The Nickels of the Man

SO THERE goes the summer of 2024, went by in a flash, don’t you think? Tomorrow’s Labor Day, in two weeks it’ll be Thanksgiving. No wonder I never get anything done.

My summer saw its reflection in a basement window and made like this coyote.

Some of the guys out west rode up to Alaska for the solstice in June, I didn’t make it this time. They rode to Colorado in September, didn’t make that either. But I did have a better summer than the CEO of Sore Loser, Inc., so that’s something. For the third time in little more than a year, he sorely lost before a jury able to do something he never will: set its opinions aside and honor the oath.

In our society, the adults in the room seem to rise up from below, isn’t that interesting? The ill-raised children at the top are busy putting on the big show.

Now that summer’s over and I’ve gotten exactly nowhere motor-wise, here was my favorite part of staying local: three or four days a week we were up at the ballfield. It was tee ball for D1D2, she’s 5, softball for her big sister.

Here’s D1D1 swatting a few. She’s a good all-around athlete: gymnastics, swimming… The 9-year-old girls are at the learning stage where their coaches pitch to them. Everybody bats long enough to hit, nobody keeps score, and parents cheer as much for the other team’s girls as they do their own.

D1D1 is like the younger sister in A League of Their Own: can’t lay off the first pitch. Or was it the high ones? Might have been the high ones…

After the game Saturday, she and a couple of her friends watched the high school girls do a batting warm up in the next field over. Those girls can hit! I’ll grab it on video next time. It was fun to see the younger girls flinch when the ball comes at them. The older girls are easily hitting 60 mph in warm up, I would guess.

Here’s our girl two years ago, talking with her cousin, Ava, from Pennsylvania. In a playoff game last week Ava hit a grand slam for Penn State. I’ve got the video on my phone, can’t seem to sync it to my desktop or I would show it to you.

The feline member of our household came to the end of the road last week.

Cats have the right idea: a long middle age followed by about a week of old age, then it’s time to go. She wasn’t in pain or distress, just stopped eating and then finally didn’t want water either, so I took her on the final ride to ease her way out of the world. They go easy, cats, dogs; it’s people who get to suffer to the agonizing end.

This cat was quite the survivor. We adopted her at age 3 or so, dead of winter. We named her Zuzu for It’s a Wonderful Life, then playing on a loop on TV, the Christmas season. She had been mauled by a dog or a coyote and was living under a truck on Cranston Street. It was single-digit temps when we took her home. She was likely a few days from death.

Warmth, food and medical attention soon set her right and she had 17 good years ahead. A wonderful life, indeed. Would Jimmy Stewart ever lie to you?

Got up to Vermont a few weekends ago. It was a cool mid-May, good sleeping weather, overnight temps in the 30s. I turn in early in the country but do like to see the day through until the text goes out of focus.

One of the classics I had missed over the years: the story of a talented guy who marries a disturbed woman for all the wrong reasons, his life turns out to be kind of a failure. It was written by a talented guy who married a disturbed woman for all the wrong reasons and his life… well… you know.

We were in Vermont doing floors.

Which is to say Jonny was doing floors.

Somebody’s got to be the old bastard who upholds standards. Hey, you missed a spot…

For full effect, point with a cane.

After I watched him do floors I watched him cook us breakfast for dinner.

Got my navigation system sorted out on the Arctic bike. I installed a new iPhone mount just under eye level on the windshield. For safety’s sake there’s never a need to look down at the lower mount; I can shift focus momentarily, check for turns then it’s eyes on the road. Heads-up riding all the way.

I soldered longer wires into the circuit on the turn-signal indicator, too; got it mounted up high so I can’t miss it. Again, no looking down, that’s the idea.

The signals aren’t self-canceling on the 650 piglet. Your chances of getting wrecked increase dramatically if you’re riding around with a turn signal you don’t know is blinking. One time in 100 is way too many times to be doing that.

I hope to get out on the MABDR or the NEBDR this summer, but since it’s Thanksgiving in two weeks that probably didn’t happen either.

Oh, well… I’ll just mope around looking at the map.

Jeff Weigel and I are working on a Phantom adventure set in 1590-91. (Do feel free to scroll down if you could hardly care less.)

This one is mainly told through text blocks instead of dialogue. Call it a tip of the hat to Hal Foster: Instead of putting the reader in the story with a simulated present moment, Jeff and I are going to hold up the tale as a tableau, hang it on the wall, as it were.

I didn’t want to use direct quotes in text blocks, Foster’s way in Prince Valiant. Didn’t want to use anonymous narration though, or burn art space continually reestablishing the present. So I’m using a particular kind of textual voice to create an off-narrative space where the 21st Phantom can tell the tale to Diana without us needing to be there.

This sounds more complicated than it is, it’s really quite simple when you have the page in front of you. Look for free indirect speech rather than anonymous narration, with voice serving as a function of time. Syntax alone should always answer the question: Who’s speaking? The answer is almost always cued by the art. What you see will have a lot to do with what you hear.

What I think readers will hear is: This must be something akin to what the 21st Phantom is saying to Diana in sequences we don’t witness.

This must be something like the antiquated vocabulary and syntax the 2nd Phantom used when he recorded the tale for future generations.

And this—this is easy—has to be the 2nd Phantom’s headspace, the syntax and vocabulary of his inner monologue. Why else are we seeing personal pronouns in a text block with no quotation marks?

As in all stories, it’ll work or it won’t. The risky tales are the ones I most love to write. If it can’t fail, why write it? AI can easily write the same safe story over & over & over. (Sometimes I think plenty of readers would be delighted with a dull reliable sameness, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Jeff’s been running occasional B&W previews of his art on his FB page.

Wonderful artist! We’re lucky to have him.

The Phantom story I did with Bret Blevins will end Saturday. Bret was filling in for my friend Mike Manley while Mike was on the DL.

I had three aims in mind, wrote about the first two here a few months back. I wanted to go on record dismantling a 1953 story by the same title, The Chain: do a demolition job on both its underlying premise and its treatment of race.

What I held back at that time was my third purpose: to have this new take on The Chain show how the Wrack and Ruin series continues; how it’s baked into the lore now but can morph into an entirely new context that raises new narrative issues. This week, the Phantom gains some insight into that evolving context and amends his thinking, or holds it open to amendment anyway.

The Phantom discovers that his son, Kit, has experienced a small part of the Mozz prophecy in a nightmare. The nightmare so disturbed Kit he felt he needed to come home from India, which we saw him do in the concluding chapter of Wrack and Ruin.

In the nightmare now revealed in The Chain, Kit saw himself as a killer at age 30, fighting somewhere on a disputed frontier in Asia. Born to be a Phantom, he builds his life instead around vengeance. He disarms prisoners, marches them behind a building and shoots them to death.

We saw this other Kit in a prophecy sequence in Wrack and Ruin, and here in The Chain we find out Kit has seen it for himself. He doesn’t know the future events that may prompt this transformation for the worse—though we do: Kit and his tutor, Kyabje Dorje, are falsely seen as responsible for Savarna Devi gunning down Chief Constable Jampa. The foreign power Jampa was spying for bombed the mountain city in retaliation. Kyabje Dorje died in the bombing. Kit became obsessed by revenge and that was that.

Here the Phantom finds out Kit has seen this future version of himself.

Kit’s home in East Africa temporarily as far as we know. He intends to go back to India to resume his studies at Nyamjang Chu. We’ll see if Kit’s mother and sister get anywhere in their plan to fix him up with Kadia Sahara and get him to stay. I rather doubt it but you never know. He might fall for Kadia and go back to India nonetheless. Hard to say.

So this is how the story wraps up this week: As always, the point of the writing is to reveal character. In these closing days we see the Phantom’s optimism, his intelligence, his concern for others—his radical unconcern for himself—and his ability to function in the human condition, which is to say he’s prepared to see his way through the unknown, his incomplete knowledge of the twists and turns that await.

What’s behind Kit’s nightmare, you may gather, is the event that started the whole thing three years ago: the intervention of Old Man Mozz a continent away. Mozz perceived the prophecy and intended to thwart it by warning the Phantom off the trail to Gravelines Prison.

This happened in the opening weeks of Wrack and Ruin.

Mozz is sketching an image he’s seen, an image of the unmarked grave that awaits the 21st Phantom in India if Savarna Devi gets out of Gravelines Prison alive.

Now, in The Chain, we see that fate was already moving to counter Mozz. Kit, at that moment, 7,000 kilometers away in India, was asleep and falling into the nightmare.

Later that day, two other events coincide in time: Mozz stops the Phantom on the trail to Gravelines and Kit decides to come home. Again, it’s Mozz fencing with fate: the thrust, the parry, repeat…

Today’s strip…

I think what the Phantom really means to say is he’s not worried about himself. As ever, he’s outwardly directed, that’s his nature. If fate wants to lead him to the mountain pass where Manju will take his life, then that’s the way it must be.

An ordinary man would feel otherwise, certainly, but the premise of the fictional universe Lee Falk created is that the 21st Phantom has, in his care, the custody of a 500-year-old legend and is thus not an ordinary man. Everything we know about the character begins there.

Now this is brilliant, this next image. It wasn’t scripted; it was Bret Blevins thinking about how to drive the sense of the closing narrative into a single image: the snake slithering by Skull Cave at night. Knowing the Phantom’s state of mind, and after spending a little time with the text in that panel, any attentive reader should be able to assign two or three possible meanings to the image.

If Savarna had learned Jampa’s whereabouts through the Phantom, Kit and Kyabje Dorje would have been implicated in Jampa’s killing. Mozz tried to alter that course by revealing the prophecy to the Phantom. Fate counters by revealing a small part of the prophecy to Kit. It’s not unreasonable to think his journey home was about fate using him to reveal Jampa’s whereabouts to Savarna. Mozz had already wrecked its plan to convey the information to Savarna through the Phantom.

So things get to the same place as far as Jampa is concerned. What you think happens next depends on the importance you assign to Jampa’s death. Was his destiny driving the prophecy or was he a cog along the way to some other emerging future? The Phantom will be thinking about that for quite some time.

Way too much Phantom blather…

Moving on, I continue to get out in the woods when I can. Though, to my liking, June is about 60 degrees too warm to work in the woods.

My wood yard behind the kids’ house on the west side of town. I’ve been hauling it home bit by bit in the ’49 truck. I knocked together a plywood box so as not to have to stack the wood and cinch it down on the flatbed.

Won’t need this wood next winter. These are 2026 fires seasoning.

It’s all got to be wheelbarrowed hundreds of feet; wheeled out of the woods to the truck, loaded, transported, then unloaded and wheeled down the hill into our backyard. I like the heft and the motion. It feels good to be a moving target.

Keeping the well-worn gear in good order…

In closing, file this under sez you, Big Tech: A plugin developer in Romania tells me I need to start sending them money because—Congratulations, Tony DePaul! Your site is growing at an unprecedented rate!

The hell you say…

I use a WordPress plugin to optimize the loading speed on the images you see here. The owner says this little sub-routine is working so much overtime on my behalf, so taxing their servers, I need to upgrade. The Romanians say they have this on good authority from all-seeing, all-knowing Google, which has fingered me as an up-and-comer: my scribblings were devoured by thousands of readers last month!

A month in which I posted exactly nothing to read. Color me dubious.

I deactivated the plugin instead of sending them money, of course. It was no small amount they wanted; easily enough to put another motorcycle on the road for the year, insurance-wise.

There are no analytics on my blog, never have been. I couldn’t care less. Analytics are for conning ad buyers, or for vanity’s sake. So many people use VPNs nowadays your reader in so-called China might actually be three streets away, no?

My final communication with the vendor:

I’m squared away with Vimeo, by the way. When I log onto my account it says: “You don’t have any followers.”

Solid!—let’s work to keep it that way. Breath of fresh air…

Tony DePaul, June 3, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA