like cramming it with walnuts

"rags & bones" concludes what scholars will no doubt refer to as my "Rig trilogy". Still more agony rock and still more backstory character development detail funtimes. The fun part is that the task I set myself with this one was to write an issue basically in a sitting. I'd been stalled on an awful lot of other projects, so I just told myself to crank one out, using whatever I had.

In this way I salvaged what once was supposed to be a mammoth, Tinzeroes-esque multi-part epic. Originally entitled SUPER! HERO! SHARED! HOUSING! versus THE BUILDING THAT ATE MY BRAIN, there was going to be an awful lot about a barfly chick getting a job that systematically and thoroughly removed from her every thing that made her her. Eventually there would be a quest, involving all the mens invading a Siege Perilous and all that, more questing, more hijinx.

Turns out shit like that is hard to write, however, so I gave up and just went with what I had; a little bit of Moorcock homage + a subtle, nuanced approach to jobs and co-workers (=they sucksucksuck). Yup; jobs be something you need to be rescued from, and isn't it grand that there are Powerful Forces working in our favor?

Yes. It is grand.

(Oh yeah, the guy leaping feet-first from the stage onto somebody's face? I saw the bass player for the Jesus Lizard do that to a dude in Denver in like 96 or so. Fucking brutal.)

in which Collision apologizes shamefacedly to Matt Fraction

The last issue contained a joke that was a straight-up rip from Matt Fraction's Mantooth. I've rewritten the offending section and will be forwarding it to Tinzeroes so that I can sleep at night.

I had stolen the joke as a placeholder, and left it in b/c it made me laugh. Shit, why wouldn't it make me laugh? It's a good joke. That's why I stole it.

I feel like dogshit. Don't steal jokes, kids.

like a goddamned rat

Follow me, fuckers!

http://twitter.com/cfCollision

like a wounded osprey

One amusing thing about 13, "with heights and malt liquor" (comes great propensity to get fucked up, presumably), is that in some ways it's the most autobiographical piece about me that Dauntless has yet hosted, despite being written by, uh, not me.

In the summer of 2002, I'd just been released from college. I sat on the couch, lay on the couch, really, for a couple weeks, depressed and lumpish in a bathrobe. Eventually, I applied for a job at my neighborhood bar, basically as a joke, just to get in the habit of applying for jobby jobs.

They hired me.

It was then that I began to explore the intriguing world of making around 100 wing-wangs a day and paying back somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty thousand dollars worth of student loans. Cost-cutting was obviously a necessity. Eventually, I bought a GameCube and a hockey game, and stopped leaving the house to do anything but work.

Sometime around then, the Plaid between my house and the bar (a six-block span) introduced a new "it's a buck!" special: 22 ounce bottles of Steel Reserve. I immediately moved my diet to Steel Reserve, Totino's "party" pizzas and "flamin' hot" Cheetos.

I lasted about a month, I think.

The thing that was amazing was that I'd never really feel drunk, particularly. I'd be there, on the floor, marching Carolina to another stirring victory (riding hard the incredible speed and skill of Sir Sami Kapanen, my then-favorite Finn), feeling just fine. Then it would come time to void my bladder; I'd pause the game and start to go upstairs. Frequently I'd fall down somewhere in this process; my first clue that I was drunk.

Thus, the signal feature of malt liquor: it brings out things you might not have known were there.