It’s the day before school starts back up and I’m seeing kids everywhere. I can take some small comfort in the knowledge that a bunch of them will drop out and go away. That’ll be nice.

While I’m here, I might as well go on to mention that I am currently roommateless. The last one left in the midst of August, as was the plan, and I put an ad on the Internet, but since I was on my own again for some time, I remembered how nice it is to have to apartment to myself. I answered a few people who responded to the ad, but it was a lot of kids, really, and I eventually just stopped replying. It looks like I’m going to try to go at least a month on my own. It will be pleasant and expensive.

Little Choy is out there insulting my characters as always.

Say, who is that he is insulting today? Why, it is none other than Philo Blue, one of the Secret Government Robots!

Some Phone Guys:

Astrona

Space is full of mystery. The human mind is only capable of knowing so much and there is so much more than that in the universe. Astrona is from that part. Although she takes the form of a humanoid woman, Astrona seems to be some sort of living embodiment of the idea of helping others. She soars the cosmos detecting what she calls “scarred stars” which have been poisoned by negativity. Around these stars are often planets with societies that have problems (disasters, tyrannical rulers, plague, etc.) and Astrona comes down as a sort of messianic figure and helps them, which heals the star.

Astrona is just my attempt to make a trippy cosmic sci-fi character in the style of the seventies comics when cosmic was an in-style thing. The problem is, I haven’t read all that much of the trippy cosmic sci-fi from the seventies, so I’m kinda phoning it. In case it isn’t obvious that is supposed to be a sort of Saturn-style ring around her. I have no idea how that works either.

Konwaag, the Magic Hunter

Konwaag comes from a planet that we would describe as post-apocalyptic. The world, once a high-tech utopia, was brought to ruin by a cult of wizards who sought to take over. Although the wizards were overthrown, the cost was too great. Konwaag grew up in the aftermath of this war and saw the damage that magic did, so when he found a trove of war-time technology designed specifically for hunting down wizards, and a space ship to go with it, he set about the universe to hunt down those who would tamper with magical forces.

I’ve mentioned more than once that I like aliens to look less human, but this is a character I drew from an old sketch I had lying around. I’m going to claim that under his costume Konwaag has all sorts of things that make him look less human…

Anyway, I don’t think Konwaag could stand on his own as a hero, probably, but I like the idea of him being a rival to another superhero, sort of like how Vartox was a rival for Superman, except instead of fighting over women, the hero (let’s say Noblewoman) would have to prevent him from attacking magic-users who aren’t evil, but they’d still work together against legitimate threats.

It has been a long, long time since PDR flexed his poetry muscles. Here’s some poems, you crotchbrains:

I’ll kick it off with some haiku. To warm us up.

An old man in France
went to a zookeeper’s house.
They talked about cows.

Your eyes are on fire!
Dear god! Someone do something!
How did this happen?

Argax the Mighty!
He’s mighty and named Argax.
That is his whole deal.

And now some other poems:

The Leaves Will Soon Be Turning

The leaves will soon be turning
into vampires.
If you don’t protect yourself
you will expire.
Vampire leaves
hang from trees
like bats on the roof of a cave.
Beware at night
when they take flight
and try to send you to the grave.
The leaves will soon be turning
into vampires.
The only way to stop it is
forest fires.

Tom’s Day

Tom sat in a chair.
He was perfectly happy there.
Top was not standing
Nor sleeping at all.
He was just seated,
The chair preventing a fall.
Tom sat in his chair
and was perfectly happy there.

This Poem Is Going In Your Face

The words that make this poem
will invade your personal space,
by barging into your eyes
and being in your face.
There’s nothing you can do,
It’s much too late to stop it.
All of these syllables
are now in your eye sockets.
There’s no point in resistance.
You’ll find help in no place.
The invasion is now over.
This poem went in your face.

Ooooohhhhkay. Detective Made Easy, the latest of John Swartzwelder novel about Frank Burly is out. As is tradition in the Nation of PDR, this means it is National Bookorderin’ Day! That’s the day when I’m supposed to get all kinds of the books I want to read in a single order from the Internet. Here’s the thing, though. I was already given Dave Barry’s Insane City and Max Barry’s (no relation) Lexicon for my birthday, so I don’t need that much. And to make it worse, just today I noticed an email from school saying that the Comics and Cartoon’s class I am starting next week will has changed professors and, with that, changed the books we need to read for the class. This means that four of the books I got and read over the Summer are now unnecessary and I will have to get and read other books for class. Ugh.

So anyway, the moral of the story is that I’m getting Detective Made Easy for National Bookorderin’ Day, but apart from that, it’s all about school.