2nd place in Derby #141: Classic Comics Style with 770 votes!
Dan, thanks so much for meeting with me today. I’ll get right to the pitch. It’s present day England. Right? Right? Dark enough for you yet? It’s England and our hero is meeting is female counterpart for a little “team up” in one of those cool red phone booths. And they have to go to England because they’re cheating! That’s right, Dan, cheating! Isn’t that cutting edge? These two powerful people, driven together because of their adult physical needs that only two aliens raised as human can accept. Because that’s what they are, Dan. They’re outsiders. Forget the fifty-some years establishing them as people happy to be American, because that’s clearly a misunderstanding of the central idea which was perverted by jingoism from the start. In a world like ours, they’d be the outsiders, so let’s start with that. I’m thinking we have the artist picture Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. Two people, willing to do what it takes to feed that dark place inside of them that only the outsider can ever really know.
So here’s what I’m thinking. They’re in England to give each other tattoos, just kind of having fun on a cosmic scale, and they duck into a phone booth, you know, Sid and Nancy style. They’re undressing and then the passion just hits them, you know, right there in the phone booth. They’re raw, brutal, forgetting all loyalties. Then, after, they accidentally mix up their costumes… but they like it! And now, they begin to question their own genders, you know, and that’s an allegory for today, where our six remaining readers are constantly wanting us to push to the edge of what comics can do as long as it doesn’t actually require any real issues to be considered. Oh! Dan! I just got this great idea! While they’re in the phone booth, a busload of little kids goes by, and just explodes! In a three page fold out! And they don’t even notice because of their passion and everyone is too scared to tell them! Then, a year from now, we can do an arc called “Redemption” and have them talk to the zombies and make it clear there are no long term consequences because it wasn’t really their fault. Because that’s what literature is, the exploration of adult themes like zombie children and wild sex and…hey, what’s that on your desk?
A what? A novel? By Salman Rushdie? About the human condition as explained through metaphor? It won the Booker Prize? But no Eisner, huh? Hey, look, if that’s your thing, good for you, but I don’t see how you can handle something so unrealistic. Now, if you aren’t in a hurry, I’d like to talk to you about my idea for having the hero fall in love with a huge breasted catgirl who is constantly in heat. I think once it becomes clear I’m just writing it as a metaphor for the outdated idea of the secret identity, it’ll really turn into the Maus of today. If I could just move that novel of yours… oof. Seriously, that Rushdie guy wasted over a thousand pages on this crappy idea? Did he at least ask George Perez to do the cover? No? Man, how do you even endure that swill?
Wear this shirt: when having a Midlife Crisis. Worlds will live! Worlds will die! Someone will buy a Jaguar!
Don’t wear this shirt. Instead, put it immediately in an archival quality plastic bag and save it in an acid-free longbox. Then wait for us to release the trade a year from now!
This shirt tells the world: “Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an alternate reality!”
We call this color: Roy-El Blue
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