me."
There's also another great Fumetti artist named Emanuele Taglietti who made masterpieces like this:
Why are they so scared? Why? Oh, the shadow. Wait, what the fuck? Is that the snowman's or ....what the hell is going on?
They're actually a great artist but seriously, what is going in this picture?
Anyways,
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
I don’t think you can teach what makes a storyteller a storyteller. Not that it’s some extra special innate talent that only a chosen few possess. It’s not. All it is – I think - is a deep want or need to communicate paired with the complete lack of skill for doing so by the normal means. You know, talking to people. Talking to them about what’s actually on your mind.
I love talking to people. I love in it big groups, one on one, whatever. I do not like talking to them about deeply personal, serious matters. Mostly because I don’t wanna bore anyone.
So I take everything I feel I have to say and make a story out of it and hope that people will pick up on what I’m really doing.
Also pay me for it.
Which is the sweetest revenge isn’t it? (When did this become about revenge?)
Whether or not I’m successful in any of this varies a lot.
So I think you kind of have to have this sort of makeup to be a storyteller; at least that’s what makes me one. Which makes me always wary of writing tips or lessons when they talk about making a storyteller out of everyone. I think anyone can tell a story but whether it’ll be worth a damn, well, I think it has to mean something to the person making it. And a story has to be the best or maybe the only way they can express themselves.
All of this means I have no idea how to make you need to tell a story. Maybe you don’t need to and that’s a good thing. If you can say your say without resorting to dressing it all up with compelling characters, a plot that hangs right and some overarching theme about the whackadoo state of the human condition; right on. More power to you and yours.
Sincerely, that’s great. I think it’s swell that works for you.
But here’s what works for me.
If you are like me, a storyteller, maybe some of this will work for you. Or at least get you to laugh at how ass backwards my methods are.
1. Walk Around Talking to Yourself (Especially While Growing Up)
My number one pastime growing up in parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio and most of all glorious Tucson Arizona was walking around. Just fucking walking. No real destination, no companions, just me and my feet and my head filled with voices. And sights. And stories. I’d walk around playing and acting them all out. Taking turns being the heroes I’d make up as well as the villains and everyone else in between. A lot of kids did this, we were 6 and 7 years old. It’s what we did. But I was also a little immature for my age. I was smart for it too but maturity and intelligence don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
I also grew up in the middle of nowhere so I had to find ways to entertain myself. On top of that there were always reasons for me not to want to be home. So I’d escape into my brain. And since I was a little immature like I said before - or maybe just stubborn or unconcerned with looking foolish - when the other kids slowly grew out of their make believe worlds mine just kept on growing. Getting bigger, more complicated. The stories more and more like the real life that I was living.
So into my teens and beyond, even now; I like to walk around inhabiting my own world. I admit as I’ve gotten older (35 as of now) I act out the stories a little less now. But when no one is around I still go full on. It gives me joy. It’s playing. I also still air guitar in public when a really sweet lick comes in over my headphones; and when the coast is clear and I’m alone I sing along loud so I can hear myself over the music. I even grip an imaginary mic if the spirit really moves me. All of this is good for storytelling – and for the amusement or horror of onlookers - for a lot of reasons.
One, if you’re actual playing out a scene you’re working on, well that means you’re actually saying the preposterous shit you’ve written as dialogue. Which means you can actually hear how clunky or maybe (rarely) how surprisingly mellifluous it sounds when an actual human being says it.
Two, walking around gets you motivated. When you’re creating something it can make the gears inside your skull start churning and get you excited about what you’re working on. And if you’ve hit a wall sometimes walking around and acting out some scenes in your head gets you distracted by the things you’re seeing outside. Distraction can be good sometimes for working out a story because if you leave your brain alone sometimes it’ll fix your problems for you. Like it’s fucking supposed to, goddamn lazy brains.
Three, its’s fun. It really is. I’m a firm believer that people don’t play enough. That we don’t let ourselves play. Life is hard, I don’t need to tell you that. Writing a book can be hard too. You might as well enjoy both as much as you can.
- Make Yourself a Mental Trailer
When I’m first starting to work up a new idea for a story sometimes it comes piecemeal, sometimes it comes in one big flood but eventually, however I get around to it, I start dreaming up a sort of movie trailer in my mind of what I want this story to be. A lot of the time when I’m walking around playing things through my head, acting them out, I’m not going through the story in a linear fashion; I’m working through a sizzle reel in my brain. All the big moments, one will lead to another, like a song, ups and downs, quiet and loud, verses and choruses; I’ll march around with this in my head and get really geared up about what I want this story to be. And like anything with storytelling, the trailer is not fixed. Anything and everything can change. Your mental trailer is just scaffolding so don’t get too attached to it. Besides, sometimes trailers show stuff that ends up on the cutting room floor anyways. Of course you don’t wanna fuck up and cut that really good shot that everyone is anticipating when they sit down and watch the finished movie (Twister truck tire I will never forgive you). So don’t. Remember what you liked.
3. Be Unconcerned with Looking Foolish
I’m talking about early on in the process still, eventually yeah, get some outside, trusted advice and make sure you didn’t shit the sleeping bag before the Jason Voorhees that is internet criticism picks you up in said sleeping bag and beats the actual shit out of you against a tree. Yeah, not a pretty sight. But before all that, be fearless. Write from your gut. Take chances. Fail. Fuck up. Figure things out. Get over your fear of looking like an imposter, an idiot or uneducated and ask somebody what you want to know. Because each of us is a bit of all three of those things depending on the subject.
I learn more all the time and I think I learn things faster now just because I’m more comfortable asking others who know more than me. Whether it’s asking an artist or writer whom I’ve become friendly with about their technique or some technical aspect of what they do or a certain tool they’ve used to achieve something; or even if it’s simply watching tutorial videos to learn how to use some new software or to watch a creator do their thing. I have questions so I use all my resources to find answers. Part of the reason I was so resistant for this for years was the feeling of pride I have at being self-taught. Don’t get me wrong, self-reliance is a great value. With it I taught myself how to draw, how to play guitar, how to write. But while this was great for my ego and sometimes lead to me developing a distinctive style it also made me slow to pick up on a lot of basics in all those fields. So now I reach out to people if I’m really hitting a wall. Again, I must stress, reach out to other creators who you are actually chummy with. Don’t bother an artist or creator who you don’t actually know or talk to (even in some online capacity) not because creators are inherent dicks who can’t be bothered (though we are) but because you’re asking for a stranger’s time and expertise and you might not be the only person in the world who’s bothering them for all their secrets. Like it’s no big deal to offer a glass of water to a stranger at your door once, right? But if there’s a stranger at your door asking for water every hour, and they were also wondering if maybe you want to see the glass of water they made, and maybe you could tell them how it tastes and if they’ve poured it wrong; and what do you think of this cup? A mug, they should have totally used a mug, right? …. Yeah, that’s not what anyone would want.
Do make friends with other creators in whatever field you’re into. Actual friends. And not just for networking motives either. Do it because they’ll be the only ones who you can gripe to about how your imaginary people aren’t behaving properly despite being your own creations and actually (potentially) understanding what you’re talking about and why it’s so important to you
4. Be More Than a Storyteller
Which brings me to my last bit, remember at the top when I said being a storyteller meant being blessed with a lot to say and no better way to say it? Sounds like a lonely way to go about things, right? Yeah, it can be. If you wanna be all Mall Goth about it and sequester yourself from everyone because you’re such a tortured boring fucking hack that is. So don’t be. Be a storyteller who talks to other storytellers, even if it’s just small talk. Blathering about other books you like, or your dogs or the interesting things you can do with peanut butter and chili. Chances are maybe they’re like you; a storyteller who doesn’t really like to get into too serious of terrain with conversation. Great, that means you’ll be on equally footing. Sometimes what we're talking about isn’t as important as the fact that we talk about something. That we reach out and make some sort of connection.
Talk to other folks too. Try and make some goddamn friends, people. There’s plenty of less attractive but more accomplished writers than me who have already talked about the need for writers and the like to crawl away from their caves and remember to have a life. But let me spell it out (because it took me a long time to read the message clearly myself) : you’re here to live life not just write about it. Without real experience your life is empty and your stories meaningless. So yeah, if life being empty isn’t enough of a kick in the pants for you, your art will suffer too.
So do more than just tell stories. Don’t just walk around talking to yourself and reciting your killer bad guy soliloquy as mothers clutch their awestruck children close to their chests while you walk by. If you need convincing, consider that all our memories are imperfect and merely a story we continually tell ourselves over and over again. How interesting is your story? How compelling is it now? Would you read you?
Make a trailer, see what you want your story to be then walk around and act it out. There’s nothing to feel foolish about, everyone else is doing the exact same thing.
Somehow not the guy from Demon Knight who also played the Grim Reaper in Bill and Ted 2.
My heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff dredged up from the corners of mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
This week's found metal comes to us from the always fun world of company safety videos.
This is, of course, the legendary, "Will You Be Here Tomorrow?" the safety video from 1998 that watches like an sizzle reel from Faces of Death Part 2.
This thing is real, it was made to keep workers safe and the powers that be decided that would best be achieved by copious amounts of corn syrup for fake blood and some truly brutal slayings of various warehouse/factory workers.
But you know what trumps "Will You Be Here Tomorrow?," 1980's "Shake Hands with Danger." Which boasts a sweet country expository theme song that makes it like some lost Burt Reynolds movie only the plot hangs together better. Though it does suffer from lack of Dom DeLuise. All films do.
One downside is this thing is 25 minutes long so you might have to sift around for your metal moments.
But if you want a little more bang for your buck you can't do much better than the 5 minute tour de force that is 1999' "Think About This." It delivers nonstop gnareliness replete with a weird, funny/chilling Portisheadesque theme song. This might be the finest example of a safety video yet produced.
How much fun would it be to film one of these? Say you're an amateur Tom Savani and you get approached by one of these companies to make them an educational faux snuff film and the best part; you don't have to even bother with all that boring story and character dreck. It's Mortal Kombat with nonstop finishing moves.
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
Disclaimer: Peter Leon is a longtime friend of mine, I even dedicated my new book to him, we played together in the tragically underexposed band Bicycle Fight and I’ve acted in a bunch of his previous movies. In short, he’s my dude.
That being said, as objective as I can be; his new film looks fucking bonkers and I’m into it.
Leon describes his latest movie Zero Point Theory as a sci-fi, time travel, action comedy set in the Prohibition era 1920s. Watching the trailer it gives off a Looper by way of Edgar Wright or maybe early Kevin Smith vibe.
Take a gander at the trailer:
Leon is an independent artist in every sense of the word. He raises the funds himself, he co-writes, directs and edits his own stuff and he answers to no one. He’s an inspiration to me in a lot of ways. I think everyone knows talented people in their life but sometimes it’s hard to find talented and motivated people. People who don’t just talk about their dreams but get off their ass and make it happen.
Leon is that for me. Zero Point Theory is like his 15th movie or something at this point and he keeps upping his game, you can check out the rest of his cinematic oeuvre here.
Zero Point Theory will be premering at the Loft Cinema in Tucson on 5-3-17. And if you’re not lucky enough to live in fabulous Tucson Arizona then after that date you’ll be able to purchase the film on Amazon.com or Peter Leon’s site.
My heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff dredged up from the corners of mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
This week's found metal is a super gnarly version of perennial art favorite "The Temptation Of Saint Anthony" done by Joos van Craesbeeck (Hufflepuff House) around 1650. There's a real Bosch feel coming off it that I like that's mixed with Craesy Bread's own humorous expressions.
Here's it de-metalled:
Real quick, this is my favorite part of this painting:
Talk about horse feathers...
A fucking duck tauntaun? Get me one of those abominations because I need it.
Alright.
As stated before depictions of St. Anthony fucking with the devil in the desert were a popular source of inspiration for artists back in the day. Mostly because it was an excuse to paint trippy monstrous shit and all artists love doing this. I don't care if you'e Lisa fucking Frank; you like drawing weird creatures. Actually that's kind of all she does, we just consider it cute for some reason. It's not, it's acid-tinged demon hentai that earthly denizens like us - unfamiliar with the innermost circles of Hell - don't recognize yet.
Here are some other versions of "St. Anthony's One Man Monk Rave" that I liked:
Maybe Lisa Frank will drop her version in my lifetime?
If you got something you think is unintentionally brutal or accidentally scary send that found metal to me via an email and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff dredged up from the corners of mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
This week's found metal comes from a reader! John Coco let me know about Russain artist Geliy Korzhev (1925-2012) and his powerful and political later work.
Starting in the 70s Korzhev didn't like the way that the his Soviet country was warming up to capitalism and viewed it as a betrayal of the Socialist culture he grew up in.
The Russian version of Lilo and Stitch has some minor differences.
He never changed his mind either so by the late 1990s when he was supposed to receive a state award refused a state awad by the government of the new Russian Federation he refused and wrote :
“I was born in the Soviet Union and sincerely believed in the ideas and ideals of the time. Today, they are considered a historical mistake. Now Russia has a social system directly opposite to the one under which I, as an artist, was brought up. The acceptance of a state award would be equal to a confession of my hypocrisy throughout my artistic career. I request that you consider my refusal with due understanding.”
Metal.
For bringing this found metal to my attention I'm going to give John a prize. Do you want a prize?
If you got something you think is found metal send me an email with it and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
PART IV
In previous posts I spoke on how gigantic an influence the band Black Sabbath was on my upcoming heavy metal horror book, you can read about that here and here; and how horror films helped shape my new book too (read that here) now here's the last part of this series.
I’ve only published one novel and one huge comic book (saying graphic novel is pretentious as shit) so far but I’ve already amassed a large amount of rules or at the very least plans for my writing and what I think it should be. Working on An Augmented Fourth was a gas and a big part of that was me saying nuts to all these dorky and uptight rules I’ve fenced myself in with. I have no idea how most other writers work but I tend to make stories out of everything and that includes my imaginary and now real writing career. Which means even before I finished my first novel I had a plan for the next 5 books after that. Like, book 1 is the debut and it has to have this, this and this. Then book 2 has got to build on that by adding this and this. Book 3; nobody is going to like at first, it’s the experimental one, the Led Zep 3, the Pearl Jam’s No Code but boom; when book 4 comes through and it’s my breakthrough everyone is going to see how important book 3 was to my development. And so on and so on.
It’s fucking hilarious to me how I much I still think I can plan any of this.
Not that I’ve totally given up on this shape the arc of my career thing; but I’ve learned planning is fine and dandy but don’t bank on 88% of it turning out the way you thought. And guess what? That’s far-fucking-out, man.
An Augmented Fourth was not part of the plan is what I’m telling you. And it’s maybe better for it.
I was in the middle of writing a massive rock and roll/sci-fi/western/dark fantasy genre shucking tome that I’m still working on now (it’s finally coming along…I think) when an author and editor I’m friendly with asked if I had anything shorter and weird I could submit to them?
What I had was a skeleton of an idea I thought up for a heavy metal anthology that I never submitted to. But what I was writing then, my big epic that was supposed to be my book 2 after Nefarious Twit (which now that I think about it was originally supposed to be book 2 itself. Needless to say its predecessor sucked shit and died on impact so Twit took its spot!) and this current book 2 was not working. So, always up for a chance to dutyshirk, I said yes to the author/editor and started dreaming up An Augmented Fourth.
And it flowed, the story came together relatively easy (for me at least) and it was awesome. I even assuaged my tightassed sense of order by saying that this was a novella and that I could count it apart from my proper novels. But eventually the book swelled up to its current girth as a slim but respectably sized novel and now it’s my book 2 and the big epic sci-fi thingamajig will be book 3.
Or maybe it won’t.
Maybe I’ll finish this draft and start writing my book 4 (yep, already have it planned, book 5 too) and when I finish that I’ll realize that it’s more ready and closer to being finished than the other project?
I don’t know and that’s cool. I’m not gonna lie and add, “and that’s great” because I wouldn’t say I’m that comfortable with not knowing – at least not yet – but I am cool with it. Which is a start.
Also writing Augmented has given me some ideas and insights into what I do well and what I need to work on with my writing in general that I’m using on the next book the artist formally known as this joke is a well-trodden cultural cul de sac that I’m as guilty as any hack for using beyond the year 1996.
The biggest insight is of course stop thinking I know enough about my own writing to know what my style is yet. I’ve been writing for a while now but only published a few works and even if that wasn’t the case; and I’d published a dozen books why be so married to one style? I love auteur directors but the doubled edged sword of that is that you like that they deliver similar work but you also criticize them if all their work is too similar, right?
It’s hard to find the line between Wes Andersoning your stuff (his last few have been pretty good again, it’s his middle shit that takes a real dip for me) and John Carpentering what you do. The difference between those two directors to me is that Anderson makes the same film the same way over and over again and Carpenter makes different films the same way. Sort of the difference between The Doors and Led Zeppelin. Doors albums are like Wes Anderson movies. You set the template early on and then you just keep making that album until you hit diminishing returns and you have to do something different. In both cases ironically the something different is return to your roots; but not the roots of your first work but the stuff that inspired that first work. For The Doors it was the blues and it gave them Morrison Hotel and L.A. Women which are great. For Anderson it’s old French movies and Harold and Maude and Ronald Dahl books which helped him make Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom and The Budapest Hotel, all of which are good.
The Led Carpenter approach is you set up how you do things early on and then you take that and try to apply it to different genres and see what the results are. How far can you push and pull a thing and still make it what it is and yet still feel like one of your works and retain your distinct voice?
I think that’s the more interesting approach. But, again, I can try and plan to do that or I can be open to letting nature run its course.
That’s the second big take away from making this book. When I get out of my own way and put my dick in the wind and hope that the breeze doesn’t come back my way the results are usually what I hoped for (zero face pee) or better. I write like me, the things I write about are the things that I’m passionate about, the way I write about them even when I do something different is always shaped by my point of view because what the hell else do I have?
And that point of view is always in flux, so why fight that? I can map out a plan for my next 6 books but it’s going to take years and years for me to write them and by the time I get them finished they’ll either have changed so much from my original plan that they’re unrecognizable or what I want to write about will have changed so much that the old ideas just aren’t relevant to me anymore.
In fact, usually that’s how I can tell an idea is ready to become a book. It’s something I’ve thought about for years, and even though it’s changed, mutated -become augmented – I still want to write it so much it hurts. It’s like knowing the name for something, the secret name, and knowing only you have it on your tongue but it’s hard to pronounce so you gotta practice for years and years and do tongue pushups and shit until you’re ready to utter it for the first time. And I’m shit at enunciation -ask my wife- so it takes me even longer.
Writing this book, reaffirmed that everything I learn finishing something I’ve written teaches me a lot but also doesn’t necessarily teach me anything applicable to the next thing I write. Because they’re all so different. But this book did - in general - teach me to stop worrying so goddamn much about controlling every damn thing because I have no control over most of it really. This book is about change, maybe every book is; because change is conflict. Whether you accept it or fight it either choice will ultimately change you. Because when the world changes and you resist it you get left behind. Sometimes that can be a noble thing, sometimes stupid. But things will be different not matter your defiance.
An Augmented Fourth, my second novel, inspired me not to lie down and blindly accept change but to grow up, realize it is inevitable but it is also just as malleable; and if I accept it I can have my say in which direction it goes.
P.S.
The third rule I broke with this book was having numbers in the title! I fucking can’t stand numbers being in titles. No reason why, totally arbitrary and irrational but it’s wrong and stupid and some of my favorite stuff (Slaughter House Five, The Crying of Lot 49, 2 Chainz; just kidding, I’m too old to know a single song by 2-Chainz) has it but I pretend it doesn’t.
But An Augmented Fourth just sounds so tasty so I said nuts to that rule too. In fact, without that name there would be no An Augmented Fourth, the name itself inspired a lot of the story. Which is not a rule of mine per say but it is a method; and not one I’d ever recommend to any other writer but it has been serving me for some time now.
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today's found metal is "Judith Beheading Holofernes" a painting from Caravaggio (which sounds like a super smooth R and B outfit from the 90s) that was painted in 1598–99.
Seriously, how is this not already metal album cover art?
Here, let's fix that:
The story the painting is depicting is pretty metal as well. The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical biblical text meaning that Protestants don't consider it canon but a bunch of other Christians do. Which means it's sort of like a really revered Elseworld's story like The Dark Knight Returns or The Killing Joke that gets sorta folded into the regular continuity in parts.
Actually, it's nothing like that.
Anyways In the story, Judith, a beautiful widow, is able to enter the tent of Holofernes because he wants to fuck her. Holofernes was an Assyrian general who was about to destroy Judith's home, the city of Bethulia. She gets dude super crunk on whatever passed for Four Loko back in her day (you could say he was a Holo-Wreck. You could say that but you probably really shouldn't) and after he passes the fuck out he's decapitated by Judith. And she's a big hero and Holo-Wreck's (we're god with it now) people are like fuck this, that broad is bonkers. peace. Literally, peace, they leave Judith's people alone. And Judith says after you take one dude's head off just marrying them is never going to suffice so she stay unmarried for the rest of her life by choice.
Now picture all of that but with guitars.
See what I'm getting at?
If you got something you think is found metal send me an email with it and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
In previous posts I spoke on how gigantic an influence the band Black Sabbath was on my upcoming heavy metal horror book, you can read about that here and here; now I want you to put down your headphones because we’re going to the movies.
Like most writers I get my inspirations from all over, other books, music, comics, video games, history; the biggest inspiration actually being my life itself but that kind of thing can be boring to talk about so instead I’ll tell you about another massive influence; especially with this book: monster movies. Because I love me some good monster movies. I grew up on good monster movies. Alien and Aliens, Predator, Monster Squad, Gremlins, Tremors, Jaws and most importantly to this book John Carpenter’s The Thing.
I think like a lot of people my age discovering The Thing was like finding out about some really great lesser known band. If Aliens and Predator were the Led Zeppelin and The Doors of monster movies The Thing was like the Iggy and the Stooges of the genre. It wasn’t just that it was lesser known (at the time I was growing up) it was that it was a little less obvious, a little rawer here and there. A little weirder and more off center.
Besides being a horror story that takes place while it’s snowing what An Augmented Fourth and The Thing have in common is that they’re both in the mold of that book with the racist as hell title by Agatha Christie that was later renamed And Then There Were None. They’re about not being sure if the people around are you really are who they say they are. They’re about being paranoid (cue Iommi riff) and no longer certain that you can trust anyone. Also The Thing is about just how shitty and isolating the winter is. Seriously, fuck snow.
"Snow picnic today, amirite?" "Kill yourself."
Similar to the “one of us is really the killer” story is the whole, “let’s board ourselves into this room and wait out this zombie werewolf hentai enthusiast apocalypse that’s happening outside but oh shit now we’re locked with ourselves and maybe we’re the real zombie werewolf hentai enthusiasts?!” type of yarn; and An Augmented Fourth has a bit of that in its blood too. It was a huge thrill for me to write my characters boarding themselves into a room as some otherworldly force tried to force its way in. Are you fucking funning me? I’ve been waiting to write that scene since I was 14 years old. Confession, I have been writing that scene since I was 14 but none of that shit will ever see the light of the day let alone the light of internet. Thank Christ.
People boarding themselves up from a monster is a classic story turn I’ll never get tired of. The initial mad scramble to get the boards or whatever up in time, the running out the clock getting to know you fat chewing, the arugments, the accusations, the inevitable fuck up that lets the monster back in; I fall for it all every time. Can’t get enough. So I got to right my own version of it. My own Bill Paxton saying, “Game over, man. Game over.” My own dude with that fucked up poodle hair from Return of the Living Dead getting hysterical about how fucked up his friend Freddie’s face looked after he had acid thrown in it. It was a total gas for me as a writer and I think you’re going to have a fucking ball as a reader.
Despite it firmly being a horror book An Augmented Fourth is the most fun thing I’ve written. Not that it’s one big joke, there are chills, thrills and some very dark musings on the human condition but it’s also about a heavy metal band called Frivolous Black who have an album titled Friv Today, Die Tomorrow. There’s no way not to have fun writing about guys like that.
I also was breaking a few of my own rules writing this book and breaking rules is always fun. We’ll talk about that in the final section.
Read The Conclusion
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
This week's found metal comes from a reader! Roel Torres tipped me to this excellent piece of baroque art from Italian painter Guido Reni which depicts the Swintonesque archangel Michael triumphing over the Giamattish Satan. Depicting the devil as the losing faction in a heavenly bout is usually grounds for outright metal dismissal but the power and beauty of this piece is such that it actually makes the angel look pretty damn brutal.
Seriously, how is this not already metal album cover art?
Here, let's fix that:
By the by, "Spare the Dying" is a necromancy spell from the only D & D campaign I ever played. It was a good time to be sure, relationships were destroyed, furniture was broken, minds were torn in twain. Seriously, we played with two another couples who both broke up by the end of the mission and I smashed the bottom of a lamp using it as a staff for a wizard character I got way too into playing. D& D is metal as all get out.
For bringing this found metal to my attention I'm going to give Roel Torres some original artwork of mine. Not that he needs any more art, dude is an impressive comic book artist himself; check out some of his stuff here.
If you got something you think is found metal send me an email with it and if I use it I'll send you some sort of prize. Hit me up at: tonymcmllen@gmail.com
Part II:
This is the follow up to my previous piece about how the music of the band has played such an important part in inspiring my upcoming heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth.
Read the first part here if you like.
Now I’m going to expound some more on Sabbath and their place in the DNA of An Augmented Fourth here. One of their main contributions to my writing in this book and maybe in general is the band’s approach to songwriting itself. A Sabbath song packs a shitload of ideas into one track in a relatively short amount of time. Sure, compared to the standard pop rock song nowadays which clocks in at 3 or 4 minutes an average Sab song at 6 or 7 minutes might seem bloated but there is little filler in most of their stuff. So unlike some prog bands that have 7 or 10-minute-long tracks with say 6 minutes of beautiful stuff and the rest is self-indulgent wankery most Sabbath gets right to the point and then keeps on making that point. In author John Darnielle’s 33 and 1/3 book on the album Master of Reality there’s a very simple but precise observation about how Black Sabbath songs are constructed. Everything, every bass line, drum fill, vocal and even lyric is there to support the riff. Not just the guitar player but the riff-oriented song that the guitar player Tony Iommi is composing. An average Black Sabbath song stuffs more musical ideas into it than most entire albums by other rock bands do. This template helped define metal. Metal is usually somewhat complex but unlike prog it is almost always easily palatable.
What I really enjoy about Sabbath and most early metal is that it’s expansive but not exhaustive like much latter day metal can be. Metallica, for instance, can be exhaustive. A whole album can leave you feeling drained. Don’t get me wrong, Metallica is fine, awesome at times. But I usually don’t listen to three of their albums in a row. Whereas with Sabbath I can listen to the self-titled through Sabbath Bloody Sabbath any time and leave feel energized as opposed to emptied.
What all of this means for my writing is that An Augmented Fourth is a shorter novel - it started as a novella – but it’s packed with ideas. But hopefully not too many ideas. I want to stretch your head with this book but not pop it like a balloon. And just like everything Sab does supports Tony Iommi’s riffs everything in this novel backs up the themes of the book.
What are the themes?
Where’s the fun in telling you? Besides, you’ll decide that on your own I’m sure.
I will say the book’s main character is named Codger Burton and it takes place in December of 1980, three days after John Lennon was shot dead.
But those are just the first puzzle pieces, every part of the novel builds off of them but like most Sabbath tracks there are a whole litany of tasty licks and monster riffs hidden into this book’s short running time.
My only regret is that I wasn’t able to name my chapters the way the band named the song titles on their first three albums. They band would list the different parts of those extended jams and long songs as independent songs themselves. So instead of it just saying “War Pigs" it’d say “War Pigs/Luke’s Wall” and as a listener you’d have to suss out which part was supposed to be “Luke’s Wall” and which was “War Pigs.” My money’s on “War Pigs” being the part of the song where Ozzy sings the words “War Pigs” and “Luke’s Wall” being that tremendous guitar solo at the end where Iommi tells Jimmy Page to go fuck himself. But that’s just me talking.
I did end up naming each chapter of An Augmented Fourth after a Frivolous Black song but I gave up the multiple part thing when I discovered how hard it was to make awesome metal song titles that weren’t too jokey but still a little jokey but overall still mostly badass.
I have a song titled “Tetrahex” That’s 6,6,6 and 6.
I am a fucking artist and there’s only a limited supply of gold the likes of “Tetrahex.”
Next up I’ll tell you about some of the none musical building blocks for my book.
Read Part 3
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today we have winter. Also maybe this cat, like just this one cat. Back to winter, winter is the most metal time of the year. Others will tell you it's Fall (calling it Autumn is decidedly not metal, Leaf Genocide would be the optimal handle but what can you do?) Winter is where it's really at for metalheads.
Why?
Brutality. Beards. It looks like cocaine is covering the earth. You either go outside, face the elements and act like Rocky in Rocky IV preparing to stomp some Russian metahuman or you stay indoors and drink and pine for your lost friend Carl Weathers.
Snarl Weathers was going to be my Gnarls Barkley cover band...just saying.
Winter has the least amount of sunlight therefore it is the most metal time of the year.
Fact.
Also:
Part I:
My upcoming heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth owes a lot to the band Black Sabbath. Not only because Frivolous Black - the fictional band at the center of the novel - is an obvious analogue to the Sab and not only because my main character goes by the name Codger Burton. Which - case you’re not too steeped in Sab facts – isn’t too different a name from one Geezer Butler, the bassist and usual lyricist for Black Sabbath.
That’s just the scales on the surface of this thing, the real reason that the music of Black Sabbath is in the blood and bones of An Augmented Fourth is because of what listening to that band has done to my imagination throughout the years.
While Codger Burton and Frivolous Black (Friv to all the diehards) started out as stand-ins for Geezer and company they mutated into their own entities very soon into the writing process. Which is what happens whenever I write a composite or full on analogue type of character or entity. That’s the fun of analogues, they’re similar to their source material but only as much as you want them to be. The rest you get to fuck around with. You keep the best or core attributes of a thing and then go crazy with whatever else unburdened by what isn’t important to you. Might be the reason why I’m generally more interested in Superman analogues than Supes himself.
But no matter how far off my characters might grow from their initial inspiration what remains unaltered in this project is the mood and the world that Black Sabbath at its best puts you in. Black Sabbath to me is one of those perfect bands – which isn’t saying they haven’t made a bad song (they have) or a shitty record (oh lord yeah) but more often than not they work perfectly. They deliver exactly what I want from them and more. And I’m not talking about my preconceived expectations of what their sound is after listening to them for years and years. No, I’m talking about the first time I heard “Paranoid” or “N.I.B.” or “Children of the Grave” and how the song took me somewhere and each destination was exactly where I needed to go. Each riff, each melody, each solo, bass line and drum fill landed just right. Right, not precise. They could be sloppy, or tight as a pin, whatever the song wanted or needed. I have a thing with art (We’re not exclusive, feel free to ask them for their number) where as I’m experiencing it and letting it unfold sometimes choices made by the work don’t agree with me or I feel like they could have been done better or differently. Say you’re watching a movie or reading a book, you’re enjoying it but then the work takes a wrong turn and you’re like, well shit, I wish they would have done (blank) instead.
Actually a lot of my ideas for stories come from just that: What if that story did this instead of that?
But back to Sab, the band seldom disappointed in this manner. Especially the first five records. They came through over and over again. And a lot of the time they did something even better then come though: they exceeded expectations. They’ve made musical, artistic choices that I never even saw coming. Ones that I could never even dream of and that were better than what I previously imagined possible.
They made moving, original and innovative work that was socially relevant and entertaining. What else could you want from a band let alone art?
Example of when one of their songs opened up into something more and blew away what I was expecting; their song “Children of the Grave.”
It opens with a dark, muted and bubbling guitar that builds up and finally spills over until the gates are crashed and the whole band charges in behind it. Beautiful. So far we have an exceptionally catchy riff and a galloping sort of feel; great start. Could be perfectly perfunctory if they left it at that. But they don’t. The next thing you hear is a second drum rolling around beneath the main beat that opens the song up into some almost tribal texture. White Zombie would later cover this song and really expand on these drums aspects. On top of this you have an excellent plaintive but pissed off vocal from Ozzy with some of Geezer Butler’s best and most anthemic lyrics:
Revolution in their minds the children start to march
Against the world in which they have to live
And all the hate that's in their hearts
They're tired of being pushed around
And told just what to do
They'll fight the world until they've won
And love comes flowing through, yeah
Seriously if you aren’t nodding along or straight up banging your head to this then you are a neckless wreck who has never known love nor the comfort of scarves. Really, you’re like the opposite of a snake which is just upsetting. But after all this Sab isn’t done blowing your fucking mind. Tony Iommi drops a savage guitar solo that goes full supernova at the song’s conclusion, squealing and screaming louder than God stepping on a Lego.
Where does listening to “Children of the Grave” take me? It’s like watching a lost early 70s horror crime movie masterpeice. Like if Dawn of the Dead and Dog Day Afternoon shacked up together and had a mutant baby (Dog Day of the Dead? Dawn of the Dog Day? Afternoon of the Dead? Dawn of the Dead Dog Afternoon! There we go, nailed it!) and this movie was about fighting corrupt cops and overthrowing the government and getting out of Vietnam. But also monsters. Always monsters.
But sometimes listening to “Children of the Grave” doesn’t take me anywhere, it just makes me reflect on what’s happening now in the world and how little has changed. The young are still sacrificed by the old to fight and die in wars and worlds which aren’t of their making. And they are still fighting despite this to “show the world that love is still alive, you must be brave.”
And then there still other times when I look beyond the lyrics and just feel the passion, anger and search for hope that’s there in the music alone.
And that’s just one of Black Sabbath’s songs. You see why I had to write a book after listening to them, right?
Read Part 2
Kind of a self-mutilating hula hoop thing going here. Into it.
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today we have cannibalistic food mascots. How fucking brutal is that? How perverse and defiant even? How very goddamn metal. You can hear the chugging riffs behind it.
Also, does this ever entice anyone to eat the food product being advertised? Is it supposed to assuage our guilt knowing that the animal wants us to eat it? That it's willing to cut us the first slice? That we're dining on Stockholm Syndrome meat?
Okay, not gonna lie; kind of what some pork chops now. Maybe there's something to it.
Here's some more fun:
He's licking his lips; he can't wait to start tearing himself apart after giving himself the ketchup Moz look. Meat is indeed murder.
Are we to understand that this is a cyclops cow? Is that why he's doing this? Taking off your hind legs is not going to make you look more normal, dude. Stop doing this.
Of course the so-called bottom feeders are the classiest of the bunch. Also, look at the size difference between the serving lobster and his friends on the plate -is he feeding the other crustacean children? Did he cook younglings? Younglings!
My new heavy metal horror novel An Augmented Fourth comes out this June.
To mark the occasion I'm going to bring you '"Found Metal" on Fridays.
Found Metal is pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Today we have swimming, swimming pool gymnastics.
Somehow this is metal.
Metal as fuck.
Here's a video with more evidence: Click Me.
You can preorder the novel here.
LitReactor was kind enough to put my upcoming book on their list “The 16 Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2017” so I suppose the cat’s out of the bag, let's talk about this thing. I'm happy to announce that my next book An Augmented Fourth will be here in June and published by the well-intentioned reprobates of Word Horde.
“Great title, what the hell is an augmented fourth?”
Alright, here you go:
Augmented Fourth: Also known as the “The Devil’s Chord,” “diabolus in musica,” and“The Devil’s Interval.”
· A type of tritone used in musical compositions for harmonic and melodic dissonance and to avoid traditional tonality.
· This tritone has appeared in Western music for hundreds of years. For its dark and often unsettling sound the augmented fourth was supposedly banned by churches in the Middle Ages.
That hackle-raising musical cue that’s been in scary movie music since forever ago, chances are what you thinking of is an example of an augmented fourth. Since this is a novel very much about music and very, very much about being scared, the title fits perfectly.
We’re still conjuring up the artwork for the book (update, Alan M. Clark done conjured it) so I don’t have anything on that front to share yet but I will tell you a little about the work. The shorthand is that An Augmented Fourth is Black Sabbath meets The Thing. But the further truth is that while it is that it’s also its own thing. Pun neutral. To quote from John Carpenter’s aforementioned masterpiece “It’s weird and pissed off, whatever it is.”
I’m going to keep it mostly mysterious for now but I will tell you the book involves the following:
Four individuals trapped in a snowed in hotel.
One of which, our narrator, is the bass player for the legendary, seminal heavy metal band Frivolous Black.
None of the four trapped in the hotel are exactly what they appear to be.
One might not even be human.
*Cue sizzle reel.
I’m going to be posting some more info about the book when I feel like It, including artwork, proper synopsis and even a contest and some other clever bits of coercion. Check back at this space for more of that as well as a series of essays I’ll be doing about some of the inspirations for this work including my favorite old metal albums. We’re gonna be talking Sabbath a whole damn lot. So get used to it.
Also I’ll be routinely dropping some “Found Metal” artifacts on you. This will be pop culture stuff I’ve dredged up from the corners of my mind and mother internet that aren’t explicitly heavy metal in and of themselves but nevertheless they still possess that unnameable thing that makes something metal. Some things just have that connotation with them and it’s hard to say exactly why. Metal is one of those things that’s impossible to define exactly but you know it when you see it.
Case in point this Nintendo Power cover:
Metal as fuck.
My book will be the same.
Permalink
I’ve been meaning to read Jones for a while now and I’m glad I finally did. Short stories collections are a great way to dip your toes into an author’s pool and see if you like the water and, to belabor the metaphor, I found myself splashing about and doing cannonballs pretty much instantly with this collection.
Jones delivers fifteen weird horror stories that stick to your skull like a peanut butter pop song. The hooks are big, irresistible and obvious but only after the fact. Not that I’d call this bubblegum horror, each story despite the supernatural and bizarre trappings, revolves around real human emotion and the private fears and joys that make people what they are.
And according to Jones here, sometimes what people really are is monstrous.
Not that there is a hard lined nihilist edge running through this work, more like what makes us great as a species; our limitless imagination, is also why we’re so often doomed to tragedy. Basically, the shit we come up with. As a species and as individuals. Many of the characters in this collection can’t help themselves. They pick at scabs, they poke at sleeping dogs, and they obsess about things which are beyond their control. Because the realization that they have no control is the scariest conclusion of all.
One of my favorite yarns in here is called “The Spider Box” and it’s all about losing something important and finding something else that you think can give you back what you lost. Only it’s wild and you only got it to work once on accident but you know, just know, that if you can figure it out you can get back everything you’ve lost. Even what this new obsession has stolen from you...
Little vague for you? Well, I don’t want to spoil the fun. And there is fun throughout this book. Morbid humor, plain silliness, clever turns of phrases, all there to relieve you from the shadows and maybe to let you enjoy how big and spooky the echo of your laughter sounds bouncing back off the walls of the abyss.
A lot of the ideas infecting these stories are something like that last, unexpected, uninvited and unsettling thought that grips you just as you’ve gotten cozy in your bed, fluffed your pillow to the preferred position and prepared to drift off to a comfortable sleep. Those eerie, taffy stretched thoughts when you’re too tired to rationalize them away. This is book is full of them, only you have a writer like Stephen Graham Jones to articulate them into steely sharp focus. It’s like having him transcribe your nightmare back to you only he’s punched up the dialogue and fixed all those nagging plot holes.
What I really enjoyed here was watching Jones masterfully know when to give us explanations and when to leave it weird. Sometimes when authors are fashioning surreal or dreamlike stories they can rely too heavily on, it doesn’t have to make sense because it’s all so fucking crazy. Sometimes that’s great, but often it just seems like, again, someone telling you their really whackadoo dream which is cool I suppose but not a compelling story. In this collection there is plenty of mystery and unnatural events but none of them seem like they’re at all carelessly presented. When the scene calls for high weirdness, Jones delivers. Likewise, when it calls for an inkling of a reason behind the madness or even a full on explanation Jones comes through again. “Doc’s Story” - a gutpunch in the middle of the book and another favorite of mine – tells you right from the first sentence that it’s about werewolves. And half the charm of it is it explains various part of werewolf lore in really inventive and convincing ways.
I’m also a sucker for working class horror because it’s just easier for me to relate to. Many of the characters here either didn’t go to college or didn’t get far after and I enjoy seeing their stories handled in varied, nuanced ways. Well-written fiction, what people think of as literary- more often than not centers on people who can afford to go on vacations to other countries to take their minds off of their existential woes. Which is great, do it if you can, read about if you like it (sometimes I do too) but I also like seeing stories about people who work in warehouses or at Circle K’s who are living paycheck to paycheck while also worrying about life itself and their place in it.
Which comes back to the notion of control and what After the People Lights Have Gone Off seems to obsess about itself. Take my favorite story here, “The Black Sleeve of Destiny,” it’s about a teenage kid working a shit job who gets a black hoodie at a thrift store. I know, already scary right, but it’s no ordinary hoodie, one of the sleeves is longer than the other. Complete terror, how I did muster the courage to finish it? It’s as if the story started out a refugee from Goosebumps, then it graduated to Fear Street and now it’s a resident of Pissed Myself with Abject Horror-Ville. But, trust me, stories aren’t just the setups, they’re the follow-throughs. See, the sleeve grants the main character a little bit of power - something crazy you’d never think of so stop trying to guess – but of course with these types of stories it’s power but at a price. But this main character, he can see where this is headed, can tell he’s out of his league, that he actually has no real control, but he likes the feeling of power the sleeve grants him. The illusion of control is that comforting even when it’s a known quantity. Maybe that’s the “Destiny” in the title? If we know we can’t have control is the best runner up the agreed upon lie that we do?
The title of the book, after all is After the People Light Have Gone Off. A lyrical, brilliantly childlike or even inhuman sort of title; and above all, a title which hints at the apocalyptic. A post human world to be inherited by things that need no illusion of control.
You can purchase the bookhere.
What if it was always night?
What if the sun never came up again? How could the world continue without sunlight? Life needs it to survive but what if there was an alternative?
More importantly: How could I make Green Lantern actually cool? Because Green Lantern sucks.
Not sorry.
green-lantern.jpg
I’ve never liked the guy or his mythos. And out of all these questions that’s the one that really started all this.
Lumen began as a creative challenge to myself, if I was given the job of retooling Green Lantern and making that character interesting to me how would I do it? What would I keep, what would I throw out?
Turns out I’d throw out everything but the lantern.
Because a hero or an explorer with a lantern, for me, that works. That’s primal. Hell, that’s the tarot.
But before this story and its hero started coming together in my mind there was one other idea that I’ve had percolating for a long time: I’ve always thought that illustrated video game instructional manuals were an undervalued art form.
I remember being a kid and pawing through my cousin Ben’s Zelda manual and be totally taken in by the artwork and storytelling therein. I was 7 or 8 and had never heard of The Hobbit so to me Zelda was my first big introduction to fantasy storytelling; at least beyond the Greek Myths I’d read and heard about in school. The format of the manual stuck to me. I have a love for it like I love my album artwork and liner notes for my favorite albums. And as a kid some of the first stories I’d create were video games in my mind. I’d draw out the levels and the characters and keep all the pictures together in big stacks. Those were my manuals.
Well, I got a little better at drawing since then and I have written a couple novels, so maybe it was time to try creating another make believe video game?
Which brings me to Lumen. This project is still far out but I’m really excited to start the conversation about it. I don’t wanna reveal too much of the story as I think it’s better to learn that from the manual itself but here’s the basics:
Lumen is the story of Esteban Vela. A young man living in a world of perpetual and unnatural darkness. The world has been this way for a millennium, the sun is now a myth. All after a falling star called “The Burning Beast” collided with the planet, destroying the empires of man and changing the atmosphere with a mysterious new layer known as “The Shroud.” The Shroud is what keeps the world permanently in the dark. But in addition to throwing the world into shadows the Burning Beast also provided the new source of light and life for those lost in the dark. Lumen, a sort of land algae that emits a powerful glow begins to grow from the deeply imbedded core of the Burning Beast and into the rest of the world. This “Heart of Lumen” becomes the source of all light and life in the Shroud covered world which comes to be known as the “Nocterra.” Lumen is a living, harvestable substance with many uses and many of its characteristics and workings still not fully understood. Under its new light the world changes, new things grow. Some of them dangerous to the remaining humans...
Under The Shroud with the light of Lumen evolution becomes rapid and humanity finds itself rivals with new races better suited to live in the Nocterra. Anglermen, feral and carnivorous beasts who use the spindly glowing lures growing from their backs to entice foolish humans hunting for Lumen in the wild, wait in the shadows. And while they are fearsome the anglers are only the most well known of the dangers as so much of the Nocterra remains unexplored by what remains of humanity.
And what remains has changed... To better survive the Nocterra people have evolved to possess night eyes which shine in the night like the eyes of other nocturnal mammals.
Civilization has changed as well, survival has become key and most of the human world lives under the protection of the Nocterra Kingdom and its Lumen lit walls. But there are others who live outside the safety of castle walls. Hermits and madmen, ravagers and rebels. And of course the poor. Esteban Vela is sixteen years old and living outside the wall of the castle when he hears whispers that the Lumen is dying. Everywhere the glow is leaving. Panic hits and humanity rushes out into the dark to gather all the Lumen they can carry while it still lasts and the anglers lick their lips and wait to devour them all.
One night Esteban sees a falling star, a small burning star of Lumen and he runs after it. Whether to use it for himself, to keep him alive in his cave or maybe to barter with to get him access inside the kingdom walls? He doesn’t have much time to think, he simply runs after the star. And when he finds it he also finds a strange suit of armor and a lantern. And that’s when the game begins...
Lumen is going to be illustrated instructional manual for an 8-Bit video game on the Alucinari Game System released in 1987. It’s going to be full color, have tons of awesome character designs, action scenes, item catalogs, maps, lists of bosses, allies, levels, dungeons (calling ‘em calabozos in this game) and tons of other stuff. They’ll be tons of crazy weird art and two stories: The first, the story of Lumen that unfolds as you play the game. The second, the story of Lumen the game and its console The Alucinari Game System and its sordid, controversial and possibly occult history.
That’s the idea at least.
Here's some more rough sketches and idea fuel:
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Here's some inspiration behind Esteban's armor:
spider-man-2099-marvel-comics-ohara-a
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samus
Oh, and:
nyasl
And back to some more weird stuff of mine:
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better-5
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The season is upon us. I've been keeping busy during Inktober and a lot of the art I've been producing has been horror themed, mostly by accident, I'm just a spooky dude like that. A lot of the rest has been working out ideas for my upcoming project Lumen. Here's some of the ink drawings I've been doing. Most of the stuff has been on a much smaller scale but this Godzilla up first is appropriately gigantic. (Less gigantic, me in my underwear...damn, self-burn.)
Here's some of concept art for Lumen, the dude with the triangle head mask is Esteban Vela, our hero. Those angler men from up above also belong to this project.
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Let me begin by stating that I was once like you: After watching the first episode of the Netflix original series Stranger Things I was reduced to a deeply smitten 10-year-old who had just landed their first kiss. Honestly after just watching the Stephen King paperback style title sequence I was already writing Stranger Things’ name all over my trapper keeper and practicing introducing myself to people as Mrs. Stranger Things. How could I not fall for this show? It was an homage to everything I ever loved growing up. But, turns out, that’s all it was.
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Simply Recreating What Inspires You Isn’t Actually All That Inspiring
At first it was really fun catching all the overt and subtle references to various 80s movies and books sprinkled throughout Stranger Things. But like that cool guy who you meet at a party that knows all the same film quotes as you...that shit gets old quick. Because after the fifth Big Lebowski quote in a row it hits you: That’s what he does. “That’s all that he does!” Christ, now you’re doing it too. He just keeps quoting movies and when you call him on it he responds with, “Well, that’s just like your opinion, man?”
So initially when the telekinetic Carrie/ Firestarter cocktail named Eleven wandered into frame I couldn’t have been happier. Ditto for her predilection toward Eggo waffles, a nod to another of her progenitors, E.T., an alcoholic from outer space who took to Reese’s Pieces and Coors Beer and once got a ten-year-old psychically drunk.
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But pretty quickly this whole Chris Farley Show-esque “Remember when E.T. made those bikes levitate...that was AWESOME” shtick became tedious. Yes, I loved Nightmare on Elm Street, It, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stand By Me and Altered States too but is constantly recreating various elements from these works all you’ve got going for your story?
Not Having Anything New To Say About What Came Before Just Reminds Me How Much Better Before Was
Even if you’re the world’s best imitation artist you’re still just going to be the world’s second best actual artist. Get me? Yes, the show’s creators the Duffer Brothers have a fine eye for the trappings of niche genre and for cinematic minutia. But they never really put their own spin on any of this raw material or reshape it into something that feels fresh or exciting. Yes, remixing old and disparate elements when done well can result in compelling and groundbreaking work; take what Tarantino does routinely or what most of hip hop is built on for positive examples. But there’s a huge difference between the inspired sampling of say The Bomb Squad or Dr. Dre and the unimaginative, just add a new drum machine behind it sampling of Puff Daddy. Stranger Things just regurgitates old tried and true Stephen King and Spielberg stuff and guess what, nobody can do old Stephen King and Spielberg stuff better than them and they already did it.
All the Stories that Stranger Things Emulates Are about Something, Stranger Things is just about those Movies and Books
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Monsters, like the heroes they fight with, work best when they stand for something. Pennywise the clown sticks with us because he represents fear itself as well as fear of self; the change and uncertainty of adolescence. Likewise, the xenomorph from Alien will forever haunt us not just because of its pez dispenser from hell double mouth; but because it’s a rape metaphor tucked inside male fragility and pregnancy themed body horror. (Geez, Giger and the gang really covered a lot of ground didn’t they?) But the Demogorgon from Stranger Things what does it represent? Nothing, just a halfway cool looking design reject from Silent Hill or the crowd shot of a monster bar in a Del Toro film.
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And it’s not just the monsters, E.T. according to Spielberg was actually about his own parents divorce.
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Ditto for the crumbling family at the center of his companion piece Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Absent fathers and struggling, burnt out mothers are the hearts of many of these stories. We get tips of the hat to several of these notions in Stranger Things, we do, but they feel like only surface skims. The friendship expressed by the D and D playing foursome and their inclusion of Elle pale in comparison to the camaraderie and frankly the chemistry of the kids in The Goonies or Stand By Me.
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It looks like the Duffers tried to emulate their heroes in a lot of ways but the results prove that they merely understand the bare bones of why these characters from old horror and science fiction still resonant or what motivates any of these characters. The one exception interestingly being Sheriff Hopper, a character who feels the least like a call back or composite of characters from other stories. Oh, and Douchebag Steve. Gotta admit, I kinda love Douchebag Stevie. He’s the anti-Ducky, the reverse Troy with the bucket from Goonies. His arc was one real effort of the Duffers to consciously buck genre trends and give us a curveball and instead of coming off contrived this change made the character seem much more real. Team Douchebag Steve all the way.
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80s Movies Commented on 80s Concerns, does our Obsession with Nostalgia Comment on our Times?
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The real monsters of Stephen and Steven’s mythic suburbia were allegorical. Whether it was fear of nuclear war, fear of small towns dying out or fear of the disintegration of the American family, these were stories of their times. Stranger Things is a period piece but it forgets that all period pieces can’t help but comment on the times in which they were actually made. Because they are, no matter how much they fight it by adding film grain to their digital shots, just that: stories of their times.
So why not embrace that a bit and use the past to comment on the present as well as the times you’re depicting? Unfortunately Stranger Things doesn’t really do either and inadvertently gives us a telling lesson on the nostalgia addicted times we’re currently living through:
We long for the past imagined, like we always have. Not the actual past, mind you, but our idea of the past. Currently we long for that simpler, pre-internet time where we believe that while we were less widely connected as a whole we were also much closer connected to one another. Friendships carried more weight and you didn’t have to wear dorky helmets when you rode your bike.
But the Duffers didn’t intend for any of this insight about our current times, there are no real references or metaphors to the intrusiveness of constant artificial connection. If their concept of upside down is meant to be one then it’s handled sloppily. Because there are no apparent juxtapositions in the show between how the world we imagined 1980 was against how it really was. And if the characters have already failed to be more than cardboard simulacrums of our favorites from the past then even if this subtle message was encoded in the 8 episodes of this show would we even care enough to sift through it to find it?
Failure to Engage the Intended Audience
Not everything is meant for me. Thank god. But I’m reasonably certain that when the Duffer Brothers created Stranger Things the core audience they were looking to attract with it might look a helluva lot like me. I’m a 34 year old white American guy who cut his geek teeth mainlining Stephen King books and Spielberg and John Carpenter movies. It’s a safe venture that I’m the target audience here. Because, not for anything else, Stranger Things, like a lot of art was made by its creators primarily for themselves and subsequently for people like them. People who came up in the 80s when this sort of storytelling was commonplace and whose lives, upbringing and fantasies were reflected in the middle class humdrum settings depicted therein.
80s movies and books featuring posses of misfit kids mounting their bicycles in a quest to destroy certain evil or maybe just help out a lovable Coors pounding, otherworldly good ol’ boy with glowing Twix candy bars for fingers; that is my shit. It’s a formula I can fall for every time. Even the knockoff stuff. Sure, there were some Mac and Mes, some Prehysterias in there that I’d waste some time on but there were also gleaming weird gems like Monster Squad (Goonies 2: Wolfnards) and Watchers (A Dean Koontz penned, Corey Haim arthouse movie about a dog with a telepathic link to a murder yeti.) And both these knockoffs were better than this show.
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I’m fully aware that right now Stranger Things is enjoying great success. That’s great, a lot of work was put into it. And I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be curious if Season 2 of the show might not improve on the problems with this season and at least have the creators forge ahead with more of their own voice and personality in the final product. But I don’t know if they will from what I’ve seen with this existing season. And if season 2 is more of the same I have the feeling that more will come around to my view of the show as an impressive but ultimately hollow imitation of better stories from the 80s. All that being said I will however watch the shit out of a spin-off revolving around the further adventures of Douchebag Steve and Winona Ryder in her adorably tiny hazmat suit as they contend with the issues which confront young douchebags and single moms alike.
Basically the show will be about teen pregnancy.
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just-okay
I'm working on a series of these, big giant statues of characters and people whose work I enjoy being excavated and repelled down by little figures with ropes and tools. You have to look closely to see them but they're there crawling around like little doozers on the massive statues.
Here are the drawings without digital color:
This idea started with me doing the next image, which is just a character of my own creation. I liked the idea of it and thought I could do various already established characters in the same way.