Fujichia

Mickey Zacchilli has a new comic out, it's been going out via an email newsletter platform for a couple weeks now. I love Mickey and I'm happy she's drawing comics again. I'll put the link at the end of the post as per usual but thinking about her new comic reminded me of an old text conversation we had when she was still brainstorming comics concepts. The set up, and I don't really remember this, but I think when I asked her to do a comic for my old newspaper Mothers News she was like "what do I do" and I said just take a thing and put it in a place. She went with "Graveyard Ducks", which I absolutely loved. Anyway here's us well after that but also before now.

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you can scroll this
phone message

Sadly none of these made the cut, though I think "Gundam Nights" got to the preliminary sketch stage. All of these are still good to be honest, except maybe "High Desert Stuntwoman" which feels like it should be and maybe already is a Lale Westvind comic. And the beatnik café one, which, I don't know what I was thinking, the god John Stanley hit that out of the park in 1962:

Anyway if you're stuck at an impasse hit me up, I love to riff the perfect amount and no further. Also if you need a band name, I'm great at that too. I'll send you a short list and one of them will ring like a bell. And I'll do it for free IF you commit in advance to using one of the names AND you play at least 5 shows before breaking up. Otherwise I feel like there should be some type of cancellation fee. Is that weird?? I'm thinking that if you're asking around then you don't really want five more names for the band name spreadsheet, you're looking for a way out of this nameless and choice-rich realm of dessication. Call me.

I'm also available to name houses, magazines, and boats (remembering especially the Elizabeth Bishop and Little Pancakes). I keep trying to name a baby but no one's picking up what I'm putting down ("Jacobina", or if it's a boy, "Jacobino"). Nicknames are free but I pick one and there's no going back.

And no, I'm not going to try and charge Mickey ex post facto because that wasn't our deal and anyway I still have my fingers crossed on "Ocelot Saloon". Mickey, think about it-- gunslingers, phantom horses, fishnet stockings, clouds of angry dust. A pearl-handled .22 in the madame's décolletage. And in every issue a 2 page spread of sinewy catmen grappling in the sagebrush. It's Omaha the Cat Dancer meets the Savage Dragon in the Weird West, it's a GOLD MINE!!

Links / Misc

• Mickey's substack newsletter is here: [link]. I really don't like the way they serve pictures on there so as I started to roll my own archive of these strips as they come out: [link]. It's in the castle library, take the staircase up to the third floor and it's the first door on the left. Reading it with a better presentation you can really see what a handsome book this would be for some savvy publisher out there. Gonna try and update this as soon as the new ones drop.
• Mickey has a website where she's selling backstock patches, plus copies of her last book, SPACE ACADEMY 123, which I loved!!!!! Makes a great gift!!!! [link]
• Every installment of "Graveyard Ducks" is also in the castle library, in the milkcrate that has all the backissues of Mothers News. You'll have to click through each issue to find it but Mickey doesn't start until issue 14 I think. Again, that's on the third floor of the castle, in the library, you can't miss it.
  
• WOW late news entry here but I JUST found out there's ANOTHER "Graveyard Ducks" thing, entirely unrelated to Mickey, in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (1987):

  

  Reading up on the lore, it seems like Americans at the time thought this was a mis-translation, but actually it was a relic from the Japanese version, where the villagers lied to you to mess you up! American baby audiences weren't ready for an unreliable narrator. This was the other "wha???" moment from the game:

  

  Band name "Deborah Cliff", that's a freebie.

Archives of previous posts is here, in the coat room: [coatroom]

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To write me a nice message, use the contacts page: [link]

To leave a little donation to help in the maintance of this castle, OR to simply hear the sound of a large bell, which is good luck, visit the temple area: [link]

As always, if you're bugging out or need a respite from endlessly scrolling the feed, you are welcome to hang out in the castle as long as you want. :)