Talking To Myself
The Eagles won the Super Bowl, which is great for everyone living in Philly. There is a type of mania that envelopes the city when one of our teams gets close to a championship. It stops being about sports entirely, and is instead a city-wide celebration of communal excitement. Maybe that’s why we say “Go birds” instead of “Go Eagles;” its no longer about the Eagles. Its about all of us, all the birds in city. And then to toss a colossal win on top of that? That’s a party no barricade can hold back. You cannot contain all the the birds in the city. You just have to let them fly.
Hawkgirl knows this. I’m certain she was celebrating on the Justice League Watchtower Sunday night.
Last week on the Patreon I started Scoesby Cuts a Rug, a comic I began over a decade ago and am now, finally, finishing. Or will be finishing, in a couple of months when we hit the end of its 36 pages.
Scoesby Cuts a Rug is about a well-to-do raccoon named Scoesby who can’t quite get his life together. In tone, it sits somewhere between Walt Kelly and P.G. Wodehouse, as Scoesby is beset upon by the often conflicting demands of friends and family in the midst of idyllic Southern environs, trying to figure out what he wants and why he isn’t satisfied just being himself.
The old me could not figure out a reason for Scoesby’s internal struggle, but it was no problem for my current self to see the trans metaphor in this poor raccoon’s quandaries. At the risk of giving away (part of) the ending, Scoesby turns out to be a trans girl. I know, you’re all shocked. But sometimes we write stories we’re not even aware we’re writing. It isn’t until we read them back years later that we finally have the words we knew were missing but couldn’t find.
It’s interesting, continuing a piece of art long…abandoned isn’t the proper word. Set aside, perhaps, to be fished out of drawers and files, to be looked upon and inspected and imagined what might be done or might have been, if I had the time now or if I had made the time to continue what I had started. In the end, the result is a conversation with the me who started this story, who was so confident on how it should begin, but could never quite place how it should end. He couldn’t do that. And so it falls to me.
Here’s the first page. The second is already on the Patreon.
