2001-01-09 - 23:59:55

...And then I met the Vampire Monique

It was Emerson who said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I've been trying to catch up on this journal, but I'm still far, far behind. I've been allowing myself to skip a date with each entry until I catch up, but even that's not doing any good. I'm going through one of those periods where writing is hard, and I'm getting bogged down.

When I talk to Lily about this problem, she just rolls her eyes, as well she might. She thinks I'm being dorky. Why not just skip ahead to the present day and save all the stress? Well, I'm thinking about it.

Where on earth did I get this title from, you may ask? It has to do with my real job, which is owning a comic store. Strega, writing in my analyzer, suggested I talk more about my store so here's a little story.

Every month, the Manager and I have to wade through our order forms. This is not a trivial task: every moth out ordering catalog is as thick as a modest-sized phone book and or order book itself is over 100 pages long. It takes us two full evenings to deal with all of it.

While I love comics, slogging through some of the god-awful crap that is being published would make a militant comic-book cynic out of anyone. Most of the people who produce these books really, really love comics, but sadly this love does not make them good writers or artists by default.

A couple years ago, while doing the order forms, I was reading the plot description of a new comic being published by one of the small companies. It had some sort of a portentous title like "The City After Dark" or something like that.

Anyway, this rather lengthy plot description had me already shaking my head about halfway through it. It looked like the writer was trying to cram every single film noir cliché into one comic book. The hard-bitten cynical private eye meets a beautiful woman who gets him tangled up in a murder mystery, and then when the woman shows up dead the police think he did it, and so forth. It just went on and on. How did the writer hope to fit all of this into one 30 page comic, I wondered. Plot descriptions should be short and to the point - you don’t need to give us the entire damn story. Obviously the same person who wrote the comic wrote the ad copy too, and you could tell that he was very proud of himself. He absolutely HAD to give you every precious detail.

However, the last line of the copy had me almost rolling on the floor with laughter. After all the complicated plot twists, the description concluded with "And then he meets the Vampire Monique..."

Of course! Let's throw a trendy vampire into the mix! Why the hell not? Vampires are hot! Vampires are sexy! Never mind that it has NOTHING to do with anything that went before it! It worked for Anne Rice, didn’t it??

I found this non-sequitur so funny that for the next week or so I kept throwing it into my conversations: "I went grocery shopping last night... and then I met the Vampire Monique."

Okay, so I am easily amused. Maybe reading too much ad copy had made me punchy. I'm sure I annoyed the hell out of everyone with my silliness.

So there you have it, a tiny tale of the comic store. Now, if you'll excuse me I have to get to work on my other job, writing the chess column. After that, I think I'll go get some lunch.

...unless I meet the Vampire Monique.