Conversation on a train

Conversation on a train,

By A. Hagen

Authors note: I will eventually convert this drawing into a webcomic and after that a web serial, with an expanded script and emphasis on the inner turmoil that you don’t see when you read a webcomic except in those clever subtle ways that they taught me about in school that I’ve never really understood all the way. 

If the web serial takes off, who knows? Because I can definitely see the potential for a video game even if those jerks at EA don’t or won’t (even after I removed a whole portion of the game comprising seven or eight levels that completely stumped even the hardcore gamers in my extended family, and I did it just to make one junior flunky art director happy, a low level stooge who probably went to some fancy east coast art school who’s probably green lighted all kinds of satanic gore fest first person shooters with fancy 3D effects but who all of the sudden can’t handle a few poo jokes spoken by lovingly crafted but highly pixilated characters with incredibly deep emotional layers that he will never be able to fathom), and if the game makes a splash, why not think big?  I’ll just say it; serial podcast, PBS masters edition, Ken Burns visuals, Ira Glass narrates. 

I’m getting carried away, the script actually needs some work. 

Dramatis personae 

Kid 1, younger

Kid 2, older

Scene 1

Kid 1: what are you looking at?

(No response)

Kid 1: hey kid 2, what are you looking at?

Kid 1: KID 2!

Kid 2: WHAT?

Kid 1: you shouted at me...KID 2!

Kid 2: What do you want?

Kid 1: you shouted at me, that wasn’t nice...

Kid 2: I shouted because I’m reading and you keep talking when I’m trying to read. 

Kid 1: You weren’t reading, you were looking out the window. 

Kid 2: then why did you ask me?

Kid 1: ask you what?

Kid 2: aaaarregghh

Author edit: And right there I’ve already identified a problem, ie the names Kid 1 and Kid 2.  They just don’t ring true, in a conversational flow kind of way. We’ll try it again with names: 

Conversation on a train,

By A. Hagen

Dramatis personae 

Psycho-Babel (Kid 1, younger)

Babel (Kid 2, older)

Scene 1

Psycho-Babel : what are you looking at?

(No response)

Psycho-Babel: hey Babel, what are you looking at?

Psycho-Babel: Babel!

Babel: WHAT?

Psycho-Babel: you shouted at me...Babel!

Babel: What do you want?

Psycho-Babel: you shouted at me, that wasn’t nice...

Babel: I shouted because I’m reading and you keep talking when I’m trying to read. 

Psycho-Babel: You weren’t reading, you were looking out the window. 

Babel: then why did you ask me?

Psycho-Babel: ask you what?

Babel: aaaarregghh

Und so. I don’t want to give away too much of the comic except to admit that there’s really not much more to it, just more of the same for a few frames, and it ends with Psycho Babel hitting Babel. It’s about something something American politics, mumble capitalism mumble free press. 

Addendum to above:

I wrote this material for the drawing that I included in my last post, which probably had nothing to do with that drawing and it’s a sign of how low the quality of content that I’ve grown content to publish for this blog that I couldn’t be bothered to go in and change the picture to whatever I had in mind when I wrote the last post which was so meandering that I could not fathom what drawing I had in mind, and it’s a sign of how disconnected my written content has become from the visual content that I myself can’t figure out which picture the written content belongs to. And that I’m so content with this level of content and that I’ll even describe my contentedness for the content within the content itself, well, that’s really really a sign that I really do not have the willpower or the wherewithal to make some kind of webcomic out of something 

Conservation on a Train in Merry Oulde Anglande, part 2:

Kid 1 plays Clarence

Kid 2 plays Jimmy Stewart

Clarence: ask you what?

Clarence: ASK You What?!

Jimmy Stewart: Why did you ask me what I was doing if you already knew what I was doing?

Clarence: I didn’t ask you that!

Clarence: Jimmy Stewart, I didn’t ask you that!

Jimmy Stewart: Okay, fine!

Clarence: Jimmy Stewart!

Clarence: you have to answer my question because it’s not nice to ignore a person’s question. 

Clarence: you have to answer my question!

Jimmy Stewart: What is the question?

Clarence: I don’t remember now!  (Weeps)

Jimmy Stewart: aaaaarrrrrggghh

Clarence: I remember now.

Jimmy Stewart: What? What is it?

Clarence: I remember now! What are you doing?

Jimmy Stewart: trying to read!

Clarence: No, you were looking out the window at something! 

Jimmy Stewart: if you already know what I was doing then why did you ask me?

Clarence: because I was asking what you were looking at!

Jimmy Stewart: I wasn’t looking at anything!

Clarence:  No! No no no, you were looking at something! (Weeps and hits Jimmy Stewart

Blog in need of fifth wheel

I had hoped to come up with a new storyline for the continuing saga of our vacation but I suddenly realized that I’ve begun a large percentage of the posts in this blog with a whiny prologue about what I had actually wanted to do, followed by my reasons for failing to do it along with a kind of meandering description of whatever inner turmoil had induced me to do what I actually did, which was nothing. I won’t do it this time, by which I mean I won’t whine about what I meant to do, anymore than I already have, and I will stop trying to describe my inner turmoil, and I will most certainly not do nothing in this particular post. I will do something. Which I have already done. 

The other thing I intended to do, the big idea I had for the future direction of the story of our trip, is a comic strip based on the pictures, something I’ve talked about doing many many times before but haven’t because it involved a lot of work. But now I will do it, and by now I mean I will begin to think about how to prepare to do it now, I will not do it by actually doing it during this blog post, other than to post the first picture of the series, which I intend to alter using the magic of iPhone drawing apps to be a comic strip of two kids talking on a train, something like this picture but more alive:

Then after I alter the picture I will add the word bubbles which will depict some of those darn things kids say to each other while their parents smile at each other and nod. As I get older and see all the neat digital art people do I have come to see myself as less of an artist and more of an art critic who draws to help with his criticism of really good artists, and as I read more and more and write less and less I have come to think of myself as more of a critic of literature than a writer per se, and in order to critic literature I see myself more and more as a cartoonist who has opinions about literature that I like to think about while I draw, than as an actual critic of literature. 

If I give up in the comic strip idea, which now that I’ve given myself permission to give up is all but definitely as good as given up on, I plan to veer this blog onto a literary criticism course, and away from any artistic pretensions completely. 

Which now that I have actually explicitly stated that I will do I might as well do, because if I even try to do anything else I will know at the back of my mind that I am just killing time before I start the literary criticism. And now that I have decided to do the literary criticism right now, I find myself looking back fondly at my artistic days, my lonely nights toiling away at my cherished dreams of being a webcomic creator. 

And voila, those good old days are back!  Maybes . Or maybe not. 

The mace of authority

The mace of authority 

I said some pretty harsh things about the readers of this blog in my last post, which in TV shows and book series is a pretty sure harbinger of doom for the production, a sign that the crucial relationship between the readers and the auteur, the business and its customers, has degenerated so badly that the business has given up on customer service and will just start ripping out huge bogus fees and resentful passive aggressive advertising just to unleash all their pent up frustrations, much like Comcast or the US healthcare system, or in the case of this week's presentation; the British House of Commons. That's right, I just did last week's complaining about my beloved and intelligent readers in order to thematically introduce this week's episode of the magical family visiting the house of non-magical "frumpity grumps", which is how we in the magical community of less popular writers have to refer to nonmagical people without being sued. 

I had worked up a fair amount of excitement for the opportunity to render the seat of power for a country as we entered the chamber, but as we sat and angrily berated our offspring for noise they hadn't made yet, in the hissing snake language that magical parents use to shout in places where they can't shout, and sat down with a scattering handful of other bored spectators, and intoned "Renderanis!" in as unobtrusive a manner as possible while I waved my elf spine wand, I was overcome with a feeling that I was being bamboozled. We sat overlooking a chamber where the representatives of the country, an entire island and a half of millions of people, met to debate and vote with total authority on the disposition of oceans of money, large armies, millions of lives, and it felt exactly as interesting and vital to my existence as a Sunday school lesson. Meanwhile, earlier in the day, we had happened to walk by an enormous beautiful palace, gated and closed to the surrounding multitudes who gazed raptly through the gates like stray dogs staring through a pastry shop window, where a royal family stripped - according to all reputable accounts - of any real power a hundred years before occasionally resided. At one point while we stood at the fence staring at suffering guards in the silly hats, there was a commotion, a flurry of excitement, as an honest to God horse drawn carriage rolled up to the gates from nowhere and a bunch of very real looking cops with guns shooed people out of its way. The people shuffled aside by this outmoded vehicle loved it. They clamored for a view of the superior beings inside the carriage (who, seriously, could not possibly have had any serious business to conduct) and stared in awe as the carriage pulled inside the gates. 

Remembering this inexplicably exciting event, and surveying the intense boredom with which the purported center of power conducted business, I could not help but hypothesize that some kind of vast scam had been implemented upon the populace of this country and of the international community in general, and that the bored functionaries welcomed people to freely enter the viewing gallery and stare down at their somnambulant performance in order to camouflage the true workings, conducted in secret behind the massive gates by people so contemptuous of the modern world that they are able to ignore its existence, preferring to play pretend with ancient animal powered devices that are lovingly protected and made way for by the armed constabulary. 

And so I present my sad depiction of the camouflage, a prey animal rendering the tiger’s stripes from the safety of the shrubbery, wondering at their movement - surely that isn’t foliage there, what could it be?

I blame the readers of this blog for everything wrong

We've had to halt the beloved Dr Hagenstein series for a while, due to some fairly severe and possibly deranged reviews that have frankly cut me to the quick, at an emotional level that I don't know if I will ever get over. This series meant a lot to me and you people have killed it, and even if you beg and plead for an encore I don't think it will ever be the same as that first time in the full bloom of summer and everyone was young and beautiful and full of that nauseatingly egotistical hope for the future that older people think they've lost because no one likes them as much as they thought everyone would. 

So I need a new backstory for the set of illustrations that I created whilst traveling, and I feel compelled to explain again why I don't want to just describe the trip as it occurred, and just record the events as accurately as I can, to strain with words to hold a mirror to nature as Shakespeare himself said, and let the truth create its own art, and with that art to find truth, and let the truth come back to art again, in this ecstatic embrace of mirror images flipping back and forth at each other and sending we mortals into a delirium of experience-ness and awe with nature and the universe.  I just read what I just wrote, and in the spirit of total honesty that has not characterized any of my previous writing on this blog I now feel compelled to admit that I have changed my mind completely and I will now strain with words to do exactly all that. 

So chapter 1: the adventures of the true to life Hagen magical wizard family in Angle-Stan, or Angle-Reich as they would say over the water. Let the truth flow! I drew this picture with aid of a draw-spell. Renderanis! I shouted, waving my elf-spine wand in devious retrograde motion. The tiny witch coven in the picture had gathered in a little group on the floor of the magically moving painting museum in London. The paintings moved so vigorously that I didn't get a good render of any of them, and my wizard offspring kept grabbing at my wizard cloak and demanding treats and water and bathroom breaks so I never even had a moment to think! And every time I found a really beautiful painting with amazing masterful brushstrokes that I wanted to copy by painstaking hand to appreciate and learn from and I would whip out my elf-spine wand that had been fermented in virgin troll tears and sprinkled with finely ground fairie by a dimuitive master wizard of indeterminate age and sex and ethnicity who told me they preferred to kill the adolescent griffins by hand in the back of the magicke shop to verify perfect freshness of the feathers, then tiny hands would pull insistently at my wizard jacket and even grab at the magic wand as I tried to wave it and whiny voices would ask if they could have it and then in the spirit of demented competition both of my wizard offspring would demand to get to wave the wand while I tried to swat them away and say very loudly in the middle of the museum that it was my elf-spine wand and only I get to use it and my wife would berate me with her disgusted eyes that would shoot magical flames at me and singe my feelings and I would pull away from them and try to aim at the closest masterpiece and shout Renderanis! but I'm also swatting at my kids with the elf spine wand which emits sparkling dust and misses the masterpiece and humorously renders a group of kids with their parents who are gathered on the floor like it's a park or something and a grown woman in silly clothes is telling a pointless fairy tail in the exaggerated voice you make to morons in the seriously mistaken belief that old times storytelling is so neat that it can convince kids that paintings done to impress grown ups are more interesting than video games, as if by magic

The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

Dr Hagenstein scanned the crowd nervously, his super sensitive secret agent nerves, honed and crafted by years of death match level mental combat with Russians and Atheists, spasming alarms all over his nervous system at the sight of any suspicious character, the majority of the London population of which apparently swarmed to this very spot every evening for the outrageous yet strangely antiseptic performances at this pseudohistoric place.  He sat in the upper upper deck, about forty vertical feet above the stage of the new rebuilt exactly as before Globe Theatre, the neo-Globe, the focal point of that gigantic theme park called London, where all the historically violent impulses of the Anglo Saxon peoples have been sublimated into tame homoerotic deconstruction of the most mind numbingly overperformed plays in western culture. 

Dr Hagenstein actually loved Shakespeare, some of it. The plays with daggers, anyway. Not so much the comedies, because of some childhood stuff that confusing speech and loud laughter tended to trigger. 

The enemy agent had tried to offer him a beer before the play, but he'd refused. "Our seats are high enough to kill," he said cryptically. She knew his secret weakness; his massive skull size, it's heft and mass, the catch 22 for any highly intelligent person, his body was basically a big shuttlecock. All it would take was a nudge, and the thought machine that had generated some of the most incredible secret assassination plans and code break ideas in dark web history would plummet the two stories to the stage like a cannon ball, dragging his hapless body with it. He didn't dare lean even a little forward, even during the most hilarious onstage hijinks, where the big drag queen with the beard was singing to the tiny lesbian trapped in the clothes rack and the audience roared with appreciation, relieved that it didn't matter if they understood the words or not. 

At some point he realized that everyone in the upper deck reserved seating was American, while the locals were all standing in the plebe seating below. Did they know something? The English resentments of Americans were well known. Had they chosen now, at the height of summer, when half the population of the US was wandering drunk and stoned through London, Paris, and Edinburgh, and the other half was trapped in Disneyland, to spring their trap? Wait, who was running the ship back home? Of course it wasn't the English. They hadn't been able to muster a real plot for more than 150 years - it was the White Ward all along! Drones filling the sky! They swarm the stage, playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic on their tiny speakers, chasing the screaming actors through the sophisticated series of stage doors and secret passages that Shakespeare had once used to weave his magic. The laughing audience does not understand. Drones? Hymns? Outrageous, what next?  The drones focus high intensity strobe lights on the audience, transmitting signal bursts at a blink rate syncopated with the refresh screen rate of the human nervous system, a technique proven by years of research to send the human brain into a semi trance state similar to REM stage sleep. The crowd stops laughing and begin to hum the Battle Hymn in a horrible chorus while Dr Hagenstein in one incredibly fluid motion draws his secret pen weapon and fires a burst of micro toner particles into the nearest drone's forward flight controller module. The drone careens into the standing room section, awakening several screaming audience members with a fiery crash. The other drones orient quickly on the threat, but their strobes do not seem to affect Dr Hagenstein, why?

Flashback to a rustic cabin in a secluded wood where the unnamed master of uncomfortable motions used a blinking flashlight to insert a destroy light source program in Dr Hagenstein's subconscious and set it to activate upon trance inducement, losing several flashlights to Dr Hagenstein's trip wire reflexes and nodding his ancient grey haired head in satisfaction as the final flashlight exited his grip in several pieces, impelled by a lightning fast karate kick launched by his subject. End of flashback, Dr Hagenstein firing his secret pen weapon at drones...

Dr Hagenstein started awake just as his gigantic head swayed perilously forward, giving him a brief view of a man in a leather jacket waving a fish onstage. It had been close. He peered closely at the delicious candied almonds that the other agents had suspiciously offered to him. Sedatives? Or had he lost track of the plot again

The Pigeons on the Thames, a Dr Hagenstein Story

Pigeons are hard to draw, they move around a lot, reflected Dr Hagenstein as he leaned back thoughtfully on the park bench or whatever they call them in England, land of Shakespeare and relentless cultural decline. His taut muscles rippled like steel cables as he scratched his beard and looked around for enemy agents while his diminutive partners fed the pigeons crumbs of organic hand molted bread that seemed to be the only food he would be consuming on this mission thanks to the machinations of his enemy from the White Ward. Unbeknownst to the others, Dr Hagenstein, utilizing his vast knowledge of chemical and nuclear reactions, had installed tiny microbot particulates in the crumbs, which would activate in the pigeons' digestive tract and transmit live video feed from the pigeon's ocular nerve to an incredibly tiny flat screen TV monitor disguised as a bookmark in Dr Hagenstein's copy of Rick Steves Does England Again, a limited edition in which Agent Steves had hidden all sorts of secret messages for fellow agents to decipher.  Most of the secret messages involved hiking around charming English landscape like the Cotswolds and taking in the greenery and placid English sheep and staying at unbelievably picturesque B&Bs, but their mission itinerary would be taking them up the other side of the country, and the only chance he had of seeing any Cotswolds scenery would be through the tiny eyes of these idiotic birds, once his microbots had taken over their grain of sand sized brains and ceded total control of their musculoskeletal systems to the incredibly intricate joystick installed in his lower left second molar. Through this device he could make the pigeon do whatever he wanted by subtle maneuvers of his jawbone. 

A treacherous ambush, in the form of a tasteless organic cookie shoved with cunning swiftness in his famished mouth, malevolently timed at the moment the Alpha pigeon succumbed to microbot control and Dr Hagenstein's molar controller activated, completely undid this operation in the spate of a few seconds of unbelievably energetic and fatally reckless pigeon hops, forcing Dr Hagenstein to perform the embarrassingly exaggerated disconnect motions with his index finger, while the startled and grieving pigeon pack chose a new Alpha. 

The enemy agent from the White Ward had struck again!  Dr Hagenstein gagged on organic cookie and spluttered with rage simultaneously, an indescribably difficult physical feat achievable by only a select few super agents heavily trained by an unnamed master of ancient and uncomfortable physical motions who accepted no pay and spoke inscrutably all the time and lived in a secret monastery on a secluded hilltop in a dense wood on the border of Wyoming and Idaho.

Continuing Adventures of Dr Hagenstein in Olde England

Continuing Adventures of Dr Hagenstein in Olde England

I suppose last week's cliffhanger may have upset a few readers who couldn't tell what happened from the picture or the text, so let me reassure everyone that of course Dr Hagenstein got out of that sticky situation, whatever it was. 

Speaking of sticky situations, this week's depicted episode takes place in Covent garden, taking a dinner in a very fancy restaurant with Germanic wait staff and French hostess who forgot half of Dr Hagenstein's order as he cased the place for assassins and snipers and noticed his miniature partner had been administered a narcotic of some time and had fallen asleep in her plate, getting the uneaten portion of her lunch all over her face. Who had done it?  Dr Hagenstein pulls out his hand held rocket launcher which is disguised as a pen and pretends to draw a picture with it while actually preparing to use it on a mysterious chick who suddenly lunges across his table and seizes the butter knife like she knows exactly how to use it. It's the woman from the plane! The enemy agent who attempted to kill him by hassling him over one little drink and expected him to sit sober through an eleven hour flight!  Not this time, Dr Hagenstein laughs and makes a quip and then orders a beer to piss her off without even needing to fire the rocket launcher. His miniature partner sleeps through all the excitement like one of those beloved characters who keep needing Harrison Ford's help to get away from the nazis. The French hostess never brings the rolls or the dessert and Dr Hagenstein suspects her of being in pay of the White Ward or maybe the enemy agent iced her with the butter knife to shut her up, but if so she certainly seems legitimately upset about the dessert.