Let's Be Friends Again

My phone frantically rings. This is unusual, as the phone usually rings with a sense of staid complacency. Yet, hark. “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” seems more commandingly urgent than ever.

“Curt, it’s Chris. Listen to me,” he says in a breathless rasp. “This week’s comic. The Tuesday one.”

“Yes. Yes, Chris, go on,” I say, fascinated.

“We can’t do it until Wednesday. I am still traveling back from Florida and will be mega late.”

The words barely exit the device and I black out for a moment, coming to only to see the Bentley brand cell phone shattered against the wood panel floor.

“No.” My voice, a whisper.

I cry like Elliot at the end of E.T.

Good job, Chris. You gave me E.T. emotions.

But, hey, since the strip is going to be late I’m going to do a special blog post tomorrow that will hopefully be alright even though 90% of the comments I’ve read about our comic are like “Yeah, the art is great but the writing is Orwellian, not in terms of quality comparable to George Orwell, but Orwellian in that it makes me want to destroy a society in which free speech is available, lol.”

lol, indeed. You jerks.

There was a young man named Chris Haley who existed in a number of realities, as we all do. A common thread among Chris Haleys is their proclivity to keep themselves in a very poor state of living, as was the case with this particular one. He lived in a flat littered with toys and books and ate enough sweet cereal to rot his teeth. So it is, this day that this Chris is headed to some dentist, who may or may not be important as far as multi-dimensional dentists go, when he hears a slight sound and looks to the sky, only to be struck right on his third-eye by a space laser. I should mention space lasers are not common in this dimension, as I’m sure you were wondering about the noteworthiness of a space laser in a story where I’ve already explained there are a boundless number of each of us separated by a veil as thin as cheesecloth but nearly impenetrable, each a tiny bit different than the next.

Back to Chris, who finds himself supine on the street as cosmic energies infiltrate and replace every cell in his body, a process that looks quite like genocide on a microscopic level what with all of the regular human cells being burst like balloons. And he sits up, still looking and thinking like a Chris usually does. But look closer. With an electron microscope. You’ll see the difference. No skin, as we know it. No organs, no tissue, no blood, no bone. This Chris is a collection of ‘dots’, as we would come to call them later, practiced at the art of deception.

We leap forward a few months, because we can do that sort of thing when we use our imaginations, and Chris is learning that he can do unusual things. Well, unusual for us at least. Not too unusual for people blasted from space by the enigmatic Vigor Trigger.

Chris is flying and firing energy beams from his hands and eyes; he’s transforming things at a subatomic level by exciting or de-exciting their atoms, and generally doing his best to discover the secrets of the deep universe in the name of service and aid to his fellow human beings. This Chris is a superhero. This Chris fights with a fervor and the literal excitement of his electrons. This Chris is The Enthusiast!

So, sometimes things just kind of get out of hand or beyond your control, and you have no choice, but to just call it a wash and start over.

This is my way of explaining why there was no new comic Sunday.. or Friday or Saturday or today for that matter.

Everything will be back to normal starting tomorrow.
Brand new comic and everything!

Won’t that be exciting?
Doesn’t it just make you want to dance?!

I thought it might.

While we’ve got you here, now is as good a time as any to once again thank the incredible, inimitable, incorrigible Joel Priddy for not only helping Curt and I create Mr. Fahrenheit Jr. and The Enthusiast, but for being so kind as to draw their official introduction into the Let’s Be Friends Again Universe.
Yes, we have a “universe” now.
Look, can you prove we don’t have a universe?
That’s what I thought.

Okay, so back to Joel.
If you don’t already have his award winning Pulpatoon Pilgrimage, you need to fix that as soon as possible.
I cannot imagine a universe where you will regret doing so.
You’d also do well to go ahead and pre-order his just announced adaptation of O. Henry’s The Gift of The Magi, available in a glorious hardcover edition just in time for all of your holiday shopping needs.

Chris and I did an interview with Eugene at the People You Don’t Know podcast, and, sure enough, we did end up arguing at some point. Life imitates art quite a bit in our case.

Eugene was great, making Chris and I sound at least halfway interesting and never letting either of us ramble too much unless it was about Wetworks.

So, check out our podcast and all the other ones he’s done, especially the Chris Sims one. It’s quality.