This Geranium Lake Properties comic was considered for the sixth day of the Eleven Monsters Holiday but it did not quite fit our criteria for the Red Beast theme. It was red enough, but it was not impeccably beastly. This panel was originally part of a series Yost made to illustrate the Thirty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of Six Tales from the Glorious Assemblage of Haberdashers by Abby Ashier Chertsey. The third tale in that book (“The Rust-Stained Jug”) is about a man named Mike Frick, aka the King of Millers. Mike is neither a king nor a miller; he inherited his title from his father, who was also not a king nor a miller. Mike comes from a long line of men who were known as the Kings of the Mills, yet none of them were kings and not one of them was a miller. Yost borrowed this character with Chertsey’s permission, and put Mike Frick the King of Millers into a short story titled “The Fine and Deadly Difference between Zossiyan and Znayossion Yogurts”.

Jack Loki meets Mike Frick on a mild August night, near midnight, at a 24-hour market in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

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Jack’s former business partner, Chuck Pelburley, has asked Jack to meet with Frick, who needs a jackalope competent in asemic cartography and atypical thaumaturgy.

The market has a deli and a coffee kiosk, with a few mismatched chairs and two tables nearby. One of these tables, the black laminated table with white pinewood trim, is the designated location for the meeting. The time and place seem a little dubious to Jack, but he has met clients in more ourewt-nefarbus

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circumstances. The person he meets is a pale, thin man in an expensive, but plain, poorly-tailored business suit, which makes the man look ill, as if he recently lost weight. He has dark circles under his colorless eyes and dark, overlong hair with a receding hairline. This is Frick, who has bought a tall coffee and a thick roast beef and Swiss sandwich

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from the deli, but he is drinking from a Dixie cup of plain water that came from a free water cooler.

Frick tells Jack to “grab some sustenance and a cup of Joe, Jake,” because Frick has a long story to tell him. Jack tells him his names is not Jake and orders a pastrami sandwich with red cabbage, garlic dill pickles, mustard

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and horseradish from the deli, with a side of sesame pistachio halva. He picks up a tea bag and mug of hot water from the kiosk before he drags over a chair and sits down across the table from Frick.

Frick opens the conversation with “Have you ever had a moment when a complete stranger restored your faith in people?” When Jack Loki replies in the negative, Frick begins to tell him about his first encounter with Phereby Catherine Belmonte, who was a great-granddaughter of a famous Appalachian witch. When Jack asks Frick how to spell the woman’s name, he spells it as “Pharaby”, but when Jack searches later for the woman, he finds her under the name of Phereby C. B. Rentzelsen.

We will not recreate the entirety of Frick’s bizarre, meandering account of witches, poltergeists, the burned-over district, alien gods, Greenland sharks, Yupik peoples, etc. – it is a conversation that exasperated Jack Loki almost to the point of callithumpian riot. Frick yammered on for nine/tenths of the original short story – “callithumpian riot” were Yost’s own words for Jack Loki’s exacerbated mood. We will finish our account with this small excerpt:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since, like, 1982,” Frick frowned and half-shrugged his shoulders. “Since the beginning of time, I guess.”

“My name is not Jake,” said Jack Loki, for the third time. “1982? Why 1982?

“That is the year when our greatest hero taught us what is best in life.”

“Okay. 1982. So I am assuming you are not talking about classic philosophy from the ancient world–“

“I am,” interrupted Frick. “From a very ancient world. From an age undreamed of. From between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas.”

“Right. The Sons of Aryas,” Jack repeated slowly, trying to puzzle through a sudden mental montage of large, violent, straw-headed men, leather-clad, wearing horned helmets and/or mounted on huge motorcycles. “Are we talking about… a TV show? No, wait,” he interrupted himself in a flash of revelation. “A movie, from 1982? This great hero – is he Conan the Barbarian? As portrayed by the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

“Yes. Conan – destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. The One who told us what is best in life. To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”

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An unconfirmed suspicion persists among GLP fans that puts Yost in an Abbotsford residence for at least six months in the nineties.

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There is a wide range of interpretations for this term, it can mean anything from uncomfortable to unlawful to scrofulous.

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He eats one quarter of his sandwich and never touches his coffee; he wraps the remainder of the sandwich in a paper napkin and stuffs it into a side pocket of his jacket.

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coarse-ground

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Night, Near Midnight

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Night, Near Midnight

Today we are posting the first part of a 12-page addition to last year’s zine project, Intrepid Spirits/The Book of Clea and Enoch. Some of you might recognize these pages, some of you will not. Most of the “viewers”

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of these pages will have no clue, because most of them are unreal, unalive machine programs laboring under the hysterical pretensions of the Most Wretched Masters of Industry Ever.

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We can stop calling them “views” now. The machine equations do not actually see anything. The word “hits” might be okay, except that word has echoes of the Top Forty lists of my childhood, and those songs were (and still are) full of human presence and significant meaning. How ’bout we call them “bumps”? I think that is a more accurate word for what a blind, fumbling machine does in the dark.

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A Dozen Pages, Part 1 [ZINE]