Tales from the Darkside: A Parallax Comic

[Abishai100]

This short-story was inspired by my love of Tales from the Darkside and horror-fantasy comics (as well as a Christopher Reeve film), but I felt it didn't rightly fit into the Writing or USMB Badlands sections of this otherwise very well-organized board.

So, I put it in the Garage (it's also a somewhat bizarre story)! Let me know what you think!


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Thomas Hewitt was a precocious 12 year-old American boy living in Austin, Texas. His adoptive parents took him in when they found him placed in a basket outside their front door when he was just a baby. Thomas grew up with a slight chip on his shoulder, trying to understand why his parents gave him up, so he developed a strange fascination with fantasia storytelling and 'darkside comics' such as Tales from the Crypt and Leprechaun.

When summer came around, Thomas decided he was bored with his otherwise unusual and interesting comic book collection. He rarely played with other children but believed he could talk to squirrels. Feeling adventurous but uncertain about how he wanted to spend his summer, Thomas decided he wanted to make himself a special fantasy activity. He took his lucky dime and sat under a tree and closed his eyes and recited, "I wish this lucky dime contains the magical power to transport me to another dimension while I dream-sleep!"

Thomas came to his senses and was conscious that he was dreaming (while sleeping under the tree) and looked around the environment of his dream-sleep landscape. The sky was purple, and the vegetation was very bizarre (e.g., wavy long red grass, fuzzy giant white flowers, and curly black trees). He roamed around and then noticed a strange figure on a flying winged horse was approaching him with great swiftness. The figure seemed to be some sort of wizard or warlock garbed in scarlet-and-black with a strange protruding horn of authority growing from his temple. When this figure raised his left hand, it started glowing, and Thomas realized the figure was about to shoot some kind of deadly energy beam toward him, so Thomas started pinching himself on his arm, trying to wake himself up from what had become a nightmare. The figure yelled, "I am Venger, master of this dominion! You are Thomas, and you found this fantasy-land by making a wish, but now I demand payment. You must become my pupil or die!"

Thomas was frightened and conceded to become Venger's pupil. Venger landed on the ground and dismounted from his eerie horse and approached Thomas. He told Thomas he was an intelligent warlock and he was going to teach Thomas how to be a figure of great authority in his own time and place. Thomas told Venger he was from Texas, a state in the democratic nation of America on the planet Earth, which rotated around the solar system centered by the hot Sun. Venger told Thomas that since his planet was near a hot celestial point, that he should learn to use a powerful metal tool that would glisten in the light of the Sun. Venger further told Thomas that if needs be, Thomas must disguise himself so others would be more curious about his 'wizardly' intentions.

Suddenly, Thomas woke back up and found himself under the tree in Texas. He believed his lucky dime really transported him to that strange dimension where the warlock Venger taught him how to be a figure of great authority and mystery. A small rabbit approached Thomas, who was still sitting by the tree, and just looked at him. Thomas had a revelation and realized he needed to be a figure of spookiness to command the sort of mystical and mysterious authority Venger was discussing. Thomas ran to the local hardware store and stole a chainsaw while the manager was busy in the back organizing supplies. Thomas then ran home and went to the cemetery next to his house and dug up a recently deceased body and cut off the skin of the face of the corpse and used it to make himself a mask, which he secured with some fishing-line. Thomas then ran inside his house (his parents were not home) and picked up his chainsaw and looked at himself in the mirror. Realizing he was now a true ghoul, Thomas decided to call himself 'Leatherface.'

Six years had gone by and Thomas was now 18 years-old. On a cold and rainy night in November, a young American couple on a cross-country road trip had to make a pit stop when their car broke down in front of the Hewitt house. Thomas was home alone in the basement, sitting in front of the mirror with his skin-mask on and carrying his chainsaw which was silent but ominous. The young American couple, Eric and Erin, knocked loudly on the Hewitt's door and waited for a reply. They heard nothing. Suddenly, a man burst through the front door, wearing a freakish skin mask and wielding his buzzing chainsaw towards Eric and Erin who by now were running scared out of their minds

Thomas/Leatherface caught up with Eric and chainsawed one of his legs off, and Eric fell screaming in pain. Erin looked back in horror but kept running and hailed down a car driving by and got in and told the driver to keep driving. Erin told the driver to drive immediately to the police station. She looked back briefly and noticed the silhouette of the chainsaw-man standing over Eric's squirming body. Erin told the driver, an average-looking Caucasian man of about 30 years of-age, to drive faster towards the police station. As the police station came up, the driver oddly did not stop but kept driving and drove past it. Erin yelled and asked the driver why he drove past the police station to which the driver eerily replied, "I'm a ghost, and you're in Venger's prison!"

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Tales from the Darkside (TV Series)

 

[Abishai100]

The Goblin Decimals

I wanted to take this same 'parallax motif' to create a stratagem tale involving Marvel's Spider-Man simultaneously tackling his two goblin nemeses Green Goblin and Hobgoblin.


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Norman Osborn and Roderick Kingsley decided to join forces and use their villainous 'alter-egos' (Green Goblin and Hobgoblin) to tackle their heroic nemesis Spider-Man, who they suspected may actually be Peter Parker, the affable photojournalist who worked for the Daily Bugle in New York City. Norman believed that if he and Roderick created a 'dark-side' dynamic, making their ghoulish alter-egos 'mirror images' of each other, Spider-Man would be too terrified to confront them with the necessary balanced mental and physical coordination. It was a 'goblin experiment' that intrigued Roderick as well, so the two set off to create a terrible stand against Spider-Man.

Peter Parker was in his garage studying the angles of lasers across mirrors aligned in various arrangements. He wanted to simulate battle scenarios in which sensitivity to the angle of motion and degrees of freedom would heighten his ability to tackle more than one villain at the same time. Peter called this his 'trajectory theory,' but he feared how such a war-conscious theory would be applied to string terrible monsters coming at him from all directions. Nevertheless, after months of tinkering and jotting notes, Peter donned his Spidey vigilante outfit and began soaring around NYC at night on his cobwebs putting his field notes and tests to work. Spider-Man tried various multi-tasking tricks (like managing two problems at once) and dodging multiple targets or obstacles in his way. He had no idea how valuable this incidental training would become.

One Saturday night, while Spider-Man was sitting on a treetop in New York City's Central Park, he saw Green Goblin and Hobgoblin soaring towards him on their jet-gliders and carrying blazing pumpkin bombs. Spider-Man leaped up into the air and decided to lunge towards the Green Goblin. Spider-Man grabbed Norman and threw him off his glider. Just then, Hobgoblin defiantly yelled, "You think you've dealt with Green Goblin, but I am his dark mirror image, the Hobgoblin, and I am still in your path!" Hobgoblin then threw two pumpkin-bombs at once towards Spider-Man and when they exploded in his face, Spidey was knocked down to the ground.

When Spider-Man regained his composure, he noticed Green Goblin had hopped back upon his glider with Hobgoblin's help and the two ghouls were again postured to come at Spidey simultaneously. Peter suddenly remembered his laser-angle notes from his garage and shouted at the two goblins, "If you two spooks are mirror-images (or dark renditions) of each other, then you're also simply alter-egos of each other and will succumb to some common frailty that makes your alliance necessary!" Spider-Man then shot cobwebs at both their gliders and soared hitched to their gliders and used his web-ties to pull their gliders toward each other. When one glider (the Hobgoblin's began to pull away), Spider-Man stayed on the webs tied to the other glider (the Green Goblin's) and pulled close enough to once again knock off the ghoul of his glider and onto the ground of Central Park.

Hobgoblin was infuriated and decided Spider-Man was getting the better of this 'goblin alliance,' so he soared down and hoisted up Norman and pulled him up on his glider and soared away with him, leaving Green Goblin's glider behind. Spider-Man picked up Green Goblin's glider and soared towards Ravencroft Research Institute where it would be properly studied for weapons assessment and analysis. Two weeks later, Peter wrote in the Daily Bugle, "Spider-Man confounds Green Goblin and Hobgoblin in Central Park by exploiting their common trajectories!" Norman Osborn read Peter's article while in his mansion and realized that as Green Goblin and Hobgoblin were working as a kamikaze duo, Spider-Man was wrestling them both as a unified acrobat pair. Norman decided that the best way to confound Spider-Man was to have Green Goblin and Hobgoblin tackle Spider-Man in some perfect synchronized motion, a perfection which hinted that the two goblins were indeed some kind of 'coordinated dark mirror images' of each other. Had Spider-Man outwitted them or ominously inspired them to become more obsessed?

Peter wrote the following entry in his journal:

"My experiments with trajectories leads me to the conclusion that when two opposing forces are united in some common path (of motion perhaps), the two forces become some kind of joint-entity and must be addressed in terms of combined angular regularity. This suggests that congruent (or very similar) bodies in motion create a nearly-perfect axis of motion symmetry, perhaps making Green Goblin and Hobgoblin evolving 'soaring alter egos' of each other. I am getting closer and closer to concluding that Green Goblin and Hobgoblin have created a 'muscular darkside' by making themselves 'moving mirror images' of each other!


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[yiostheoy]

So this is what millennials dream of ??