The Poof
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
It was in my early twenties that I noticed a decrease in the number of rejection slips from editors. My scripts were being accepted and a few years later I was offered a job as a full time writer on a lower rung superhero (or more accurately one at the bottom of the superhero standings at that time of my life; he has risen in prominence now). I was assigned a penciller, The Indian Inker he called himself and I found in him a soul mate, a rare person who knows your soul better than you do and in our case a person who could paint pictures from my words. My girlfriend did not see it that way though and questioned me one night, under the Influence I suspect.
"Why do you spend so much time with that man?", asked she, referring to the all nighters we pulled to get our comic ready for publication.
"Well, honey, you know how important this comic is to me. I have-"
"Why do you spend so much time with him?", she repeated, not really listening to what I was saying in response, "Tell me, I need to know. What has he got that I ain't?"
"A pencil", I answered truthfully, thinking she would forget about it the next morning, hungover.
She goggled. "Is that how you refer to it?"
"Well yes", I replied, confused. Did she know it by a different name in her native tongue? "It is a tool that might be known by different names in different tongues, but in his hands he uses it to make magic, to take the one who experiences the magic to ecstatic levels."
She looked faint. "I should have known", she said and went and locked herself up in her room.
In the morning she was gone. A letter on her bedside informed me that she had left, telling me that I was "free and unrestrained to enjoy the company of men". And then it dawned upon me. A woman is a jealous creature, to the point of begrudging the professional relationship of a man and his penciller.
I laughed about it with The Indian Inker that night as we drank to our health and the King. "To our supposed relationship!", I raised a toast drunkenly but my glass did not meet another. I looked at The Indian Inker. His glass was empty and his brows were furrowed.
"Can our union bear fruit?", he asked.
"The fruit of our loins? One of us would have to be a woman for that", I reminded him.
"No, I mean a character."
"A character? You want us to give birth to a character?"
"Yes. And we shall name him The Poof!", said he and raised his glass and it clinked against mine resoundingly.
The next day, in a sober state, we still thought it was a good idea and the first superhero who was "free and unrestrained to enjoy the company of men" was created.
As I wrote and The Indian Inker pencilled, The Poof assumed three dimensions, had multiple layers added on, until he was complete. He was born with the gift of Supreme Sight, allowing him to see through layers of opacity and he used it to full effect, developing elevator eyes that would render a foe incapacitated in blushed embarrassment. He ruled the skies for a few months, unchallenged.
In time though, the villains got used to the gaze, and The Poof faded from the comicbookworld public memory. In the reader's world, the idea got old quickly, lost its novelty and the audience demanded something new; hence he faded from public memory once again.
The Indian Inker and I parted ways after that. Somehow we could not create the magic again and we decided to go our separate ways. He works on God+ now, a comic about an entity that has powers God could only have dreamed of. I write romance novels; there is good money in it and there is no end to the line of women who want to meet me and find out if I have any aspects of my knight in shining armour characters in myself.
posted by foogarky @ 11:17 PM,
2 Comments:
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At 12:11 AM,
Mihir Pathare said...
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I like this story more than the last one...
Erm... next one...
wahtever... you know what i mean... -
At 12:14 AM,
Mihir Pathare said...
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oh and take the bloddy capcha thingie off. Don't flatter yourself.
The Author
foogarky
foogarky is the pseudonym of the fictional construct who battles for supremacy with other constructed personas in the mind of a crazed individual. He describes himself as a man living in a non descript house in Rio De Janiero, Brazil with two dogs and a parakeet.
About This Blog
The Loony Lampoonist serves to parody, spoof and satirize everything that needs to be parodied, spoofed and satirized. Due to the fictional nature of this electronic journal, any anecdotes appearing here ever so often that seem to be personal in nature, would suffer from the effects of conflicting personalities, the creation of fictional events and the inclusion of non existent characters who did not make it to the big league in the author's literary works. Thus, the Loony Lampoonist is also a purgatory for characters and ideas that have missed the limelight.
