GOT A TEXT from CCjon a moment ago while sitting here in Gig Harbor scribbling Phantom copy for Mike Manley, the artist on the daily strip.
CCjon made it as far as Coldfoot, Alaska, pulled up with a broken frame and that was the end of his northbound travel. Nestor went on alone, trying to make the last 245 miles or so to Deadhorse, on Prudhoe Bay. The haul road is slick as can be, a moonscape of potholes, his tires must be nearly gone by now, but on he rides, solo, into the land of the barren-ground Bad Mr. Grizz.
CCjon limped his sidecar rig 250 miles back down to Fairbanks and is looking for someone with a welder as we speak. I’m told it’s the sidecar frame that cracked, motorcycle frame’s still in one piece. I texted him back with, So other than that, what did you think of the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
BTW, this is Johnny Danger’s old workplace. He rangered out of Anatuvuk Pass at one point in his career, Gates of the Arctic.
Will keep you advised. In the meantime, check out this blog piece on the Phantom story currently running in the Sunday papers. I like this writer. He mocks us, but always with a funny read. Underlying it all I can see his love for comics. So many other critics seem bitter, unhappy, unfunny, as if they wanted to create comics themselves but couldn’t land a gig, now their barrels are trained on you.
This guy is the exception. I almost always laugh out loud when he’s making fun of us. Comics are supposed to be fun! That’s the spirit.
Tony DePaul, August 15, 2018, Gig Harbor, Washington, USA
Thank you kindly (and belatedly; it’s been an overfull week) for the mention. You’re right about my attitude toward comics, though. I like them as a group, and like just about all of them individually. There are comics I don’t like, but fortunately none have been the story strips that I recap. And even if there were, well, I’ve watched Please Don’t Eat The Daisies several times and feel it stabbing whenever I get too snarky about anything.
If the Phantom is drinking from a straw that bends, that probably means it’s plastic. Have the Enviro Police issued an APB for his arrest?
I don’t know about the Phantom details, but the town names: “Coldfoot” and “Deadhorse?”
And I thought that “Newport,” “Middletown,” and “Portsmouth” back here in the Biggest Little were adventurous …..