Broad Appeal Sneak Peek

Aw, my Broad Appeal story. It’s basically my version of Andrew’s “Ultimate Narbonic” high-school characters, and it’s very similar to my old, old strip North of Space. I like the goth Mell. Also on display here: my ongoing fascination with eight-ball jackets.

I may have mentioned this before, but Two Willows, Ohio is a name I use for small-town settings in a lot of my comics. It was the setting of North of Space, and in Narbonic it turns out that Dave went to high school there.

Okay, let’s run some reader art! Wm Saunders of ontheblob.net sent me this vastly improved version of a gerbil sketch I did for him once.

Writes Wm:

I gave a friend of mine, Eve Thomas, a printout of the Revolutionary Gerbil sketch you did, and she colored it one day while bored at work.

Not only did she do an awesome coloring job, but she developed a basic backstory (fleshed out by me to fit in with the Narbonic storyline):

“After subduing the murderous owl with a technique borrowed from Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, Jaye forced his avian conveyance on a nonstop journey away from Narbonic labs. When the bird finally collapsed of exhaustion in the arid Southwest, Jaye, using his enhanced intelligence and a purloined firearm, assisted a local impoverished Native American tribe to found a gambling empire in the state of Arizona. He was an avid supporter of Senator McCain’s 2008 presidential candidacy until the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket, because there are some levels of batshite crazy even a mentally degenerative GM rodent can’t support.

Jaye now spends his days in a palatial (for a gerbil) mansion he has had constructed, Lincoln Log style, out of rolls of quarters in one of his casino vaults. Friends are not sure if his insistence on living within his wealth is the result of his deteriorating mental state or just too many Scrooge McDuck cartoons.

His one fear in life is the owl may some day come looking for revenge. As a precaution Jaye disguises himself with tail dye.”

This is so awesome I’m not even going to mention that Jaye is a girl. Thanks, Wm and Eve!

5 thoughts on “Broad Appeal Sneak Peek

  1. It’s really hard to tell with gerbils.

    I figure that either Ultimate Helen handed her jacket down to Mell when she outgrew it, or Mell killed her and absorbed her power. I’m leaning towards the latter theory, because Mell. 

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