One of my favorite news stories of the year had to do with the Large Hadron Collider’s history of bad luck, ranging from the kind of technical/machine errors you just expect when trying to operate your typical supercollider in peace to outright things exploding and possible terrorism.

Considering the LHC’s importance as a player on the stages of both the scientific community and those that fear its very existence is an affront to GOD or simply a hideous threat to the existence of existence, its easy to see how a “run of bad luck” could be blown up into something much more dramatic, depending on your point of view.

The thought of the LHC inadvertently generating a black hole that sucks first the screaming, suddenly-enlightened scientists in, followed by the rest of the furious planet, is as fun as anything Roland Emmerich can make a shitty fucking movie about, but that’s not the best of it. No, the real good stuff came later, when some physicist fellows, respected as usually not being part of the “God is angry that you’re playing with his train set” group, proposed something far more wonderful sounding.

They proposed that the Higgs boson particle, the very pot’o'gold that the LHC was created to detect, to discover really, the particle that is very handy at deleting phantoms that spring forth from your mind when you’re in orbit around Solaris, is so abhorrent to whatever mechanism keeps the universe in order that it has been sabotaging the success of the LHC, effectively slapping our hands as we reach for those elusive, steaming hot rolls on the dinner table. No Higgs boson for you, bitch! SLAP! Its very discovery would be the genesis of it triggering its undiscovery, keeping the universe nice and safe from those dirty, jam-smeared hands.

Much in the way that that theory proposes that God or the Universal Balance Machine simply cannot allow the the Higgs boson particle to be discovered by the LHC, I’ve a theory that that same entity finds the idea, the very thought of a reality in which I, your humble absurdist, have had a hand in the creation of a video game, to be against the very laws of nature.

To think that I could be an ingredient in a potential doomsday scenario is about as romantic a thought as I can conjure up, but at the end of the day, when tucked quietly into my bed, damp from the incessant sobbing, I cannot help but feel slighted somewhat, as I had no say in my participation in something that keeps me from doing something I’d love doing – Making awesome video games!

“How did you come up with this theory, Jhonen?” you ask me, your attire offending my eyes and your manner making it obvious you grew up on message boards instead of in front of actual human beings that can tell when you’re an unholy mistake of a presence, and I’d tell you it is a long story before hitting you with a bat and calling the police to get you out of my house.

I’d say the story started a few years back when I was approached by a group of guys working on a huge, soulless monster of a project over at Shiny Entertainment. I won’t name so many names here, but Shiny is no longer with us, sadly, so we can poop on them for the most part).

Shiny, to me, was one of those companies that stood for original, if not always successful, game ideas with a leaning towards the bizarre. In the case of Earthworm Jim, their most popular series, not only did you come away with a sense of having just experienced something that stood away from the crowd, you also got a sense of PERSON, that there was some identity to the game as a whole, and that the creation of that thing was perfectly in sync with a love for making that thing coupled with the skill to make it right.

Shiny in its final years, however, was not that shiny. They had become more known for licensed games than anything, with Enter the Matrix being what these guys were working on at the time when they showed up, a burning umbilical of unsatisfying grey/blue textures trailing them, characterless and leading back to their offices. The idea was to put a package together pitching a game that hearkened back to the Shiny of old, something original, fun, and not just a little fucked up. I was about as excited as I get (about 2.5 exciteds), and started running my brain on the matter of what sort of game would I love not only to play, but to help make.

This guy was going to yell at you a lot.

We’d meet up, discuss gameplay character, I’d do some sketches of main characters like Boss of the character you controlled.  You can tell he’s the boss because he’s got a tie on, see?  My favorite bit about this guy’s design was that his head was actually being held up by a neck comprised of arms jutting up from his collar, working him like puppet.  Oh, the times we had, eating, laughing, throwing up and then laughing some more.  We were all very capable types, all having been quite successful at what we do in our own worlds, and now we were joining forces!

I'm not even sure you deserved all the yelling.

I believe it was at E3 shortly after this process had begun that the announcement was made – Shiny was being swallowed up by the piebald creature named Atari. The conference took place on an old wooden platform upon which many were shot to death, so ending whatever could become of that project of ours. I hope those guys are happy and successful wherever they landed!

I could sit here and detail more stories, but I realize they’d just be duplicates of what I just wrote: Developer approaches me, we have fun coming up with ideas, artwork starts happening, and then developers are eradicated by layoffs or are chopped in half by madmen in malls with samurai swords.

Even just writing for games, a thing I’ve been approached about on several occasions, goes that same direction. This sort of thing happens all the time in film and television, and with games it’s no different, only its slightly more off-putting.

If you’ve ever played a videogame with any semblance of a story in it, you know what I mean when I say most writing in games is about on par with what you’d get when your cat walks across your keyboard, only not nearly as awesome. Of course, you can have a fine time playing a game that has bad writing for the fact that what you’re doing is playing a game, not playing the writing, but being a writer sure as hell makes the experience of sitting through some of the worst dialogue around maybe a bit more hideous than for most.

Then there are those moments where the controller sags in your hands, the character on screen having just spewed something inspired by maybe someone’s latest MW2 team deathmatch experience, though perhaps lacking its raw poetry, and you realize…someone wrote this…and got PAID for it. Someone is making a living being a “writer” of this stuff. And as games get more and more expensive, you begin to see more promotion for the various aspects of the game creation process, including a celebration of its writing as being above and beyond the call of duty for what you’d expect in a game.

I love the writer getting attention and writing in general being celebrated, but the payoff is never as sweet as the setup, and playing the game with this so-called elevation of the games-writing art is usually proof. We’re still several hundred years away from bridging the gap between Full Metal Jacket and Gears of War 2, not that I don’t think Coltrain’s sassy mouthoffs aren’t worth getting tattooed all over my face so people know I’m a connoisseur of the literary arts.  That’s not to say I would sit through five minutes of that last Indiana Jones movie when I could get actual joy from just listening to the great writing read by great voice actors in just one cutscene from either Drake’s Fortune game.

Thing is, I don’t play Gears of War 2 for the writing, because I’m quite happy to blow the face off something big and toothy so long as it feels good, but when the lead-up to a game includes touting its epic storyline and movie-quality writing, SOME part of my brain starts to wonder just what the hell happened to the evidence of this while shooting faces off and listening to something even the cats are sneering at. No I don’t have cats, but I often borrow some for testing, and yes they can sneer (if yours don’t then yours are awful). My co-op experience with the game was spent having fun with the actual game, and taking turns groaning and bitching about the things the characters were saying, wishing it was done well or wishing it was so ridiculous it was funny.

So I’ve been in situations where I could have been that guy responsible for making players angry with dialogue they found to be hideous, but end up, for whatever reason (usually my face) not getting the job. I don’t really hold grudges where games are concerned and I end up playing the game anyhow when it comes out, only to be horrified by what was deemed more suitable for something that now sounds like it was written by things cats would eat. It is on those occasions that I wish the Universal Balance Machine would have kicked in and annihilated the person making the call on who writes and who does not.

This leads me to believe that the scenario feared by such a Machine involves me not just creating a game, but having anything to do with gaming at all.

There are a few technical exceptions, but in those cases I am only involved indirectly, and had no hand in the creation of the games at hand. Such examples would be those wonderfully forgettable party games that included ZIM characters in them. There’s no actual personal offense taken by the existence of those things, as, like solar rays or dust or kneecaps, they are a simple byproduct of the machinery of the cosmos, brought into being by no conscious decision whatsoever. That or they exist as a deal between corporate entities to perpetuate the the presence of the screaming abyss formed entirely by licensed games that nobody gives a god shit about, including the people making them.

This easter egg message was the only cool thing in the game.

Related, however, is a rumor I heard way back when, while ZIM was still twitching in its pool of blood, making people uncomfortable with its death spasms. Now, rumors being what they are, I take this one with a big ol hunk of rock salt, but my hindsight, wearing enormous, gadget heavy goggles powered by my awareness of the universe keeping me and games creation from being friends, lends a bit of credence to the validity of this one in particular.

The rumor, stated as fact at the time, came from somebody that worked at THQ. THQ, if you’re aware of the gaming world, is one of the Titans of old that was overwhelmed by the newer, slicker gods of Olympus and forced into servitude to shit out a procession of games based on children’s cartoons, movies, and garden utensils. If someone else dreamed it up, THQ had to make a video game based on it, usually for the gameboy or Wii. There, in the checkout aisle of your local department store, you’d find these games nestled there on clearance amongst the Slim Jims and Big League Chew. You can actually hear the screams of the programmers for miles around the THQ complex, and it’s as cool as it is heartbreaking.

So the story goes that back before the ZIM and his Amazing Friend show was axed, that some guys at THQ, much like the beleaguered group of developers at Shiny, wanted to work on something they actually WANTED to work on, and proposed working on an INVADER ZIM game and were actually repelled by Nickelodeon, a company that has done a video game based on even the janitors that clean up their offices (available for the Nintendo DS). Those developers were then thrown out of the airlock, along with some copies of the Avatar: The Last Airbender game. This seems likely enough to me, though it IS just a rumor as far as I know, and my heart goes out to those poor prisoners trapped on the licensed game colony for invoking the effects of my video game curse.

I have a friend that once told me about a story of theirs in which the quality of the world was leaking out through a hole in reality, leaving only terrible, uninspired things to remain. I’m not saying I’ve a midas touch if actually left to complete something in the world of games, but to be pitted against such a horrific law of nature while time and resources DO get spent on things that nobody gives a good goddamn about, well that’s just criminal when I’d at least be glad to contribute something that would at least be infamous in its horrificness instead of just forgettable.

Okay, so why don’t I take the initiative and get away from these huge companies that should surprise no one when things fall apart or simply go nowhere? Layoffs happen and all manner of terrible things go on in these faceless monstrosities! It’s just business as usual at places like that. Why not focus on something much smaller and more manageable than dealing with multibillion dollar games companies that are driven by the business a bit more than the passion?  Already way ahead of you there, you presumptuous bastards!

J.R Goldberg and I. I dunno what they even are but they deserve a game.

On various occasions have I teamed up with little garage band efforts, guys who maybe did or currently DO work at those places, members of the purgatorial crews that you find in any endeavor like games making or animation, these people working on the stuff shoveled into your faces but who are in hell doing so. If you’ll allow a brief but potentially relevant diversion here…

Based on much of the communication I get from fans on the subject of animation I think is very applicable to the world of games creation as well. I don’t actually expect most of the world to know much at all about the process of getting something like an animated series made, and it’s not important in the grand scheme of things. Most things, other THAN the grand scheme matter at all, I imagine, so something like how one gets their television or theater entertainment is about as relevant as life, death, candy and this scalding hot tea I just spilled on myself. The pain and suffering of creation or hot tea on red flesh is simply unimportant in most cases, UNLESS you’re the person whose lifetime is spent on the other side, making this stuff for the people or existing in a world where hot tea on your lap IS the point.

I imagine that these people that write to me, or talk about me on their fantastically relevant message boards and whatnot, on the subject of my Invader ZIMtime show pictured me huddled over a desk, creating cartoon. CREATING cartoon. All myself. There’s absolutely no doubt about it when they ask me why this or that was so cool or so awful. My perception of the show, when I think about it, is more along the lines of thought when watching an orchestra do their thing, channeling their collective powers to play someone’s piece of music. Starting with the flaws and or greatness of the initial piece of music, each person contributes their strengths and weakness towards a final product, the very thing that gets fired into the ears of the listeners. A cartoon, my cartoon being no exception, is this wonder/horrible frankenstein’s monster of a thing, a shambling beast of joy and disappointment that one sometimes regrets having created, until it looks you in the eye and utters some awkward, adorable phrase that melts your heart and stays your hand from finally stabbing it to death.

The important thing there is that I simply could not have made that show, let alone even a SHORT without the help of so many others involved in allowing that process to be at all feasible. I was the idea, and I was no slouch in helping them see what it was they were to be using their powers on, but, in keeping with the the musical analogy, I was a musician that had no experience actually playing the horns, or strings, but the music was in me enough that other people could hear it and make it real. And that’s where I really got the sense that most of these guys, the board artists and cleanup guys and background painters and the like, all these people had come from places and projects they either hated or simply ignored the soul-sucking implications of.

Think about it…SOMEONE had to design that goddawful character speaking to you in a commercial for nasal spray. Some poor, melting fuck with bills to pay and a girlfriend that hates him for not being happy enough had to design, or even worse, clean up the lines that someone ELSE designed, for that singing bee in the ads for that suppository you know doesn’t work. Some woman, crying, remember the fun days of art college before her life was all about in-betweening this sequence where the dog farts on the cat. When someone actually THANKS you for giving them something fun to do after years of servitude like that, it really means something, and was probably the coolest thing anyone could say to me.

Back to the games, so yeah, these guys were THOSE people, the ones who just wanted to do something cool, but controllable in terms of scale. These were people making sure boxes fell right in that Fairly Oddparents whack-a-mole game, or keeping characters from walking through one another in some games they would walk away from easily and murder themselves, if not for the fact that lunch was in just an hour. I run into people like this every now and again, we get excited about a mutual love of making something unusual or just plain cool, and then a flaming 18-wheeler with the head of the Green Goblin mounted on the grill smashes through the wall and obliterates them before my very eyes.

“You guys work for Pandemic and want stuff to do on the side that you actually LIKE? You say you’re okay so long as you have your dayjob to keep you healthy financially if not spiritually?! Then let’s DO IT!” Next day in the news: PANDEMIC STUDIO EATEN BY ELDER GOD RISEN FROM THE SEA.

Hey guys! Let's have our next game meeting on a train! YEAHHH!

Several attempts at an iPhone game along those lines have ended with that same elder god rising and deciding game developer blood is just what he needs to settle his lil stomach rumblins.

I’ve only given you the real broad strokes for what I believe is some greater equational proof of the universe keeping itself safe by deflecting any and all attempts on my part to make something, anything, to be something that combats this leakage of quality from our known world, from making an all out game or just helping write on one so that the villain doesn’t say shit like “KILL THEM ALL.” Try “Kill all but THAT one, because I like her shoes. Anything. Just stop fighting me, universe!

What I’m saying, kids, is that I’m well aware of what it just might mean for the universe should I discover this gaming particle, and that I just don’t give a shit if it means the end of everything you know and love. I obviously don’t care how many game developers and hopeful types I kill along the way. I’m already speaking to you from a podium of corpses, dig, and they’re just falling dead from the sky by this point.

I’m not giving up anytime soon, dammit.

Contrary to what my neighbors will tell you, I am a man (mostly machine) of highly developed morals, and anyone that challenges that statement is just begging to be tied up and raped with the corpse of my neighbors’ cat. I’m just kidding, there – that lil guy’s still alive.

As evidence of this claim (the morality one, not the decree to molest people with a cat), I present you, dear reader, with an actual conversation I recently had with E. Gauger on the heady subjects of religion, criminal justice, and fusing the morbidly obese to couches.

People, big and small, fusing to inorganic matter has always been a point of fascination for me, and it just seemed appropriate to incorporate it into this vision of righteousness.

Anyhow, here, for you, is the conversation in its entirety. Read it with an open mind, an open heart, and maybe, just maybe you’ll learn a little something about science, the nature of man, and maybe even about yourself.

MANSOFA

EG: This will cheer you up:
EG: A 66-year-old church elder convicted of indecently assaulting a child will not be sent to jail because his obesity means his health is “precarious”.
EG: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8393463.stm
JV: they should hurt the old man.
EG: They really should.
EG: What will they do, put him under house arrest?
EG: He’s already obese, he never leaves anyway.
JV: they could make him even fatter.
JV: and sit him on a couch.
EG: Until he becomes ONE with the couch.
EG: Wheezing and suffocating under his own flesh.
JV: that’s right.
JV: and then televise his being airlifted from his house through the hole they had to cut out of the roof.
EG: And as they lift him, the weight of the la-z-boy to which he is attached is enough to pull the flesh off him.
EG: Like a well-cooked chicken.
JV: It’d help if they boiled him a bit before lifting then.
EG: Just keep the room real warm.
JV: Not fatally, of course.
JV: That’d just be sick.
EG: Or maybe get him a hot tub.
JV: No, no…they just boil him to loosen up the chub.
JV: good idea!
JV: A hot tub would help, certainly.
JV: Just so long as big clumps of flesh flop off, sort of like blubber from a rotting whale.
EG: I think it’ll work.
JV: We’ll see.
JV: It’s just the guy can’t be let off that easily.
JV: Sure he has his conscience to plague him, supposedly, but there’s a good chance this is such old business for him that this conviction is more a nuisance and that the man is even ANGRY about all this bother.
JV: So you have to make sure.
EG: He doesn’t care.
EG: He’s a clergyman.
JV: Make sure he suffers somehow.
JV: Exactly!
EG: He was molesting for something like twenty years.
JV: A clergyman.
JV: What better person to show the meaning of hell.
EG: This is like being caught at the end of a really long affair.
EG: Yeah it sucks your wife finally caught on.
EG: But at this point you just don’t feel BAD anymore.
JV: I didn’t feel bad when my wife found out.
JV: And I was even more obese than this guy.
JV: This is why I know what to do.
JV: Force feeding, and then a really fibrous couch.
EG: They knocked on his door and said, “Father O’Flabs, you’re under arrest for indecent liberties with a minor.”
EG: And he, from his motorized wheelchair, blinked wetly and said “What of it?”
JV: Get this: The couch has conductive metal fibers woven throughout it.
JV: You know why?
EG: A couch made of coffee sacks.
EG: Damp sacks.
JV: no, no..
JV: NO.
JV: You’re not even listening.
EG: Sack?
JV: I’ll punch your sack, woman.
JV: Anyhow, it’s a couch, and the metal fiber is in there as well.
EG: Go on.
JV: once he’s properly fused like a fat man should be to a couch, you can pass an electric current through the thing.
JV: Sure, you could just poke a fused man with a cattle prod or a taser, but then what would I do with this couch I made?
JV: Are you beginning to understand the beauty?
EG: He’d jiggle.
JV: This turns you on?
JV: Because it shouldn’t.
JV: It should be a jiggle of vengeance.
JV: A wobble of justice, dig?
EG: It would settle him farther into the weave.
JV: Hell, yes.
EG: Like shaking a bowl of cake mix through a sieve.
JV: Imagine it!
EG: I am!
JV: After enough time, he’d be so deeply fused with the sofa that just some fingers and his face would be visible in the thing.
EG: He would BECOME sofa.
JV: he would truly BE the couch, like some hideous Philadelphia Experiment craziness with a couch.
EG: “Sofa” as a classification of mass.
EG: A type of matter.
JV: Shit, you could then put Mansofa in a public place as further means of justice.
EG: Children would sit on him and make wishes.
EG: And giggle their cute giggles.
JV: So people sit on him and animals wizz on him and birds shit on him and so on and so forth ad infinitum.
JV: Children are the future, Eliza.
EG: And he wouldn’t be able to rip his squeezing arm off the couch to fondle them.
JV: The future torturers of the world.
EG: We have to raise them right.
JV: I’m not sure letting children sit on his face is a way of hurting him, ma’am.
JV: Maybe the kids could be wearing special gear before getting on him.
JV: Like, maybe someone with a box of gear to hand out, the way 3d glasses are distributed before a movie.
JV: Only instead of glasses, it’s spiked pants.
EG: Only children with poor bowel control are allowed to play on Mansoga.
EG: sofa
JV: No, he might like that.
EG: It would help with the slushing process, though.
JV: I really want to avoid him being cool with some of this stuff.
JV: I’d want to make sure that his skin had almost liquified, and that his body would have settled over the cushions the way thin dough settles over a woman’s face when you cover her face with dough.
JV: The way it conforms to the surfaces.
JV: That way his nerves are spread all around the couch.
EG: Pizza dough, the stretchiness.
JV: For MAXIMUM FEELING.
JV: How can we profit from this, though?
JV: And I don’t just mean the obvious Japanese sources of income for disgusting shit like this.
EG: Well.
EG: We can insulate him.
EG: And then sell jiggle rides.
EG: Like a heated waterbed that sloshes itself?
JV: You’re not thinking with horror, man.
JV: Remember, this man is serving his time for crimes against humanity.
EG: I KNOW.
EG: I’m thinking with the end goal in mind.
EG: Insulation will stew him up.
EG: Marinate.
JV: So upholster him?
EG: More like vacuum sealing.
JV: I was imagining he was more this Cronenbergian flesh-sofa.
EG: Yes, but the shocks would transmute to any uninsulated thing that came into contact with him.
EG: This is simply one torment on a rotation of horror.
JV: Well, okay. How about this?
EG: He should also have various foreign species introduced.
EG: Ants would be good.
JV: We obviously have different approaches we want to try here, so why don’t we each get an obese man and fuse him to a couch and then compare notes and see who gets the most hits on fuse-tube.
EG: No, I think we should just do them all. Draw up a schedule.
JV: I know a pretty morbidly obese guy that lives in this building, and he’s super nice, but I bet he’s hiding something worth torturing him for.
EG: Probably really great snacks.
JV: That way we can keep our subjects’ paths of horror pure in themselves.
EG: No.
EG: You aren’t getting it.
JV: Too late, yo.
JV: I just chloroformed him.
EG: Any one torture is going to build up resistance in the subject.
EG: You have to switch them out.
JV: Holy shit. You wouldn’t think someone this morbidly obese would be so HEAVY!
JV: WHEW!
JV: Alright, he’s on the couch, and crying. S’going well.
EG: Chloroform is no good…too dangerous.
JV: how long is this supposed to take?
EG: Stick with GHB or ambien.
JV: he doesn’t look too fused yet.
EG: The merge?
EG: Check the manual.
EG: Did you get an extended warranty?
JV: Ah, says to cut a few lil slices into his back so that the healing mingles with the fibers of the couch.
JV: Makes sense.
EG: Ah, yeah. See?
EG: It’s going great.
JV: Man, this is swell.
EG: Did you ask him about snacks yet?
JV: He says he doesn’t have any.
JV: Woulda been nice to east snacks while doing this.
EG: The first thing he should eat is that pumpkin. Fill it with sour cream.
JV: Oh, you mean for HIM?
EG: No.
EG: I mean he’s gotta have some. Check his apartment once he’s nice and fused.
EG: Don’t want him rolling down the hallway after you.
JV: As for feeding, I have a system I used back when I had a baby.
EG: Funneling corn mush to bloat the liver?
EG: And eating really nice foods in front of him.
JV: Nevermind where I got the baby from, k? So what I’d do is fill water balloons with beans or mashed potatoes, k?
JV: And then I’d just squeeze the stuff into his mouth.
JV: “HE” being the baby.
EG: I follow you so far.
JV: This was back when I was working for the government.
EG: And this got the desired result? With the baby, I mean?
JV: Working on project HUGE BABY.
JV: It was pretty good, but in the end they just ended up using that gigantism formula that was all the rage back in the 90’s.
EG: Yeah I had that injected into my ass.
JV: Everyone did.
EG: I had real bad ass punies and they wanted to make sure I was hitting all my proper growth marks.
JV: Everyone injected that into your ass.
EG: my god
EG: Probably should put a turkey thermometer in the fat guy.
JV: You worried about his temperature?
EG: I’m just big on collecting data. You know how I roll.
JV: Let’s not drop the religious angle, though.
JV: Remember, the guy’s a clergyman.
JV: Maybe on Sundays we display him at his church where his former congregation can see what his life of sin led him to.
EG: The guy stuck his hand up a little girl for ten years, it’s hard to imagine anything upsetting him.
JV: Ah, well, we could dress a bear up as Jesus and let him at him for a lil bit.
JV: Bears HATE sofas.
EG: But they love fatty food.
JV: And they can’t stand clergyman.
EG: True.
JV: Hell yes, it’s true.
JV: That’s how my dad died.
EG: Which is why bear mace is manufactured in a holy water bouillon base.
JV: He was a priest one day, and BAM: BEAR EATS HIM.
EG: But we saw your dad at Thanksgiving?
JV: What’s left of him, yeah.
JV: There was a lot more of him before that.
EG: He WAS pretty small.
JV: I’M pretty small.
JV: Makes me wonder if I was a priest once, m’self.
EG: Wait, aren’t you the obese clergyman?
JV: But enough philosophy, let’s get back to the matter at hand.
EG: Okay.
EG: The sofa matter.
JV: Eliza…aren’t we ALL the obese clergyman in our own way?
JV: Think about it…
JV: yeah…
EG: I think I read that.
EG: Or saw it in What the ^@%#&^!? Do We Know.
JV: Isn’t “The Obese Clergyman’ one of the scenarios used to train officers for wargames?
EG: It’s in that book the Secret, too.
JV: Games and Theory stuff, right?
EG: Yes, but the fat men in the training exercises are just blanks.
JV: I’d hope so.
EG: Well, no one should get hurt…
EG: Look, I need to use the restroom. Slide a sandwich under the door in about five hours, okay?

So, sorry if you came to be regaled by yet another incredible tale of me naked with naked plants – maybe some other time, eh? No, today is for a bit of a glimpse into the lesser seen of my lesser known sides, the comics side.

I’ve included a two pager, here fused into one tall page, that I did for someone’s musical collection album a few years back. They asked for pretty much whatever I wanted to do, so there was no real connection to any themes present in the album, which freed me up quite a bit. Honestly, I’m never very happy when people tell me to do a particular thing, and that tends to get me into a lot of trouble at grocery stores when asked to pay for all that stuff I plan on eating. Anyhow, the little comic was only included in a special edition of the album’s release and I figured the rest of the universe should check it out instead of those dirty types who get suckered into paying more for pretty much the same thing only with more pictures in it.

I hope you enjoy it and share it with your kids when they’re old enough to start resenting you for your questionable tastes.

Click on the preview to really get in on the action, yeah?

The Horror. The Horror

I’m not sure why it took so long to come to this, but Aaron A. has put his considerable talents to monstrous use to create this terrifying print depicting the Ham Chamber Horror as written about in the Ham Chamber Manifesto several years ago. Grab a piece of one of the darkest chapters in our collective history over at Aaron’s Etsy store.

What follows is the original Ham Chamber post as detailed back when the world was still young and Michael Jacksons still roamed the Earth.

2006

Enter the Ham Chamber
A work update is impending, but I felt it important to share with you jerks some truths that needed to be told: Truths that became known while having a conversation with Aaron A. some months ago that I’ve been sitting on until the time was right.

Actually, this is more the result of two minds under the grip of the love of bullshitting, but if there’s any insight in it for you, then so be it. It all begins with a conversation about Mike Mignola’s Amazing Screw on Head animated pilot on the SciFiChannel’s website that everyone should have watched and voted thumbs up for. From there, it all goes to hell.

0:31:52 Aaron A.: Hmm. Rikki said Screw On Head was coming on right now, but I don’t see it. I think he is on acid.
0:32:19 Jhnen V: rikki is generally drunk.
0:32:58 Jhnen V: on ham.
0:33:10 Jhnen V: christmas hams from several seasons back.
0:33:12 Aaron A.: It’s sick, isn’t it. Ham drunks.
0:33:28 Aaron A.: He just tears the top off and guzzles the liquefied innards.
0:33:36 Jhnen V: he ages them in barrels he buries under his yard.
0:34:13 Jhnen V: then, when it rains, he burrows, naked, into the mud and brings up his rotting booty.
0:34:27 Aaron A.: Giggling the whole time. Full of pig-glee.
0:34:53 Jhnen V: it’s a horrifying scene to anyone who happens upon it
0:34:58 Aaron A.: He likes when his own bodily juices mix with the ham.
0:35:29 Jhnen V: So he’s in there, twisting and writhing while just letting everything go into the mix…sweat, blood, piss and shit.
0:35:38 Jhnen V: stirring it up with his contortions.
0:36:42 Aaron A.: His juices age it ten years all at once. It’s important to age it like a fine wine.
0:38:15 Jhnen V: when the feeding is done, he just curls up there, the mud covering him, and drying as the day comes. He goes into a sort of torpor until the next ham season.
0:38:54 Jhnen V: sometimes, he is found by miners who break open rocks, only to find a still-living rikki in there, ravenous and screaming.
0:39:03 Aaron A.: He’s kind of like one of those buried guys in Motel Hell.
0:39:15 Aaron A.: Just gurgling of ham.
0:39:21 Jhnen V: I’ve always thought that about him, yeah.
0:40:03 Aaron A.: Why are there miners in Rikki’s yard?
0:41:12 Jhnen V: he oversleeps.
0:41:20 Jhnen V: and entire ages pass.
0:41:30 Jhnen V: but always, in these ages, there is ham.
0:41:30 Aaron A.: That’s some well-aged ham, then.
0:43:18 Aaron A.: After so many epochs, only Rikki is man enough to eat it and live.
0:43:35 Jhnen V: he’s built up both a tolerance and a need.
0:43:59 Aaron A.: He’s sort of like a very specific vampire who can only feed once every millennia.
0:44:20 Jhnen V: his gut is this huge ham-burning engine, reminiscent of old train engine rooms.
0:44:49 Aaron A.: The ham is hard like coals.
0:45:28 Jhnen V: As a child, his parents would just leave him in a room with a terrified pig. They’d lock the door and run, crying and holding each other.
0:45:38 Jhnen V: Neither one blamed the other for the monster they had spawned.
0:46:12 Aaron A.: The power of their hatred actually changed his chemical construction, remaking him into the twisted ham-beast you see today.
0:47:24 Jhnen V: I only see drawings of him now.
0:47:29 Aaron A.: His room was sort of like the transporter in the Fly. Only it works through hatred instead of electricity.
0:47:34 Jhnen V: to actually look upon him is to go mad.
0:48:21 Aaron A.: We should feel lucky that we are not Rikki.
0:48:56 Jhnen V: he puts up a brave front, but everything he says is very practiced and mostly without meaning.
0:49:15 Jhnen V: beneath it all, he just thinks that constant thing…”MORE HAM…MORE HAM”
0:49:48 Aaron A.: You can see the ham-lust in his eyes at every moment. Even when he’s talking about Jeeves and Wooster, the ham thoughts are obvious.
0:50:47 Jhnen V: His friends just avoid eye contact, trying to hold back tears at the sound of him struggling to seem human.
0:51:09 Jhnen V: pretending the ancient hams he breathes are not making them sick.
0:51:22 Aaron A.: He just makes sickening guttural sounds. Big flecks of ham from deep in his bowels fluttering up out of his mouth.
3:16:38 Jhnen V: man…I’m hungry.
3:17:06 Aaron A.: Goth meats… Mark Ryden might get behind that idea.
3:21:08 Jhnen V: hungry for meats of the night.
3:21:28 Aaron A.: NIGHT MEATS.
3:22:27 Aaron A.: That will be the title when I finally write a biography about Rikki and his queer lust for ham.
3:22:54 Jhnen V: I gotta save that bit from this IM.
3:22:59 Jhnen V: some good stuff in there.
3:23:03 Jhnen V: poor rikki.
3:24:56 Jhnen V: Surely rikki would love it
3:25:05 Aaron A.: I just picture his big sweaty head poking out of the earth, waiting for ham.
3:25:17 Jhnen V: just his head is sticking out?
3:25:34 Jhnen V: the rest of him, absorbing vital ham juices that have seeped into the earth.
3:25:39 Aaron A.: Yeah. I’m not sure why. It’s just a freakish image.
3:25:45 Aaron A.: He draws the ham to him.
3:25:59 Aaron A.: Every now and again he bellows, and it comes.
3:26:12 Jhnen V: the village folk, they bring the hams to THE BEAST so that they will be safe.
3:26:37 Aaron A.: He can’t really get out, but they don’t know that. They just figure someday… he WILL.
3:27:09 Jhnen V: they bring it to him because if he has to hunt for hams, it means he has to haul himself out and shamble naked and covered in that jelly you see packed into canned hams…
3:27:24 Jhnen V: and it makes the soil he treads upon infertile for ten years after.
3:27:32 Aaron A.: He slips around as he walks. It’s pretty sick to see. And the SMELL.
3:27:58 Aaron A.: He sort of slides around on his ham-slickened feet. Like a ghost.
3:28:05 Jhnen V: you can actually SEE the hams being digested in his hamchamber.
3:28:28 Aaron A.: You can see through his skin?
3:28:38 Jhnen V: only a section of his belly.
3:28:55 Jhnen V: McFarlane toys does a figure of rikki, but they don’t get the hamchamber right.
3:28:58 Jhnen V: it looks cheaper
3:29:16 Aaron A.: They say he has no other organs. From head to toe, he’s just a shell, filled with ham digestion apparatus.
3:29:29 Aaron A.: McFarlane puts chains all over the ham chamber for some reason.
3:29:32 Jhnen V: no one gets close enough to find out though.
3:30:20 Aaron A.: Hooks and little chains everywhere, to hold the ham. What were you thinking, McFarlane.
3:30:21 Jhnen V: it’s all conjecture.
3:31:11 Jhnen V: once, against the army’s orders, this one scientist, gentle and curious, argued that RIkki was peaceful, and that to destroy him would be a loss to science and to our very humanity.
3:31:39 Jhnen V: He approached rikki, and when RIkki made some mumbling sounds in response, the scientist turned to the army men and said “see…he does understand!”
3:31:51 Aaron A.: The scientist fears what would happen if we lost Rikki, and the world was overrun with ham.
3:31:57 Jhnen V: and then was incinerated by flecks of white hot ham that rikki belched at him.
3:32:37 Aaron A.: See, that’s what people don’t understand about the ham chamber. It’s a fiery hot nuclear furnace of ham smashing.
3:33:07 Jhnen V: that’s what they assumed after the scientist got killed, yeah./
3:33:07 Aaron A.: He converts ham into small, edible pellets that could feed the world.
3:33:20 Jhnen V: so he did sorta help the world understand the workings of RIkki.
3:33:28 Jhnen V: it’s a super ham-collider.
3:34:12 Aaron A.: People ask the scientist, “Why can’t people just eat the ham itself?” And he just shakes his head and says “NOW who’s the crazy one?”
3:34:15 Jhnen V: not unlike Gamera’s chest opening laser beam.
3:35:10 Aaron A.: Can Rikki grow to incredible size?
3:35:16 Jhnen V: you’re talking about before the scientist was incinerated?
3:35:21 Jhnen V: or is this the one that replaces him?
3:35:27 Jhnen V: his son.
3:35:39 Aaron A.: His son doesn’t blame Rikki. He’s just a mindless beast.
3:35:42 Jhnen V: who now helps the army devise ways of destroying RIkki, because he has a hatred for him.
3:35:54 Jhnen V: he has two sons.
3:36:21 Aaron A.: One who wants to contain the awesome power, and one who wants revenge.
3:36:59 Aaron A.: What is the army so afraid of, though? Why do they want to keep the hams uneaten?
3:37:06 Aaron A.: They are in thrall to the hams!
3:37:08 Jhnen V: the nice one just acts nice though, when in fact he is trying to win Rikki’s favor, just to get close enough to actually get his hands on some of the ham.
3:37:29 Jhnen V: for he has a theory that he who eats of the Rikki-treated ham can live forever.
3:38:01 Jhnen V: It probably ends much like that last scene in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark.
3:38:05 Aaron A.: He’s wrong though. He’s destined to incinerate himself in the ham furnace.
3:38:16 Aaron A.: He falls in there like Gollum.
3:38:30 Jhnen V: with it going terribly wrong and the scientist getting his face all melted while Rikki just dumbly sits there, legs splayed like a child, eating hams.
3:39:44 Aaron A.: It’s got a lot of emotional resonance, y’know? It’s kind of sad, Rikki sitting there, oblivious to all he has wrought.
3:40:04 Aaron A.: And the hams pay the ultimate price for their hubris.

—-

And here you will find the fan-submitted masterpieces, kids. Pictures inspired by…

THE HAM CHAMBER

JV

Things at PAX got fuckin' CRAZY. Like whuhhh?!

Though, technically, PAX 2009 still has this last day to go, my adventures there are done as I was only obligated to sign on Saturday for a few hours thanks to the monstrous crew at 2k Games threatening to key my car if I didn’t make an appearance.  Still, I might pop in today for the finale of the Omegathon to watch the finalists compete in a brutal showdown between man, machine, and also man to prove who among them has the skills to truly lament the hours spent in front of a console as they slip away, elderly and on their death bed.

In typing that last line, though I caught it just after writing it out, I spelled death bed as death “bead”.  Not relevant, but I thought maybe you’d find it as hilarious as I did upon finding it.  I hope you did.  Maybe it’s just a personal thing because of that time, you know the one, with the bead and the death and…oh, man…that was fuckin’ awesome.

But enough about science.

PAX.  Yes.  Good good.  What can I say about this excursion into the great northwest that hasn’t been said countless times before by far more poetic types than I?  Well, for starters, those poetic types are jerks and you shouldn’t listen to a word they say, believe me.  I’m the only person you should listen to as I’ve no art to my manner other than the desire to fill you with the truthful vision of mine, unfiltered by flowery this or that, and I’m telling you that this place is pretty “neato mosquito” in a “badass burrito”.

I lied.  I’m pretty goddamned poetic as it turns out.

I had plans to visit friends in Seattle, so when 2K asked if I was interested in doing a quick signing at PAX, the tip of one of the nastiest keys I’ve ever seen (was that dried blood?) pointed at the side of my expensive family wagon with the family still in it from the previous owner, I accepted, breathing a sigh of relief when the brick wall of a goon they had hired to approach me returned to the shadows from which they had manifested.  Strangely, and somewhat unsettling, he never really vanished, just returned to the shadows.  He’s still there in the garage, and I’m not sure he knows I can see him.

I love Seattle and try to visit whenever I can, so the combination of gaming and visiting a place I dig was too much to resist.  Packed up my wagon, dusted the “family” with fish food (They absorb it through the skin, I’m pretty sure) and off I went.

FRIDAY

Had no reason to be there but how could I resist a convention center full of games?  How I ask you?!  No, really, please tell me because I have a serious problem and it’s ruining my life and I’m scared. God, I’m so tired and scared.

HAH!  I’m kidding.  I don’t have a problem and that fucker from Intervention that keeps surprising me with my loved ones doesn’t know shit!  I know when I’m in too deep and, trust me, this is nothing.  I can stop whenever I want to and if I hold a knife to someone’s neck and threaten everyone that “I’LL FUCKIN CUT HIM!” unless they let me scuttle to the door and escape, then it’s because I want to and not because I feel I have no choice in the matter.  Those crazy loved ones’ll say anything to avoid being showered with the hot life-spray (not sexual) of a guy saving lives on television instead of in reality.

It’s rare that I wander around a convention without any obligations but to enjoy myself, so I did what i could to do just that, poking my head into various booths to see what it is I’d be playing in months, or in the case of Bioshock 2, in the year 2056.  The convention was smaller than I was expecting, so It only took a short while to see pretty much all of the games laid out to play.  Favorites included the blatant God of War clone Dante’s Inferno, which looks unbelievably cool despite not hiding its influences.  Deathspank looks like a barrel of spanks (fun), and was generally pleasing to my amazing eyes with a style that reminds you how few games manage to actually pull of a style at all.  Another one that stood out visually was Shank, which reminded me a bit of the Rainslick Precipice-Hothead style animation and art-style, but in brawler form.  Watched a boss battle that looked pretty damn fun, but gritted my teeth as the guy playing it demonstrated that he had wandered in off the streets and had never before experienced a game console in his life, at times chewing on the controller to try to make things happen.  Borderlands was fun in the brief lil time I got to play it with a couple of friends, reminding me of a shooter style, FPS Diablo, only with deafening music blaring from speakers a foot behind my head.  I hope the speakers behind my head are not in the final version.  Axel and Pixel I found to be very relaxing, and I dug the artwork.

I saw this man murder a kid for being skinny.

Spent some time with MC Frontalot, who most of you might know as the guy who plays MC Frontalot in real life.  The thing that strikes you the most, if you’re at all aware of Frontalot’s stage persona, is that in reality the guy’s a raging jock monster who, when not chugging beer from a football trophy, spends every waking hour roaring about how much he hates “NNNNNEEEEERRRRRRDSSS!!!”, pounding his fist on the table, his beer sloshing about on the wooden mead-hall style table he always seems to have with him.  Honestly, I can’t take more than a few minutes of the guy, but he’s pretty cool.

SATURDAY

Signing went very well.  Was surprised to see a line formed for me at the 2K booth, with some people having started it up some hours before, the crazy bastards.  I say surprised because things were way more casual at PAX than they usually are at conventions more focused on the kind of things I am generally known for.  It’s not like this was a clown-porn or boating show, this was a gaming convention, and though I’m an avid gamer, I have, to date, not gotten very far in terms of making the things myself.  The sight of a queue wrapping around the booth was indeed a cool sight, and I couldn’t help but let out a joyous scream of horror.

One of the things that separated this signing from any other I have ever done was the number of people that came up and asked if I was the creator of Bioshock, to which I’d respond with a laugh and the correction that, no, I was not the creator – I was the INVENTOR of Bioshock.  In perfect sync mental sync with me, one of the 2K booth people would punch the mistaken person so hard in the side of the head that they never got back up once they crumpled to the floor.  2K knows how to run a booth, people, and they know how to punch a head with absolute disregard for human life.

Speaking of violence against the awkward, One girl, obviously nervous and searching for words, managed to get out a “Mr. Vasquez, I’ve been-” before a football sailed out from the crowd and hit her in the neck.  She went down with a choked cry and then, as she was trying to get back up, Frontalot shows up in that filthy football jersey he always seems to be wearing when not in his nerdcore costume.  That jersey is HUGE, so I have no idea if he ever wears pants or anything underneath that festering thing, and the bare feet do nothing to settle the question of whether or not he thinks the jersey is enough to pass for fully dressed or not.  ”Smell you later.” he burped at me before shoving his way through the crowd to disappear from sight again.  What a guy.

Okay, here’s the thing about this signing that made it so memorable, despite all those other things vying pantless for my attention:  The people were unlike my usual crowd.  Sure they were mostly awkward, goofy, hideously misshapen and all those other things I’m terribly familiar with at things like these, but I found it easier to relate to these particular goblins, ya know?  Maybe it was the profusion of glasses, people with vision annihilated by countless Starcraft battles or something.  I dunno.  People at my signings are, generally, all pretty nice and supportive, and sure, there were some people at PAX that acted like they had fallen from their bedroom window and had taken refuge in the first covered space they could find, never before having had to use their nightmarishly underdeveloped social skills, but that was okay because they were wearing Super Mario shirts and I can totally relate to Super Marios, see?  Freaks and geeks are the best, yeah, but if I had to pick I’d pick the geeks and this was a whole line of them just waiting to say hi and then get brutally punched in the head.  Warmed the space that the bugs left when they ate my heart, it did.  Doing signings where someone dressed as some anime bloop or something is always funny, but it’s a little something extra when I’m signing a Vault Dweller’s poster.  You understand.

So, thanks to the people that showed up to see me, thanks to the people who had no idea who I was and didn’t sue after finally coming to in an alley dumpster filled with medical waste several blocks away.  I’d like to take a few of you home with me to keep me in gifts of candy and severed limbs whenever the mood for either is on me, but I simply cannot as I get really sick of people after just a few hours.  Still, you all pretty much rocked and other cities should be ashamed and try much harder to not fill me with dread and rage.

You can't beat the Seattle skyline. Just look at it!

Until the future, pigs.

Cult of Rapture, the source for Bioshock 2 info ( Did you know Big Daddies love girly drinks?  ) has been generous enough to make the artwork I did for them available to all of you (despite my warning them about quite a number of the dirtier portion of you lot) as desktop wallpaper in various sizes.

Something I noticed while signing the print at Comicon was that a lot of people picked it up not knowing a thing about Bioshock, and that disgusted me.  I mean, it was cool that they’d stand in line just to pick up something I did, but the sheer ignorance of what a Big Sister was just infuriated me, and I threw a huge fit, tearing down the whole booth, putting a halt to the signing for about an hour while I had to put it all back together again.  The most common comment from the infidels was that I had put my “trademark style” into the thing by making the Big Daddy spindly and emaciated, when I had done no such thing, pretty much going by the design of the Big SISTER that exists in the newer game.

All I’m saying is, know your history, kids.  This is important stuff and you won’t feel at all regretful that you spent your life studying this stuff when you’re on your deathbed with nothing but gaming memories to look back on.

Fancy!

Now, if that’s your sort of thing, then head on over and download it.

DOWNLOAD IT NOW.

Discarded child-corpses: The yearly, post-Comicon heartbreak.

Well, my plan to do a series of daily posts about my Comicon adventures was thwarted by the fact that I didn’t do that.  My vision of several posts at the end of each day, not unlike my Supanova posts just didn’t pan out, as, unlike Supanova, I had almost no free time while conscious at Comicon, devoting every waking moment to either walking on feet that no longer had bones in them, just padding painfully along on water balloons of flesh filled with organic shrapnel and boiling hot blood, talking despite the absence of an audible voice, or pretend dancing to show just how unhappy I was by cleverly appearing to dance while filled with a burning rage.  You know the dance – sooner or later we all do it, just before we die.

Since I didn’t do the daily updates, I don’t think I’m going to try to recap every day.  No, instead I’ll just hurl all my various memories and musings on the adventures of the past few days into a delicious stew upon which you may all feast with these humorously oversized spoons I have supplied you with).  I hope that, by arranging these memories just so for you to frolic through, you will feel very much like you were there, nestled in my pants like a little newborn joey, along for the ride through my worst nightmares and most beautiful dreams come true.

HOLD ON, JOEY!

• CROWD CONTROL –  When people talk about Con, those who have experienced it and try to convey the overall experience to those who have not always begin “FUCKING GOD IN HEAVEN…”  No joking.  Just try and do this yourself and no matter what you think you’re going to say, those profane words will always come out of your mouth.  I recommend trying to tell  a priest about Comicon.  What then follows is generally something about how crowded it is, and how just trying to walk without ramming your elbow or face into someone’s gut or neck is next to impossible.  It’s all true, and it gets worse every year.

The name tells you “Comics” are the focus, but more and more Hollywood and the big games industry saunters in like an exponentially growing cave troll, throwing the salon doors open and parting the comics like so many styrofoam peanuts, establishing itself dead in the center of the convention hall, making you have to cross seas of humanity to get to anything comics related.

I’m not saying movies and games are bad at all, and, admittedly, I’m probably a bigger games enthusiast than I am comic collector, but if cave troll’s ass keeps getting bigger, then he’s gonna need more room, and more room is not what happens every year.  Every year more and more people are packed into that same convention hall, raising some alarm when you wonder what would happen if someone even pretended there was a fire in there, setting off a stampede of terrified fanboys running to save their copies of visionary comic creator Tyrese’s MAYHEM and special edition ‘All Good Things’ Enterprise toy (with the silly looking 3rd nacelle on the top of the ship).

Imagine dying from being tramped, and the last thing you see with your one good eye (the other got stabbed by a Silk Spectre’s heel) is the nightmarishly gelid ass-flesh pouring out from a Cammy’s thong.  ”Cammy’s legs aren’t covered in cammo.” you think, your life ebbing from your fleshy prison, until, with your final ability to comprehend anything, you understand that “Cammy’s” legs are just spotted with pepperonis from the pizzas they sell at the food court, glued there with cheese.  I DO NOT WANT THIS.

As you shove your way slowly through the mob, a single cell in a crawling river in the clotted arteries that are Comicon’s aisles, you are pitted with the horror that is CROSSING THE STREET.  For the entire stretch of the convention hall’s body there is only one street crossing area, and it’s as terrible as that sounds.  The only thing missing from this awful scenario is accompanying music by Philip Glass to complete what would otherwise be a stunning and beautiful scene out of Koyaanisqatsi.  Someone please commission Glass to sit in an all seeing spot above that intersection next year where he can improvise some appropriately psychotic scales to the constant flow of humanity surging through that chokepoint.

Because I’m so big on tower defense games, I just kept thinking, as I crossed the street at the speed of death, that this would be a damn fine place to position the mortars and flamethrower towers.

• SIGNING AT SLG –  SLG’s booth was a more intimate affair, and by that I mean everyone was just fucking everyone like mad there.  Oh, I tell a lie.  But intimate is as good a word as any to describe the vibe there this time around.  It was fewer artists signing at a time, just four or so at a go, instead of the 360 degree ring of commotion that the booth has been in years past.  I don’t even think there were any real weirdos that showed up to make things memorable in that bad way that they do, just a steady ebb and flow of relatively decent fans.  It helps that, as the days go on I am less and less “there”, sort of watching it all from a tiny room in my mind that feels like it’s all hundreds of miles away from my reality.

It might have been that recent post I did about people coming up to me at conventions that kept a lot of people from going batshit insane on me, or maybe those once-loony fans have grown up and out of those days, enjoying the newfound maturity that comes with being 12.  Either way, most everyone was pretty nice and I think I did a fairly good job of only making about half of them think I was a total dick.  Not bad, eh?!

I still don’t know what it is about people in desperate con situations that makes them think tapping you on the back while you’re wearing headphones, talking to a friend, and deep in concentration while trying to diffuse a bomb is an acceptable way of getting your attention.

• HOT DOGS – I ate one, okay?

• SIGNING AT 2K GAMES – Was a fairly smooth operation, and probably the coolest little setting I have signed in, that Bioshock inspired study.  The prints they made of my artwork were a bit smaller than I was expecting, and maybe a bit on the dark side, but all in all it went well.  My nieces, the ones that posed for the Little Sister reference images, even showed up and got into the spirit of things by murdering a guy in line and harvesting the adam with those crazy syringes of theirs.  Adorable, really.  Everyone let out a big “Awwwwww”, except for the guy, who only let out one of those death rattles and loosed his bowels.  Also adorable.

• THE REST IS ALL A BLUR – Honestly, this last con was pretty awesome in terms of getting to see friends and such that I only get to see once a year, usually, and meeting other people who make things that I think happen to be  pleasant diversions from life’s absurd, soul crushing horrors.  Sure, they were also some of the most grotesque, excruciating  couple of days I can recall in recent memory, but that stuff fades away to be replaced by only the glossy, attractive bits, like managing to not actually slip and fall on the urine soaked restroom floors.

• I’M GOING TO GO NOW – Good day.

Chickens. Wieners. Horror.

For the past few years, I’ve been keeping a woman prisoner in my basement.  Isn’t that awesome?  Anyhow, starting right around when I first met “Martha”, I started up a bit of a tradition at my San Diego Comicon visits, and that was to always check out the premiers of Breehn Burns’ latest animated shorts.  If you don’t know Dr. Tran, then take a moment to acquaint yourself in the wondrous lore of that world.  We’ll all wait for you, since having your ignorant self along for this post is, frankly, a bit embarrassing and we’re all trying really hard to pretend you’re not one of the most awful people we have ever met.

Start here with the original: Here Comes Dr. Tran

Okay, I guess you’re a little better now, but stay the fuck off the carpet and don’t you dare make eye contact, yeah?

Anyhow, This past Comicon, sadly, I missed Breehn’s latest, but thanks to the wonders of modern Youtubery we can all enjoy this latest chapter in the Tran saga, and it’s got a fruit hat this time around, so you just know it’s good, right?  Fruit.  Hats.  Fruitbats.

Well, we all just watched it, right?  I gotta say, I shat myself I was so afraid of that hat, but when it turned out to be a chicken, I had flashbacks to that M. Night Shamlamlaml movie where the ghost actually turned out to be old Mr. Whatsisface, the amusement park owner being buried by his mortgage looking for a way out of his financial hell.  How many movies have I seen now where the hat was actually just a chicken?  Fuck you, Breehn.

P.S: ROYBERTITOS!

The cheapest entry in the Turtles saga.

I was going to call this post ‘The Secret of the Ooze’, not so much in homage to  horrible Ninja Turtles movie, but because of the prevalence of juices that assaulted my senses yesterday.  I write this on Friday morning, with flashes of the day before still leaping out of the gloom of memory and slapping me hard in the face, eyes, and brains, and the juices, both bodily and manufactured, are what take center stage.

I’m not making this part up.  I know I’m famed for two things, making things up and for my get rich commercials where I have the two large breasted women on either side of me while I’m speeding about on my boat screaming at people on the shore about how they can get rich NOW if they just let me turn them into large breasted boat-women.  This is an example of neither of those things, so know that this is truth I am about to load into the chamber and fire into your atrophied minds.  Anyhow, here goes…

While walking in the crowd inside the convention yesterday, I smelled a man that managed to produce a body odor that was essentially the smell of exposed bowels and celery.  One man pulled this off.  The image that immediately came to mind was of celery, a thing I actually like the smell of, being served in a bowl made of human bowels.  The guy had a look on his face, a sly look with just a touch of fear, a look I find to be alarmingly common at conventions.  It’s a face that says “I wonder if anyone will know?”  Well…I knew.  I knew too much and now I can’t forget it.

And no, I’m not saying the guy smelled like he ate some celery, and then simply passed gas.  That would still be pretty unpleasant for me to walk into, but at least it would be easier to understand.  I’d walk behind him, recoil a bit, and then nod slowly, knowing that it all made sense overall, that it had its place in a universe of good and bad.  No, this…what I actually experienced was more Cronenbergian in its offering to the senses, or possibly something portrayed in a scene painted by Bosch, something one of his phantasmagoric demons would be holding up to one of the damned.  ”YOU LOVE CELERY, DON’T YOU?” The bird-headed man-thing would be screeching to some naked, tortured bastard who indeed loves celery, the man’s hand reaching out, but not committing to grabbing any of the delicious looking stuff sitting in the bowl of HUMAN BOWEL.  The man then falls to his knees and just curses every decision he made in his life that led him to this terrible fate (The bird man just looks weirded out because he’s the one nice demon in hell and he actually likes celery bowel bowls and was just trying to do something decent for someone).

Bowelery?

So there was that.  The whole day was full of stench nebulas ( my space traveler name) but that one took the cake, ladies and gents.  A spongy, moist cake that someone used to sop up the sweat of thousands of hot fans roasting in the sun.  Later, the juices were spewing from severed heads and mutilated breasts at a Gwar show.  ”I’m going to sleep in this shit tonight!” I heard a girl exclaim breathlessly as I walked out.  I imagined her, all dyed purple and blue and red from all the fluids being launched about during the show, her hair slicked stuck to her forehead, a dopey grin on her face as she said it.  I’m not sure that that’s what she actually looked like, as I only overheard it and didn’t see her, but I loved the visual so much that I dared not turn to see that it was just yet another girl on the streets covered in actual shit and ecstatic about it.

All in all, the day was a pleasant one, aside from the smells.  The signings were pretty mellow, with only one person showing up in various different disguises, getting back in the “line” to get things signed and ask questions about this or that.

I kept telling people that the four page story of mine in the Strange Eggs book that just came out was the best story, but I haven’t actually read the book yet, so I was lying.  I lied a lot that day, and felt terrible about it each time the people bought the book based on my review.  Today, Friday,  I will only tell the truth.

I will tell them that it’s the best story in the world.

Alright.  Well, I have to start getting ready for today’s adventures.  I promise the post about today won’t be as scatological as this one was.  It wasn’t my intent to make it such a fragrant thing, you know.  S’just how the day went, but today will be all pie and candy and laundry fresh from the dryer.

I hope.

I'M AWAKE, BITCHES (esteemed ladies and gents)!

Had that dream where my face is preternaturally wrinkly and, well, you know how that one goes.

Woke up just after the bit where I’m spinning with my chainsaw arms in the room full of kindergartners, and discovered the bagpipe music I thought was just part of the nightmare was actually squeaking up at me from somewhere down in the streets, along with the blaring train horns and turkey gobbling of people amassing for the con day ahead. Reading over that last line, it comes off as people amassing for the “corn dog” ahead.

Really hoping more people go for a sci-fi space salute instead of a handshake today, as even just yesterday the touching of damp, human hands was a bit much. It gets to where you go in for the handshake and the juices from their balmy flesh just accelerate your gesture so that you slide right past their hand, impaling their stomachs instead. Before you even know it you’re shaking some hunk of their large intestine, smiling casually in hopes that they think it was all very deliberate.

Anyhow, the day’s just begun, I’m incredibly fat from all that pasta I drank last night, and it’s time to hit the gym (spinning in the desk chair here in the room). If you’re planning on coming by the SLG booth, I sign from 2-4, take a short break where people tap me on the shoulder to scream that they can’t come back later because their house is on fire and they have to leave right now and could I please sign their thigh-pimple ridden arms, then come back to sign from 5:30-7.

Wish.
Me.
Luck.