Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:What the fuck is this supposed to be. What is Tales of Zenith.
It's a webcomic I'm doing. First I was doing a copy of Ben's "Green Guy/Purple Guy" which consisted of a green and purple stick figure. If you go to
http://paul-robinson.us and click on the Cartoon tab you can see that, I did about 4 or 5 before I got tired of it.
Then I decided to do a comic about the incidents in the midwestern town of Zenith, Winnemac. (The fictional state stuck approximately where the bottom of Michigan and the top of Ohio are). I got busy with other things and put it aside after I had a Jehovah's witness kill me in the 5th panel of the strip. You can go to the first panel via the << button and move forward using the right arrow button. (I can't put a right arrow in here; PHPBB will think I'm doing HTML and suppress everything between the two). It uses the ComiKaze comic management system with my own customizations.
The eventual primary story will be about Tam O'Shanter, a hypersexed guy we never see, who gets into all sorts of strange situations, mostly anything to turn a buck. Or to get laid. Or both.
He ends up in a homeless shelter after some woman (who doesn't like it that he's basically giving women who live there a discount on their rent by sleeping with him) burns down his house and he remembers something someone says to him, "Tam, you think you're tough? Try going through something really hard like being institutionalized, like being in a jail, or a mental hospital, or even a homeless shelter. Then you'll see how tough you are."
Well, they don't allow women visitors at the shelter, but some woman wants to "meet" him. So she tries bribing the front door clerk with $20 but that's not enough, they don't allow women in the place as visitors. Then she offers the guy $100, and he says "I think we can arrange a private interview with him in the dorm room, hold on while I set up an unscheduled fire drill."
The shelter gets a call from a supervisor at the Welfare department, because apparently Tam has knocked up about six of their caseworkers, but these women are so efficient that they want to find out if they have more guys like him to improve their case handling statistics, which makes the supervisor look really good with his bosses.
One woman wants to see Tam late at night, and first, they don't allow residents out after 10, and second, they don't allow female visitors. So she comes back bearing a Remington 16 rifle, and the guy calls the shelter manager. The manager disarms the woman, saying that she can't see Tam and she shouldn't have left the safety on. After she leaves, He then says, "And she fell for the old 'you left the safety on' gag! Further, everyone knows that the Remington 16 are prone to " (he sets the rifle down on the desk, and it goes off before he can finish the sentence) "accidental discharge".
This shoots and kills the desk clerk, and one of the residents yells out "You just shot Marvin in the face!" (The desk clerk's name isn't Marvin.) The shelter manager says, "He was shot in the gut, and beside that, we're not parodying
Pulp Fiction in this strip. You and you, take his body out and leave it in an alley on 3rd street."
"Why? It was an accident."
"Yeah, but if he's killed here, it's a worker's compensation case and they'll charge it to our rate. If he's killed on the street it counts against his life insurance and it will just look like a drive-by shooting."
There will be one part when Tam ends up starting a church to get into the (very lucrative) field of solemnizing gay marriages (since most churches won't, his will and charges a premium price). This happened after a couple of female missionaries (the exception to the no women visitors rule) come to counsel the men at the shelter, and Tam talks them into something a bit more intimate than a religious discussion.
"Somehow I think Tam is going to be filling those women with more than just the Holy Ghost."
When someone who doesn't like it that Tam performs gay marriage ceremonies firebombs the church, someone says, "Are you going to go through the wreckage for stuff to recover?" And he says, "The first thing I'm going to do is call my insurance agent!"
Tam helps this guy get a power wheelchair, and the guy wants to know how to arrange to be able to get to the library since the bus keeps showing up with a broken lift. He asks the handicapped guy if he minds going one hour early.
"No, not at all. Why?"
"The transit authority is under a consent decree. They can't send out two buses in a row with broken lifts. If you show up for one and don't leave, that freezes that bus, they can't continue the route until they send out a relief with a working lift. Since that route only runs once an hour, the next bus they send out will have to have a working lift."
Meanwhile, back at the transit authority, the supervisor complains. "George Maharis shuts down more buses than a maintenance strike."
"Who's George Maharis?"
"He's a handicapped guy who waits for the Number 7 bus every day at 9. That bus has a broken lift, which means we have to take the bus out of service until the driver is relieved by a bus that has a working lift, and we're required by court order to send out a bus that has a properly inspected and working lift if any of ours fail, so we have to take out the 9am bus every day and make sure the 10am bus does have a working lift."
"Why don't you just run the bus with the repaired lift at 9?"
"Inconveniencing customers doesn't cost us anything. Doing regular maintenance on buses costs actual money."
I'm going to go back and start doing cartoons for it, I'm just saving the ideas for the cartoon segments.
I have one about the Nadir County Library Police:
"Well, I'm ready. Mac 10, sawed off shotgun, rocket launcher and armor piercing rockets, antipersonnel fragmentation grenades, tear gas and my Glock 9 with kevlar-piercing ammo."
"Andy, we're Library Police, we're only going after people who violate the retention law by failing to return books and are ignoring warning notices. We're not going after Osama Bin Laden or Carlos the Jackal. You don't need to be carrying all that stuff."
"So this is excessive?"
"Yeah. Lose the tear gas, everything else is okay."
http://talesofzenith.com