Creating Grimalkin Lane

Today, Gunderic Mollusk and co embark on a new adventure: trying to create a comic book publishing company from scratch. So far, it's just an idea.

It all started from the most innocuous of moments. To preface, My stepmother, a self-made woman who came to America to create opportunities for herself, gave me one of the most compassionate interventions that I've ever experienced. I'd clouded myself in the realms of the spiritual, escaping into magic for magic's sake as my reason for being, in hopes it would give me an answer. She more or less laid it out that if I didn't make a change in my life, I was doomed. I honored her words, yet shelved them for the rest of the trip. The door blew open to our home in South Philly while I had my childhood friend from Delaware, his mistress and her cousin over for carousing and musing, catching up, et cetera, without anyone noticing. My roommate enters, and of course his cat-preservation instincts kick in fiercely, prompting my erstwhile compatriot to hit the road. It made for an awkward evening, yet the confluence of events overwhelmed me. Being the teetering emotional Tower card I am, I've let no one, not even myself, in on exactly how deeply my existential woes had cut into my being. I fainted a few times, and eventually my roommate, in his infinite compassion, helped me to the bed.

Dare I say it, it was a great time to hit a "ripple" from a previous psychonautical experience. I hadn't listened to my inner promptings up to this point; I merely reported them. I hadn't listened to the voice that told me that if I continued to ignore this drive for purpose, I would self-destruct. My stepmother... really hit it on the nose. Her primary quote was as follows: "Without financial independence, you can't achieve mental independence." I realized that, even though I don't much care for the ways money works, or the process of making it, I can put it aside for a goal that I find enriching. In my head, I've had little musings about post-human stories trapped in superhero conventions, superhero stories trapped in self-referential neurosis, and all manner of these things, but I haven't written a blessed thing outside of tables of correspondences and thousands of rewritten character histories, changed names, and an endlessly complex interpretation of supernatural abilities. If I get keyed into anything organizational, be it cleaning, folding laundry, doing the dishes, putting paperwork in order, and anything along those lines, I'm methodically unstoppable until I hit a wall. I need to use this to create this company. I want Philadelphia to have a comics scene. I want to make a home-grown pile of wierdo comics for people who like both forms of media under the name Avatar, who like canceled TV shows, who want to take control of the effect of the superhero medium and create marketing for compassion, sincerity and the evolution of mankind. I want to see Lance Evaporator onesies on babies who'll make the new economy that'll permit free energy. I want to see Gunderic Mollusk patches on the beat-up jeans of art school vixens who innovate art therapy programs that prove that society needs autistic, bipolar and schizophrenic kids, and it needs to find some better ways of translating their viewpoints aside from pills, pressure and paper trails. Yeah, I want to change the world. I want to make comic books. I want comic books to change the world. This is how I will do it.