[Edit: please note, Salvager Kain will NOT be continuing on 29 May 2010. Please read the blog entry "Babydelays" below. Thanks.]

Aaaaaaand, coming to a close, page 24 of Tales Of October #1. The end! Ta Da! Comes full circle nicely, don’t you think? A little cliche, sure, but… ok, a lot cliche. And, as is now standard, poorly inked. Well… I’m nothing if not consistent.

At least we got Pargimus up and off his ass, huh? Took a talking dog and couple hallucinations, but the man is UP! The next question could be “where’s he off to?”, but if I told you “to go get scared by more hallucinations, then break into the wrong house and fall asleep on the wrong couch”, you might not want to keep reading. And even if you did, you’d have a heck of a long wait, eh? Ah well. Moving right along…

So! Yes! Salvager Kain #6 will be returning, in just five days! Awesome, huh? Back to color, back to comedy, back to bug-eyed bewilderment in The World Outside The Wall. Just in case it’s been so long (and IT HAS BEEN SO LONG) that you’ve forgotten where we left off, I suggest you pop over here and catch up. Go back and reread the first five pages, or better still… start at the top of SK5 and catch up all the way — that you can — online!

Otherwise, should his current predicament be fresh in your brain, I’ll see you back here in five days. Cheers!

Okay now — the place is closed. That’s new, huh?

And yes, “the BOSS”. Not Bruce Springsteen, but a terrier, one of those big & menacing kinds. TIntin’s “Snowy” on steroids. I took a gamble with the words speaking the image here, but it does read kind of like telepathy, right? A big circle around the wee beastie and the balloon anchor pointing to the dialogue, yeah, that’s telepathy, I’m sure of it. Saw it on tv once! Adding the shadow to the type was my way to do a further mix’em-up… basically it should read as a troubled man thinking he’s having a conversation with a dog who’s in charge. You decide if it was successful!

Conceptually, I had to get something to move Pargimus along from his station here, and I figured it wouldn’t be something normal. What Parge takes as a “sign” versus what the rest of us do in life, well, I have a lot of leeway.

And let’s not talk about my inking. Egads, man, sometimes simpler is better.

Cheers all — see you in five days!

So here we go: the final short story in Tales Of October #1, called “Welcome To The City (Reprise)”. No title — it would have been too abrupt. I was looking to keep this story tied with the end of “Fun & Games” a little, to show that it’s all supposed to occur in the same Canadian suburb: Quitoclam.

Now, yes, Quitoclam is fictional, but only barely; it’s blatantly modeled on the small Canadian suburb I grew up in, which for the faintest stretch of privacy, I’ll leave unnamed. A real trait of the real suburb, though, is the comparatively high level of undeveloped natural areas (”high level” compared to most American suburbs from my experience). Many parks, a number of ravines, just large sections of woods. Of course, this better describes the area of twenty years ago. Nowadays there still are some parks but the rest of it has been developed like crazy. “Ay, oh, way to go, Ohio…”

The view at the top of the page invokes a very specific wooded corridor near my childhood home, where the power lines reach down from one plateau into a more-developed urban corridor and then back up the mountains on the other side. Not much point to it, except it’s a view I know well… and seemed appropriate to represent Pargimus’ supposed “high-altitude” observations.

What’s supposed to be the streetlights on the bottom half of the page is my poor inking choice de jour. Live and loin.

For those of you just joining in, I’ve been posting these short stories for the last couple months here on salvagerkain.com while I’ve been busy being a new dad. Once again, the plan is to resume postings of Salvager Kain #6 (already in progress!) as of May 29, 2010. Thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoy this last little tale.

Ah, some nice Dave-Sim-inspired lettering. Big and effective and built right into the art! This is the kind of thing I would do all day, if someone would pay me. Seriously. I’m here. I live and love to letter. This isn’t a creepy come-on. Write me.

So the final joke is here: it’s dull in Quitoclam (a familiar thread to these stories, you might have noticed?) and for most folks, you have to make your own fun. Maybe you try and rob a place that doesn’t carry cash, or get lit and hassle a mall employee, or try to make forced moves on a juvenile in a dark corner of a parking lot. Fun fun fun! Hey, I didn’t say this was War and Peace. Bite me. Then write me.

Panel 3, hm, that’s bad art. Panel 4 too. It’s funny, when I remember rushing the art as I drew it, I see it here as still rushed, only preserved in ink and apparently online as well. Oh and hey, what’s with all the background zig-zags? Looks like all of this is taking place within the mouth of some big fish. OH SNAP I JUST GAVE THE SURPRISE ENDING AWAY… right.

Okay, that’s the end of that. Coming next time: the start of the fourth short story to Tales Of October #1, titled “Welcome To The City (Reprise)”. Starring Pargimus again! We’ll get to see just how far he’s come since leaving the institution. See you in five days!

Still far from perfect, one of the better jobs I had as a teenager was working at a game store in a mall.

What made it better? Well for me, that was the age where working in a mall seemed like the best of all possible work scenarios, for socializing and status, equally. Plus, the store sold board games and pool tables and darts and dice and stuff, so I figured (and rightly so) it didn’t seem anywhere near as dull as, say, staffing a tourism caboose for the summer. By happy coincidence there also was a lingerie store right next door; this allowed for the optimism (if not the payoff) that an attractive female who might be looking to purchase some lace panties along with plastic poker chips might choose to solve her shopping strategy in our corner of the establishment. Better still, our store sold a Wurlitzer jukebox we could program to play any manager-approved ‘45 singles we brought in… continuing my streak of “it’s a good job if you can listen to your own music”.

And, lastly, anything was better than a damn paper route.

So here I finally get to introduce the second of three key players into Tales Of October (and what I hope will someday be its larger longer stronger story, Foolproof). Her name is Kathryn Sharkey, and I’ve blatantly borrowed her appearance from a cartoon version of my ex-girlfriend Kristine.

(Let’s be clear, though, that’s it; any traits or tragedies that could be compared between the real person and my crudely drawn protagonist are purely coincidental and should never be construed as me trying to serve out some petty payback agenda with pen & paper. Got it?)

Where was I? Oh, right; Kathryn Sharkey, lost in a paperback, working the night shift at the local gameroomery. Kathryn, in advance, I apologize to you, my fine creation, for every horrible thing that will ever occur to you in the future of this story and others. It’s not like Pargimus who — as a tall, gangly, big-nosed freaky creep wandering the streets of Quitoclam — bears enough resemblance to me that I don’t wince when dealing out bucket after bucket of Story-Caliber Pain. No, with Kathryn, she has plenty of hurt coming her way, and for that… yeah, I feel guilty. Reading that paperback will probably be one of the calmest points of your story, dear, even if almost all of it is yet to be told.

(Just in advance… I apologize if the next couple of installments are late, or erratic, or commentary-free. My wife is due in the next ten days with our first child; I’m pretty busy & distracted, but should be able to post the pages consistently, if with little accompanying fanfare.)

“Insane young man”. Ridiculously overdone, perhaps, but nonetheless, a pretty resonant thread throughout the fictions from my teenage years. Not just the cheap stuff I wrote, but also the slightly-less-cheap stuff I’d read (or, you know, watch / listen to). I think it’s a variant of the “angry young man” scenario, but where that anger perhaps doesn’t get an outlet? Angrier to the point of nuts? Not sure, but it was around a lot, and something I attached to… y’know, as an “author”.

And so when it came time to actually start introducing Pargimus and the main context through which Quitoclam defined him (or which he chose to be defined), I couldn’t shy away from it. I don’t know that I’ve come up with anything close to original in portraying a “confused” young man’s relationship to psychiatric institutionalization, but at the very least I hope I’ve stepped far enough away from the more cliché aspects I originally envisioned, in my own confused adolescence.

There was a building I knew (from reputation only) as a “mental hospital” just down the hill from where I grew up. I never knew what went on in it, but an old girlfriend whose grandfather once worked there mentioned some pretty uncomfortable stories once upon a time. Of course, it’d probably be something as mundane as budget problems that would close such a place before staff misconduct would. The place is probably closed now.