#cleveland quixotic

[narukaminigga]

something interesting i noticed

In Bavitz’s works, there’s a moment where the story ends. It’s hard to explain how I feel or what I’m talking about, but at the end, these larger than life figures, people who don’t seem to have a lot of character or hobble around as misanthropes unleash a dam of tears when they are complete, no longer barred from the circumstances making it impossible for them to cry. I’ll try to explain it in the best way I can. SPOILERS beneath the cut for I think all of Bavitz’s works.

In Fargo, Sloan Redfearn is beaten down after many epic battles, deaths of people she cared or didn’t care about, and cosmic destiny looms on the horizon. Despite her becoming an insignificant character in the grand scheme of things, Madoka herself approaches Sloan. Sloan, who could not feel anymore, drifting listlessly through the motions and could barely be invested at this point beyond key moments is brought back down to earth again. This moment is important because earlier in the story, Sloan tells Sayaka to bring down the Homura devil explanation “down to earth”, but Sayaka can’t. But after all of the conceptual talk, the world blowing up, and girls from Chicago, Sloan returns to something she cares about. The ending is akin to an abrupt ending of a movie or a video game, which Cleveland Quixotic returns to. The last chapters after the story function as an extended epilogue where life slowly transitions from the story to normality in the weirdest way possible.

This moment sets up a recurring theme in Bavitz’s works. These characters, larger than life, or not, are people at their core. In Modern Cannibals is the elusive Katsumata, who remains mostly out of the story but functions as Z. Coulter’s greatest inspiration. If we recall the story, Mr. Katsumata believes the game is for young girls, who he wishes to inspire and empower, compared to the malignant and elusive Hussie who swaps between several personas, several existences, many ideas, all layered under an ironic schtick that may or may not be a form of postirony. This simple and straightforward creator, once stone-faced, like Fargo, is touched, and the story ends because there is no reason to keep exploring. Z.’s journey is over.

In Cockatiel X Chameleon, Caricresco (or Car, I struggle with that name…) realizes that nobody was here for her or will prop her up. Car disappears without a trace, yes, without a trace, vanishing into oblivion. Harper, meanwhile, who just passed her, stares at her own creation, apart of her own being. In the story there is a great emphasis of art being apart of who you are, and the art being apart of who you are can be commodified, changed, and even controlled, but it can never be destroyed. In a similar vein to UNDERTALE, despite everything, it’s still you. Harper understands that, even if she is stuck in a perpetual state of drifting and non-thinking.

This takes me to his most recent Pokemon fic, When I win, the world ends, where Red, this silent figure, boogeyman supreme, is inscrutable to Aracely. It’s hard to even tell what Red is thinking compared to everyone else, and Cely missteps multiple times in her shock. It is like the mention where Red wins playing basic fundamentals and his opponents trip up somehow. But in the end, Cely loses despite having literal psychic powers, and the story ends. It shifts to Red himself, who returns to his 11 year old self. Red isn’t even the protagonist of the story, and yet:

The story, beyond that, means nothing. Red has won, and for everyone else, the story has ended. Bavitz chooses to take it in another direction, however. After this moment, it is only Aracely who is the loser of this tournament, the one who did not get her happy ending. But Red beat the person who was the herald of the end of the world, and that’s it.

[weaselandfriends]

Recently finished reading Cleveland Quixotic, so now I have read all six of your stories in the span of like two months. I had a serious illness and had to stay in bed during all that time and you got me through it.

Questions...

Have you read every book referenced in the chapter titles? Have you watched every (real) anime mentioned in in CxC? Have you played Bubsy 3D 2?

Is there any WoG on the connection between Aracely and CM? When reading Chicago, I interpreted CM's wish to mean that "Cely Sosa" was herself, and that Charlie Vizcarra/Clownmuffle were different identities Kyubey had conjured for her after messing with her memories as per her wish. The alternate versions (?) of them in When I Win suggest... I'm not sure. Any comment?

Obligatory who are your biggest artistic influences question.

Especially in terms of tone and thematic focus, you are the bleakest writer I have engaged with that managed not to fall into the trap of numbing misery porn (Berserk, Wildbow, etc). Is something you are conscious of and intentionally try to avoid?

Who is your favorite character, from your own books? Which character do you see yourself as most similar to?

In Modern Cannibals, Graves and Maximillion and Hussie are LITERALLY meant to be the same interconnected entity, right? I was discussing this with a friend who I got to read it, and they agreed that they were meant to be connected as different potential representations of either AH or artists in general, but I read it as them actually being some fantastical unholy trinity monster. The story has a lot of allusions to Catholicism (the game designer in one of his monologues directly compares to his position as an creator as Christ being transmuted and consumed), was wondering if this was as much of an intentional choice as I'm assuming.

Are you ESL? My friend seems to think there are a few minutes "tells" in your work, and if you were that would be the most motivating thing ever for me

Oh boy, a lot to cover here. (I love it, thank you for this ask.)

I've read almost all of the books used as chapter titles. The only chapter titles that come from things I haven't read are:

Magica Madoka Veneficus Puella, from Fargo Ch 38 (This Story's Dead) - I just happened to see the author note blithely describing the story as scrapped and thought that was funny.

To the Stars, from Chicago Ch 24 (To the Stars) - As I mentioned in an old review of To the Stars, I only managed to read about 200,000 words of this nearly 1 million word behemoth.

Dunston Checks In, from Chicago Ch 29 (Dunston Checks In) - I have not seen this movie.

As for the anime in CxC, I've seen most of it. I haven't seen Gabriel DropOut or Himouto! Umaru-chan and I've only seen 8 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena before I dropped it. (I have an old ask about Utena where I express my unpopular opinion that I didn't like it, to the dismay of everyone who interacted with the post, but I can't find it anymore.) I'm obsessed with lists, so I have a list of every anime I've seen with a number rating (the Dropped section is also accurate).

I have, in fact, actually played Bubsy 3D 2 (also known as Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective), and not just seen the Dunkey video from which all the Bubsy 3D 2 chapter titles come from. (Including WIW's chapter title, MEWSEUM.) I've also gone to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Bubsy 3D 2 is set.

Since I keep bringing up Dunkey in this ask, I'll mention that I'm actually in four Dunkey videos. I used to play League of Legends with him in 2012. We even did a group watch of the Disney Channel original movie Don't Look Under the Bed.

2. That's an interpretation I never would have thought of, but it's really cool! (My commenters always seem to have predictions/interpretations I wish I thought of.) My mindset regarding Clownmuffle's wish in Chicago was based on the classic work of horror fiction by RL Stine, Be Careful What You Wish For (Goosebumps #12). In it, the main character, Samantha Byrd, wishes in a fit of rage for her bully/rival "to just disappear." The wish works, but there's a catch - everyone else in the world has disappeared too! Which is just like, okay at that point it's not even be careful what you wish for, you're just making stuff up. At the end of the story, Byrd fixes everything and makes it so her bully/rival gets to make wishes instead. The bully immediately wishes for Byrd to become a real bird, which she does, and nobody else in the world becomes a bird, suggesting the wish woman was just particularly screwing over Byrd for no reason.

Anyway, my mindset was that Charlie and Cely were rivals, and things spiraled out of control, so that Charlie wished for Cely to disappear. What specifically caused them to fall out? I'll leave that open ended.

3. Franz Kafka is my biggest literary influence, though as even just this ask probably reveals, I can take influence from pretty much anything. I'm probably the least Homestuck-esque creator of the many creators influenced by Homestuck, but it was a major influence. The rapper Aesop Rock is another major influence (I'm named after him). Beyond that, pretty much anything I've read or seen might be an influence on me. Cockatiel x Chameleon's two main artistic influences were Lucky Star and the Madoka Rebellion movie, for instance.

4. Honestly, I love bleak misery porn. I love just the most depressing story you can imagine. I love when a story ends and there are maybe 2 characters still alive and they're both generic bureaucrats there just because someone needs to give the final line (like in Hamlet, King Lear, and Akame ga Kill).

Cockatiel x Chameleon is probably the work that most completely realizes my artistic ambitions, and it's no coincidence it's my bleakest and most depressing work. But ordinarily I often feel like I have a duty to achieve some sort of reader satisfaction. I would not consider myself a very indulgent author. I don't know if I could even be one if I tried.

5. My favorite character I've written is Khalid "Lil Cal" Bhandari from Modern Cannibals. I love his role in the story structurally. I love how Z. is so excited to go on this road trip with her friends and then neither of her friends talk to her at all and she winds up talking to this random guy all the time who is introduced as a literal who she has to put up with. I love how he vanishes for half of the story after walking off into the desert and then reappears 50,000 words later to participate in a climactic rap battle. I love his analysis of Malkwon's rap music. He's just a really funny character with a unique role in the story.

The character I'm most similar to is Harper Praise. Cockatiel x Chameleon is my most autobiographical work.

6. I designed Modern Cannibals so that both interpretations would exist simultaneously. They could be different people, or all aspects of the same person (Hussie). Modern Cannibals dwells on questions of identity and people having different faces or sides that are not immediately seen: Not just Maximillion/Ian West, Graves/Hussie, Max/Cosplay Max, but also almost everyone Z. interacts with, who winds up revealing completely new facets of their character in their POV scenes that Z. is totally blind to. This theme of identity works both on the level of Z.'s relationship with her friends, but also on the level of the creator figures' relationship with their audience. It culminates in the final question of the story: Who is speaking the story's final words, Shirou Katsumata the game developer, or his corporate-approved translator?

The identity aspect also translates into a lot of doubles or pairs that are less explicit and more thematic. For instance, each of the three main kids (Z., Kiki, Max) winds up having a "counterpart" in the three main adults (Maximillion, Mitchum, Hussie). The POV chapters are arranged symmetrically around Max's POV chapter as an aspect, with characters either getting a second POV scene in the same position on both sides of the axis (Kiki being the first and last POV scene, Maximillion being the second and second-to-last), or having a different but similar character replace their position on the other side of the axis (for instance, Shirou Katsumata and Andrew Hussie's POV scenes exist in the same position around the axis, prompting comparison of them as creator figures beleaguered by their fanbases). By the end of the story, Z. has seemingly replaced Kiki and Max with Cecily and Maximillion, both of whose names are similar to those of the people they "replace."

So yes, all of these characters who might or might not be the same character were intentionally designed in such a way, and I think that's core to how Modern Cannibals is operating on a thematic level.

7. I am not ESL, sorry. I wonder what those "tells" are...

[just2comment]

Cleveland Quixotic is not just a deconstruction of isekai, it's a deconstruction of the entire fantasy genre. What compels us to read stories of make-believe? Of not just fiction, but of tales that are so otherworldly as to be impossible. Escapism is the automatic answer; when the world is harsh and unfair, we yearn for a world entirely unlike our own where heroes rise and villains are vanquished. Good triumphing over evil, the underdog rising to the top, an unjust world being set right. We seek karmic catharsis on a grand scale.

We are at a point in history where everyone everywhere has access to endless fantasy. Endless catharsis. Escapism ad infinitum.

And why not? Reality has solidified. The systems in place have become so codified, so bureacratic, so layered and imperceptible, that we would sooner imagine the end of the world than any significant change to it.

The premise of Cleveland Quixotic and Jay's initial struggle is intensely relateable. What is his ultimate fate? What is anyone's? Squash your dreams and become another cog in the machine? It's a soul-crushing reality. And if you're losing your soul anyways, why not get something out it? Your own world, where you can truly fix things and make things better, where you truly matter.

Cleveland Quixotic has a strong premise, and if it just ran with that, it would be an incredible subversion of the isekai genre, but it does more than that. Fantasy as escapism is just the current zeitgeist. Fantasy, historically, started as religion.

Before smart phones, before the internet, before television or radio, we had religion. We had the fantasy of Heaven and Hell. When we die, we're transported to another world (isekai'd) to either Heaven, if we're good, or Hell, if we're bad. The ultimate karma, the fantasy of a just system governing our world.

Fantasy has always been with us, for as long as we have been able to speak and tell stories. It's as core to human desire as food, air, or water. We dream of justice and fairness and of a better world. Fantasy that is only escapism is just sloth. Fantasy, true fantasy, is a goal.

Are you satisfied with this world? Are you happy with the way it works? Don't you think it could be better?

...

Well, you have a few options.

You could keep your head down, just do what you're supposed to, pretend like it's okay.

Or you could run away, hole up in your room playing video games and watching movies. Dissociate completely.

Or, and this is the tough one, you could try and make the fantasy reality. You could try and earn it.

...

Cleveland Quixotic is a good story, a good fantasy, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I will be remembering it for a long time. Hopefully, you do, too.

[haootia]

a very sketchy viviendre (of @weaselandfriends ' magnificent cleveland quixotic)

[weaselandfriends]

Fuck I should have had Napoleon show up at the end

The blurb on Cleveland Quixotic starts out with a banger. "There are no more Napoleons". Is that actually very relevant to the story?

yes, it would be a very strange blurb if it wasn't. cq is very very concerned with individualism and heroics, with greatness and what it means and if it's real or not. i mean it's thematically relevant to be clear dont expect napoleon to like show up or anything

[itsbenedict]

so many baseball bats

get a haircut, hippie

WK reviews +5 lessons

make a list of art assets necessary for the launch

do something off that list of assets

update loop for fight screen, go through lifecycle

okay sure it's 1:43 AM but i did get everything done, and i don't have to get up early tomorrow

[transgenderer]

i feel like when i win the world ends might be worth reading but also the idea of a story that involves smogon-style pokemon battles described in detail seems really stupid. i read modern cannibals and thought it was...okay. bavitz readers: should i read cleveland quixotic or WIWtWE

[weaselandfriends]

"You know what, fuck it, let’s get this over with” is assuredly what Andrew Hussie said to himself when he clanged out the final bit of Homestuck. It is, by some accounts, what the showrunners of Game of Thrones said to themselves when they put together the show’s final season. It’s probably what Stephen King said to himself when he was 1,000 pages into The Stand and decided the best way to end it would be the literal hand of God descending to resolve the action instantly.

Coincidentally I’m moving into the last few chapters of my own long serialized work right now. I feel that temptation creeping in, and I’ve felt it before for my other works. (I succumbed to it during the final chapter of Fargo, that chapter in my opinion is well below my typical standards of prose quality, but luckily readers seemed to enjoy it anyway.) The only way to finish a story right is to fight that impulse as best you can.

state of the book

(Attention conservation notice: long, kinda navel-gazey. There are some specifics at the start and end.)

There are 7 chapters remaining in Almost Nowhere.

I'm about halfway through writing the first of those. The current plan is to post that first chapter when I'm done with it, and then stop with the serial updates until I've written all of the remaining six. Then, I'll post those all at once.

----

When I got near enough to the end of writing Floornight, it got frustrating to write in a new way.

The fact that I wasn't just done already was agonizing. Once the finish line got close enough for me to see, the remaining distance felt like it was taunting me.

How did I react? I let it go on for a little while, and then one evening I said "you know what, fuck it, let's get this over with." And I sat down and wrote the last two chapters.

I wrote them with the attitude of a checked-out high school senior racing through his last homework assignment. I wrote them unusually fast, with less "quality control" than usual, and with less passion for the story itself than for the idea of just getting it over with already.

----

When I got near enough to the end of writing The Northern Caves, it got frustrating to write in a new way.

The fact that I wasn't just done already was agonizing. Etc, etc.

I let it go on for a little while, and then one evening I said "you know what, fuck it, let's get this over with."

And I sat down and wrote the last five chapters, in one evening. Unusually fast, with less "quality control" than usual, etc., etc.

I often drink a bit when I'm writing, but I drank more than usual that evening. A checked-out senior, already mentally on summer break. Fuck it. Just get it over with.

----

I have now reached this point of ending-related frustration with Almost Nowhere.

I'm not going to do the "fuck it, let's end this tonight" thing a third time, though.

The endings of my earlier 2 novels were, uh ... not ideal, in a lot of ways. Some of those are related to plot and structure, and can't really be blamed on the way I kind of gave up 90% of the way though.

But there's a weird, sudden, desultory, incompletely sketched feel to those endings that I'm sure was a result of the way they were produced. It wasn't some necessary implication of the broader construction. It was just that I gave up.

And I can just ... not do that. And get a better last part of the book out of it. And then it'll be there, forever, in its better state.

----

(I think this frustration largely stems from serial writing?

Thanks to the peak-end rule [among other factors], endings are pretty important. But the further you go in a serial, the more constrained you are.

No matter how much you plan ahead, there's always some maneuvering room, some opportunities to be creative on the fly, to surprise and delight yourself.

This decreases monotonically as you get further along. You feel less and less like you're creating something in the big, exciting, easily romanticized sense of that word, and more and more like you're doing the yeoman work of painting in fine details between pre-established lines and keyframes.

The upside risk declines faster than the downside risk. In the middle of a serial, you can always fantasize about how great the remaining parts will be -- great in ways you might not ever have expected! And you're not wrong: there ARE things you'll only invent later, which you'll feel proud of, and will be unable to imagining lacking once you've made their acquaintance.

As you near the end, this potential goes away. But there is still the need to paint in between those sketchy lines and keyframes. If you do this very well, the result will be simply as you have imagined it -- not superior to your current vision, in some heretofore-unimagined manner, but only what you already have in mind, ably executed. However, there is still the possibility of severe failure: those painted details could go very wrong indeed. There is a ceiling, now -- but there is still no floor.

That's why I have trouble with endings, I think. But it's no excuse for not doing them well. It's hard, but many things are hard. I simply need to not give up.)

----

Long story short, I really want to be done with the book!! This is eating away at me, every day.

Unfortunately, this year continues to be mildly cursed as far as writing is concerned.

I'm finally (I think? fingers crossed??) coming out of the depressive funk that has afflicted me for most of the year.

In its place, the new problem is that I'm sleeping terribly. I've been sleeping terribly, consistently, for at least a few weeks now.

At first it was due to the sun rising earlier. We blacked out the bedroom windows again, but now my circadian rhythm is all messed up, giving the problem its own momentum even after the removal of the initial stimulus. Presumably it'll improve over time.

(Maybe the sleep deprivation actually helped with the depression? That has been known to happen.)

So I'm in this kind of weird state w/r/t the book.

I have a strong emotional motivation to go as quickly as possible.

I also have a strong emotional motivation to "stick the landing," and not feel like I'm giving up 90% of the way through.

I keep finding myself in states where I can't easily produce writing that feels like "sticking the landing," and certainly can't produce it very quickly.

(Probably I need to just take better care of myself, in all sorts of ways, and then the other problems would work themselves out.

That goes against all the instincts I learned in school, of course: you get the final projects and exams over with first, and you "take care of yourself" after -- not the other way around, silly! But I have not been in school for a long time, and should start acting like it.)

Just to be clear, I'm not posting this out of a desire for people to tell me that it's #valid for me to take as long as I need, and to reassure me that I don't need to rush for my (tiny) readership. I believe that all already, and appreciate it. But the impetus to go fast is coming from me, not from any idea about my audience.

----

Some qualitative statistics.

I keep track of (chapters written / time) and also (words written / time).

Both of these have their flaws, but I think the latter is more meaningful overall. Mere verbosity is no virtue, but one does need to write more words when there's a lot that needs to happen, and chapters very in eventfulness.

My average words-per-time rate over the "third act" of AN has been about 60% what it was during the fast period in 2022, when I wrote most of the "second act."

For what it's worth -- which is disputable -- that slower rate is still faster than my average rate over the entirety of TNC. But of course TNC was a lot less wordy.

(I don't know how I expected to write the whole book in 2022. Well, I do, but it involved absurdly optimistic assumptions about the "third act." The conceit was a useful kick in the ass, though.)

A somewhat optimistic extrapolation, using this rate and the average chapter word count in "act 3," says I will take around 5-6 months to write the remaining 7 chapters.

5-6 months is ... actually not that big a hiatus, by my standards! (That says more about "my standards" than anything, but still.)

It does feel absurdly long, though, emotionally. Emotionally, I feel like I ought to be done, like, next week. Come on, it's so close, just "get it over with" --

On a practical level, I'm a little worried about the size of the planned 6-chapter final block. Less from the length of the pause involved, and more due to the possibility of losing momentum... I guess. Maybe I'm spoiled by the immediate feedback of serial release.

I guess I could shrink the size of the final bunch and push out serial release for long. None of that will matter in the long run anyway, for "archival readers." The current plan feels structurally right, though.

----

I set aside the entirety of the past weekend for writing. I worked as hard as I could, and got ~5000 words of the next chapter. It still feels less than half done, honestly.

I was aware that the words were coming less easily than usual, due to my sleep debt.

On Monday evening, after sleeping very badly, I tried to continue, and did write a bit more. I quickly had to admit, though, that I was simply too tired for my brain to make words of the desired quality at any usable rate. So I stopped.

I have a strong emotional motivation to go as quickly as possible. "As quickly as possible" is currently pretty slow. I'll do what I can to improve that.

[synoddiane]

Some things I did this January:

Visited family in California

Met up with an old friend from high school

Went to a fan meetup in San Francisco

Found a nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge from a beach at sunset

As part of the team Unicode Equivalence, came in third place in the MIT Mystery Hunt

Wrote half of a Pope Francis fanfic before deciding there wasn't enough love behind the concept

Got some new headphones

Beat Baldur's Gate 3

Started trying to beat Baldur's Gate 3 on Honor Mode (currently up to level 8)

Got gum surgery

Went to the American History Smithsonian

Walked more than last January

Watched Knives Out and the rest of Baccano

Read China Mountain Zhang, An Earth-Shattering Confession, Cleveland Quixotic, and Summer Fun

[themuseumwithoutwalls]

MWW Artist of the Day (2/11/20) Edmund Dulac (French/British, 1882-1953) Don Quixote...in his Blind and Rash Endeavors (1919) Gouache w/ watercolor over graphite, 25.7 x 25.6 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Fanny Tewksbury King Collection)

The book illustrator, Edmund Dulac, was born in France, but educated in England. He was one of the masters of the illustrated gift book of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This drawing illustrates a passage from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter a duke and duchess at the edge of a forest. Dulac remained close to the text, painting the richly attired duchess on a white mount, a hawk perched on her left hand. The duke and duchess smile mischievously at the chaos created by Don Quixote and Sancho, who tumble from their horses in a vain attempt to impress the aristocratic couple.

[weaselandfriends]

The Making Of: Cleveland Quixotic

I. Context

After I finished Chicago in 2019, a powerful and persistent fatigue gripped me: the fabled "burnout." The next two years would be the least productive of my literate life. As one day ebbed into the next, I wondered if I would ever be able to write again. I thought of Andrew Hussie, who, after years of feverish activity on Homestuck, seemed now capable of only short spurts of creation, heavily assisted by amanuenses.

It wasn't an issue of knowing what to write. I had been developing the idea for Cockatiel x Chameleon since 2015. I knew its plot, characters, scenes, themes. But when I tried to manifest it into reality I felt drained. What I managed to scrawl was junk, far below my standards. Goaded by a lurking terror of infinite lassitude, I forced myself to blurt 60,000 words of an initial draft; loathing it, I scrapped it entirely.

That was when I got the idea to write a "fun" story.

My vision for Cockatiel x Chameleon was technically complex and emotionally demanding. Maybe something simpler, a straightforward adventure, would be a stepping stone to recovery. I thought back to Fargo, which I had written (unlike most of my works) with relative ease and minimal forethought. How could I emulate that experience? What made Fargo so easy compared to Chicago and Cockatiel x Chameleon?

After reflection, I concluded that Fargo was, at its core, a revenge story. Revenge stories are older than dinosaur dirt. They are fundamental to human experience, easily understood, all structure inherent in their premise. The hero, wronged, seeks revenge on the villain. From that sentence alone you understand the protagonist's motivation and the plot's direction: trending inexorably toward final confrontation. With such a powerful core, it'd been easy to add details and complications to Fargo as they popped into my head, without warping the story's innate trajectory.

If I wanted another "easy" writing experience, I decided, I needed a similar type of story. Something with a clear premise that removes the burden of planning. A "template plot," where beginning/middle/end is fundamentally present and the writer merely adds their own spin. It took little time to think of such a story type. After all, it had been ubiquitous in Japanese media for the past decade. Not only was it popular with readers, it was appealing to amateur authors; many of its biggest examples originated as web fiction.

I decided I would write an isekai.

II. The Isekai Genre

A person from the real world is transported to a fantasy world.

Not quite as old as the revenge story. Nonetheless, this narrative concept has existed for over 100 years. The premise immediately informs the challenges the protagonist will encounter. They will adapt to a world they know little about, introduce knowledge from modern Earth society, and rise in power and prominence. Toss in a Demon King hellbent on world domination and you get a clear narrative climax. The details can be changed nearly any way without issue.

(Or so I thought.)

In retrospect, I myself was being transported to a new world. If we ignore The Chronicles of Narnia or The Pagemaster or Digimon Adventure and focus solely on the contemporary isekai genre (say 2012 on), which is what I intended to emulate, my experience extended to only the following titles:

1. Sword Art Online

2. Log Horizon

3. No Game No Life

4. The Saga of Tanya the Evil (or Youjo Senki)

5. KonoSuba

This is not only a pitiful sample size, but a specifically poor representation of the genre. Sword Art Online and Log Horizon exist in their own subgenre—trapped in a video game—and have many oddities unseen in more traditional isekai. No Game No Life and Tanya the Evil are "real" isekais, but both have unique worlds that eschew most traditional fantasy elements (especially in Tanya's case). And KonoSuba is a parody.

Nonetheless, I felt that, via cultural osmosis, I "understood" the isekai genre. Based on a few video essays I once watched that roasted dreck like Trapped in Another World with a Smartphone, and reverse engineering KonoSuba's parody, I conceived an impression of isekai as wish fulfillment: A loser gets another chance at life, often with some boon to ensure they don't muck it up this time. They become the hero, triumph with their strength and modern intelligence, and meet lots of attractive women.

I smirked. Heh, I thought. What if I made an isekai... that wasn't wish fulfillment! Truly novel. Let us take the premise of KonoSuba—a benevolent god gives a loser a second chance in a fantasy world—and turn it on its head. Instead of a benevolent god, what if the main character was sent by... a devil? The loser protagonist makes a Faustian bargain to become a hero. They get exactly what they wish for, except they're still a loser at heart, and inevitably bungle everything due to their own social incompetence.

That was the flashpoint. Ideas came together quickly, exactly as I hoped. Soon I had a narrative. It went like this:

III. The Original Idea

Our protagonist is a bumbling failure who lives with his mother. One day he sees an advertisement for a devil's wish-granting service. Being a fan of isekai anime, he goes to the devil and wishes to be sent to another world, one where he'll be the most powerful person. The devil, a sleek and professional businesswoman, agrees to the unusual wish, but pushes the work of actually creating the world to an overstressed, chain-smoking intern. The intern cobbles the world together in a matter of hours and our protagonist embarks on his journey.

He arrives to find the human kingdom besieged by the Demon King's army. The humans are outnumbered; total defeat is imminent. Just as he wished, though, the protagonist possesses incredible power. He charges into the fray, destroys the demon army singlehandedly in instants, and slays the Demon King himself soon after. The protagonist enters the human kingdom hailed as a hero.

Soon, the Human King emerges from his castle to express his immense gratitude. He offers the hero anything, including his daughter's hand in marriage. The hero takes one look at the princess―named either Mayfair or Viviendre, I wasn't sure which―sees she is exceedingly beautiful, and eagerly agrees. He's gotten exactly what he always wanted!

Unbeknownst to him, the king is a schemer. Advised by two strange beings—the rotund fairy Tetzel and the living plant Tintoretto—the king believes the hero is too popular; the people would side with him if he sought the throne. The king offers his daughter not in goodwill but to tie the hero to his side. His ultimate goal is to control the hero's power to imperialistically expand his kingdom.

Meanwhile, the princess has her own schemes. She's a lesbian and has zero intention of sleeping with the hero. In a comic scene, she gives the hero excuse after excuse why they can't sleep in the same bed despite being married; the hero naively buys it. Eventually he catches on, but while he's upset by the situation, he's too morally upstanding to do anything but accept it. (This would be a recurring theme: The hero could use his strength to force people to do what he wanted, but constantly shirks from doing so because he refuses to act in a way unbecoming of a hero. His morality and desires exist in a constant state of push and pull.)

Eventually, the hero and his wife compete for the affections of various female characters, with the wife always winning. Temporary the elf was part of this subplot: A dimwitted ambassador to be competitively wooed. To keep the hero sated, his wife buys him a female slave to use "as he likes." The hero, possessed of modern anti-slavery sensibilities, is appalled. He instantly frees the slave girl and enters a crusade to abolish slavery in the kingdom. Unfortunately, because he is not particularly smart, when he debates the slaveowners over the evils of slavery they routinely trounce him (using many arguments real-world slaveowners once used). Again, he could use his incredible power to kill the slaveowners, but they're law-abiding members of society. Murdering them would be "immoral" in the hero's eyes despite his staunch belief in the immorality of their actions.

Around this time, the hero finally uses his power for something good and sends gold back home to his financially poor mother. Unfortunately, this charitable act also goes awry when his sister, an IRS agent, thinks his disappearance is a ploy to evade taxes. She gathers a posse: her coworker boyfriend, his two friends (I called them Aaron Van Zandt and Allen Van Langevelde, envisioning an American Psycho vibe), and a private detective. Using security camera footage they track the protagonist's last known movements to a dingy apartment building, where they find the overworked devil intern who created the world and force him to send them there too.

They roll out in a huge SUV: Five people plus the hapless intern, armed with guns and equipment. The king, not wishing to lose the hero, decides he must intercept them before the hero learns of their existence. In a big setpiece-style scene reminiscent of Children of Men, a horde of knights ambush the SUV on a forest road. Arrows fly through the front windshield, killing the boyfriend (passenger seat) with an arrow to the neck and wounding Aaron Van Zandt (driver). The SUV crashes into a tree and the sister flees on foot, followed by Allen Van Langevelde, who has barely spoken before then but who now reveals themselves to be a badass marksman as they dispatch knight after knight with efficient hunting rifle shots. The private detective is wounded in the leg and forced to remain behind, while the devil intern cowers in the backseat. Aaron Van Zandt limps out of the driver's seat and attempts to follow Van Langevelde, but a knight on horseback rushes past him and knocks him down a steep incline, where he smashes his head on a rock and seemingly dies.

The knights surround the vehicle. The private detective fights back, but is overwhelmed and killed. The devil intern is captured to be burned at the stake later. The sister and Van Langevelde escape on foot, but without the intern, they can't leave the world. They need to rescue him before he is executed. Meanwhile, Van Zandt, clinging to life, is discovered by fairies and brought to their court.

And then...

IV. The Problem

And then I got stuck.

First, it should be clear by now that I did not actually have a plot. I had a series of incidents, loosely organized. Vaguely I knew the main character would work to overcome his social ineptitude and ultimately truly succeed, accomplishing the character growth his get-rich-quick Faustian bargain could never provide. But nothing came together in a coherent structure. Despite my intention to stick to a template plot, I instantly destroyed the template by killing the Demon King in the first chapter. I still had character conflicts and ideas to pursue, but no actual story.

Plus, the main character being a loser made him—well, a loser. Even if he eventually grew, he still ate shit again and again before vanishing entirely from the big action setpiece.

So my original idea of quickly and easily constructing an isekai plot hit a roadblock. Luckily, it was now 2021. After two idle years my fatigue seeped slowly out of me. Finally I regained my energy; I no longer needed to write a "fun" story. I decided to shelve the isekai, potentially permanently, and worked on Cockatiel x Chameleon in earnest.

This time, the draft of Cockatiel x Chameleon―which would be the final draft―progressed acceptably. It consumed my entire focus and I might not have thought about the isekai at all if not for two hiccups. First, though I now had the mental willpower to technically execute my ideas, the emotionally intense material of Cockatiel x Chameleon still left me sometimes wistfully longing for a story not quite so bleak and harrowing. Second, I revisited the isekai genre.

V. The Isekai Genre, Part 2

The anime analysis YouTuber Ygg Studio (formerly known as Digibro) posted a video called Is Mushoku Tensei The Most Influential Isekai? (History of Isekai) that outlined the isekai genre's chronology in Japanese pop media. Watching the video, I discovered some surprising origins to the "contemporary" isekai genre. Though there were many isekai stories―even popular ones―before, the current isekai craze seemingly began in 2012 on a Japanese webfic site called syosetsu.com, where several popular isekai were written in close temporal proximity to one another.

The main titles of note were Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei—followed by KonoSuba, which was specifically a parody of Mushoku Tensei, instead of (as I once believed) a general cultural conception of isekai. In fact, it was these three works that created the current cultural conception, establishing many now obligatory tropes.

So, I decided to watch Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei.

I was shocked! As it turned out, my clever and subversive idea―treating the hero as the loser he was instead of as a wish fulfillment badass―had not only already been done, it was foundational to the genre! Both works feature loser protagonists whose social ineptitude constantly causes problems for them despite their cheat mode powers. Both protagonists are forced to develop as people rather than rely on their advantages, and the development of their relationships with the other characters is a crucial consideration of both works.

As it turned out, Trapped in Another World with a Smartphone (which I also haven't seen) wasn't the beginning and end of the genre. I had underestimated isekai. In retrospect, the languid existence of my 2019 and 2020 led to me ironically attempting the same cheap wish fulfillment of my imagined isekai protagonist. I wanted a "fun," "quick," "easy" story and intended to use isekai for that purpose, the same way an isekai protagonist assumes being sent to another world is an easy way to becoming a hero.

It was time to return to the planning stage. This time, I wouldn't take things for granted.

VI. The Original Idea, Part 2

First, I revisited my protagonist. Originally an afterthought: a punching bag who failed whenever he exhibited any agency. I decided on another direction. My hero wouldn't be a loser by incompetence, but by choice. He would be clever and intelligent, but unwilling to apply himself. He wanted a new world because the original didn't seem worth it; too rigid, too structured, too immune to change. His journey would be discovering it wasn't the world holding him back, but himself. Believing nothing could be changed, he stopped himself from changing. Thus, Jay Waringcrane came into existence.

Earlier ideas were remixed around this new protagonist. I merged the devil boss lady and the devil intern into a single character, a semi-hapless sort for Jay to outwit. That was Perfidia Bal Berith. The hero's sister, whose subplot originally lacked any connection to him, now became a foil to his ideology. She exhibited utter faith in the "real world"—its mechanisms, its processes—and applied herself diligently to maintenance of its status quo. That was Shannon Waringcrane.

Still needed a plot. Since my hero was no longer a social bumbler, I discarded the original beginning where he annihilates the Demon King's army and toyed with a new idea. The human kingdom, besieged by the Demon King's army, becomes aware via prophecy that a hero is about to appear in their world. The king sends a party led by the gallant prince to find the hero and bring him safely to the kingdom. When Jay arrives, he meets the prince and his crew, but they are immediately beset by demons, who kill most of the party and grievously wound the prince. Jay, the dying prince, and the sole other survivor―a taciturn, dark-skinned mage named Viviendre who is secretly the prince's lover―barely escape. The prince succumbs to his wounds shortly afterward, leading to an emotionally-charged moment in which Viviendre laments his death and blames Jay for causing it. Leading to an adversarial relationship between Jay and Viviendre that, after much character development, would eventually turn into romance.

Then Jay would lead the kingdom against the Demon King, constituting the main plot.

This idea improved on the previous in several ways: exciting start, high drama, and a long-term goal. However, as I became more engrossed in this project, I came to dislike the "default fantasy world" I'd used as my setting thus far. When my goal was "quick and easy," the Dragon Quest-inspired medieval fantasy tropes sufficed. Now, they struck me as banal. In particular, a generic "Demon King" villain disinterested me (which was why I summarily disposed of them in the idea's first iteration), so even if it outlined a clear direction, it wasn't a direction that enthralled. I realized that to continue, I needed to do some worldbuilding.

VII. Worldbuilding

I dislike worldbuilding.

I prefer the real world―or the real world distorted by urban fantasy and surrealism―to an entirely fictitious fantasy world. In writing an isekai, I had wanted to maintain the connection between the real world and fantasy world (hence why one of my earliest ideas was for Shannon and her cadre to follow Jay in a modern vehicle with modern weapons). But by relying on stock fantasy tropes, I only exacerbated the core issue. I decided to think deeply about my setting and design it to both stand out and clearly relate to our world.

To determine a deeper connection between fantasy and related, I pondered the historical development of the fantasy genre, from chivalric romance to Tolkien. (I collected my thoughts into this essay.) Tracing this lineage, I considered writing a fantasy world modeled on Arthurian and Carolingian romance. Then I took the idea deeper. Much of the early modern fantasy genre, up to and even to an extent including Tolkien, was rooted in nostalgia for an imagined and idealized past. Many pre-Tolkien fantasy works were born out of Victorian fascination with medieval Europe, as evidenced by the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott, the Arthurian poems of Lord Tennyson, and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The original isekai, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, parodied this idealized medievalism (Twain blaming Walter Scott specifically for the genteel Southern culture that propagated slavery and rendered the Civil War inevitable).

Then I realized that, 200 years before this nineteenth-century craze, there was another major literary work that parodied excessive love of chivalric romance: Don Quixote.

As soon as I made that connection, everything clicked. Rather than Perfidia whipping up a new fantasy world on demand, she would reuse one she created in the 1600s for a Don Quixote-esque figure. Rather than Spanish, my Don Quixote would be British, a royalist in the English Civil War seeking escapism in face of the collapse of monarchy. Pursuing standard chivalric romance activities, he would overthrow a corrupt Catholic church analog, slay a few dragons, and war against a Pagan nation that he later converted to Christianity.

What happened to this world 400 years after Don Quixote used it as his playground? I imagined the ex-Pagan nation a vassal to the Christian nation, while secretly plotting an uprising. Don Quixote's descendants, legitimate or illegitimate, grasping to maintain control in face of their weakening bloodline. Dragons hunted to extinction. A stasis that prevented sweeping change without the intercession of a true human, yet gripped by slow decay. Prayers cast for a new hero to save them from this stupor.

I also wondered how the Christians of this world reckoned with a Christianity whose foundational text is clearly meant for a different world entirely. While Don Quixote's scion, still ruler, promoted the religion uncritically to maintain their grip on the culture, underground grew a nihilist cult that believed nobody in their world was saved, that Christ died on Earth and thus only cleansed Earth's sins. All of this intermixed with the same historical devolutionary forces that ended feudalism and gave rise to mercantile oligarchy.

That was the world Jay Waringcrane entered. A world rife with thematic potential. Finally, a plot was forming.

VIII. Starting the Story

This last stretch of planning happened quickly. (Evidenced by traces of the earlier idea remaining in Cockatiel x Chameleon, specifically in the brief descriptions of the in-universe isekai from which Temporary the elf hails.) Rather than fight a Demon King, Jay's mission would be more chivalric in nature; he would rescue a princess from the evil wizard who led the heretical cult. Liking my earlier idea about the princess who first seemed like an ordinary damsel but turned out to ulterior motives, I decided for an end-of-arc twist where the princess secretly worked with the cult all along. Thus, Princess Mayfair came into existence. For the evil wizard, I reused one of the original king's advisors, the living plant.

The gallant prince and his secret lover from the second iteration returned as Jay's companions, although I changed the lover from a mage to a ranger. Shannon would still pursue Jay, but I merged Van Zandt and Van Langevelde into a single character named Wendell Noh and cut the private detective entirely, giving the sleuthing job to Shannon's boyfriend, Dalt Swaino. I rearranged the big action setpiece where Shannon's group meets disaster: Instead of fighting knights, they would fight a dragon, and this time, Jay would be involved.

After that, keeping with the chivalric romance aesthetic, I threw some faeries into the mix (I love faeries): the obnoxious Olliebollen, who would play off the more sullen Jay, and Flanz-le-Flore, a mid-arc complication. I also decided to make the cult members monstrous demi-humans with magic powers; the Christian anathema against magic must necessarily make it actively corrupting in this world run on Christian precepts.

On top of these plans, several long-term ideas already bubbled: The eventual introduction of the devil world, Sansaime's pregnancy, Viviendre, a battle with elves, Mayfair uniting the two worlds. The ideas flowed one after another now that I established a solid base. Sketchy outlines of the full story stood limned in the distance. I was ready to write.

I decided the work would be published serially at a one-chapter-per-week pace, identical to Fargo and Chicago. That decision was baked directly into my original desire to write a "fun" story. With a serial work, there is less burden of technical execution; the focus is on a fluid pace with regular updates instead of unimpeachable prose. Furthermore, serial writing lends itself to story speculation as readers comment every week, turning the work into a collaborative experience. Some readers of Chicago have told me that the reviews on fanfiction.net are an integral part of the experience, for instance.

When I post serial works, I first build up a "backlog." Essentially, that means I write several chapters ahead of what I'm posting online. The backlog ensures I can regularly post chapters even if one chapter takes longer to write than usual. (I can generally write a 6,000- to 7,000-word chapter in one week.) For this work, I decided to complete four chapters before posting the first. This generous backlog allowed me to post the entire first arc weekly, without a break prior to the climactic chapter that took two weeks to write.

When establishing the backlog, I also gave myself more time than usual to edit, which allowed me to polish the beginning for a better first impression. I meticulously pruned the first chapter to make the dialogue between Perfidia and Jay as snappy as possible while also minimizing exposition. (Originally, Perfidia explained the Seven Princes and their increased quotas in an internal monologue, since I knew they would become important much later in the story, but I cut it for streamlining purposes.) Additionally, I spent a long time deciding when Chapter 2 would end and Chapter 3 would begin; originally, the scene at the beginning of Chapter 3 was at the end of Chapter 2, but I moved it because it better matched the tone and scope of the third chapter. Olliebollen was originally far more in-your-face obnoxious; I toned them down. Lastly, I added the part in Chapter 4 where Jay remembers being beat up by Shannon's past boyfriend, which not only hinted at a soon-to-be-introduced major character, but gave Jay a reasonable chip on his shoulder to cause friction between him and Makepeace.

With four chapters completed, I was ready to post. Almost. I still needed a title. The entire time I operated only thinking of the story as "my isekai story." Thinking long and hard, I came up with titles such as American Isekai, The Waringcranes, 144k Angels, and—my personal favorite—Hellbrowned, the last of which I was strongly advised not to use by every single person I know.

(Side note: Setting the story in Cleveland had been an easy decision. It's such a funny city, taking Detroit's tragic Rust Belt decay and removing all grandeur. The Jon Bois video The Browns Live in Hell and the famous Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video sum it up neatly. Setting the story in 2017, the same year the Browns infamously went winless, was also a snap decision.)

Finally, I thought back to Don Quixote, the impetus for much of the worldbuilding, and the title revealed itself.

IX. Writing the Story

Because of my fast-paced schedule, I lacked the luxury to make major changes to my plans as I wrote. I started with a plan for the first arc and scattered ideas for the future. As I wrote the first arc, I planned the second, and as I wrote the second, I planned the third.

Room remained for tweaks, though. Each time I write a story, I try to do at least one thing outside my technical repertoire. This time, I wanted more flexibility in my characters. I usually only introduce the bare minimum necessary, and aggressively cut or merge characters to reduce the total number. In Cockatiel x Chameleon, however, some commentators criticized how the Consortium's limited number of characters gave the impression it was as dead and empty as Harper's real life. While that impression doesn't necessarily conflict with the story, it did expose limitations to my economical approach.

I dislike having limitations. (Unfortunately I have many.) Thus, I decided to write more characters whose storylines were not plotted from the onset, characters I would develop spontaneously as the story progressed.

An example is Lalum. I introduced Lalum in Chapter 5 as an enemy with a unique power for Jay to fight. Zero subsequent intent for her at the time. Then I realized her power would interact well with Flanz-le-Flore's, so I kept her around for that fight as well. When Lalum is attacked in the Flanz-le-Flore fight, I was 50/50 on whether she would live or die. However, a friend reading the story really liked her and wanted her to live, and I realized it might streamline the plot if someone was around to point Shannon and her crew in Jay's direction.

Having spared Lalum from death twice, and also conceptualizing more concretely the second arc—including Viviendre's role in it—I decided I had a use for Lalum after all. I conceived of Viviendre and Lalum being foils, envisioning their eventual confrontation in the last arc. Thus, Lalum went from monster-of-the-week to major character. To a lesser extent, characters like Theovora were introduced offhandedly, and while they did not become major characters, I found small uses for them later.

Speaking of Viviendre, that was another challenge for myself. With her, I wrote something I wouldn't normally: A romance. Cockatiel x Chameleon, believe it or not, was originally intended to be a straightforward romance, but I found myself incapable of writing one and pivoted to its current direction. Nestled within the sprawling undertaking of Cleveland Quixotic, the romance between Viviendre and Jay was my attempt to write two people who genuinely liked each other. Their three-chapter mini-arc in the middle of the story moves at a more lax pace than usual, but allowed me to develop a relationship I otherwise wouldn't have been able to.

In general, Cleveland Quixotic is larger than my other works. More characters, more plot threads, more locations, more everything. Though Fargo and Chicago are also large, they operate in a more enclosed and linear space. My thought process with Cleveland Quixotic was to open up and express that feeling of world-spanning storytelling the fantasy genre is so known for. It pushed my limits, but I accomplished that goal more than in any previous work.

The real challenge is, once you go big, how do you reel it back? So many of the isekai I mentioned remain ongoing, proceeding through arc after arc without end in sight. Today's most notable ongoing fantasy literature, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, is likewise mired in endless expansion the author seems incapable of curtailing. On RoyalRoad, it's easy to find million-word works with early reviews uniformly positive, but recent reviews expressing a new sentiment: "Dropped after nothing happened for the past 200 chapters."

Above all else, I wanted to avoid that trap. My solution resided in the second arc's climax, which I developed midway into writing the first arc. Uniting the two worlds made it natural for all the distinct groups of characters to join up for the finale, tying every plot thread together. As such, I cultivated multiple storylines in the long and less immediately plot-focused second arc, secure in my knowledge of how it all eventually connected.

Even so, at times it grew overwhelming herding so many characters. Many characters wound up less prominent than I initially intended, sacrificed for the good of the overall pacing. Fortunately, few characters wound up utterly vestigial, and those that did were minor. (There's no worse feeling than a character given loads of screentime and dialogue only for them to end up inconsequential when the curtains finally close. Homestuck reeks of it.)

A few miscellaneous changes that occurred while writing:

I intended for Viviendre's brother, the "mad king" of California, to appear in the final arc, wielding ten relics for an epic duel with Jay. Given the large amount of characters already prominent in the story, I cut him.

I intended for Sansaime to die at the end of the second arc and for Avery to live. This was mainly because I wanted Jay and Shannon to have a cathartic moment with Avery in the final arc (Avery still would have died afterward). I realized that, using Pandaemonium, I could have that cathartic moment anyway, and Avery wound up saving Sansaime's life both outside and inside the story.

On the flip side, I originally intended for Mallory to die at the end of the second arc, but decided I wanted her and Mayfair to have a climactic conflict, which could only be done if Mallory were still alive.

I intended to kill off the minor character Gonzago of Meretryce the entire story, probably by having him jump in front of Shannon to take some attack or another. I never found a way to work it in, and I feel like the actual use I got out of him in the climactic fight, though minor, was far more unique. I likewise considered killing Mademerry by having her take an attack for Mayfair, but I prefer her current ending. I did not intend to kill Pythette, but found at the last moment it would be more convenient if she died.

Beyond that, I wrote the story generally according to plan. Leaving aspects of my plans malleable meant I could write quickly without needing absolute certainty in the precision of every line and action. Only in Chapter 45, the climactic chapter with Beelzebub and Moloch, did I sit down and carefully outline what each character would do at each moment in the chapter. (The chapter's seven-minute time limit made such meticulousness essential.) Otherwise, even in other climactic fights, I relied only on general ideas about what should happen and when.

Ultimately, I successfully completed the longest story, with the largest number of characters, I'd ever written. It pushed my limits, but in a way that didn't leave me gasping for air. Instead, I feel ready and eager for my next story. What'll it be? I have an idea and I've already begun research. I hope to start writing it by the end of the year, and publish it by mid-2024. I'll let you know more as things become more concrete.

X. Names

Before I end this post, a few name origins.

Perfidia Bal Berith: As mentioned in the story itself, "Bal Berith" (or Balberith, Baalberith, et cetera) is a false idol mentioned in the Bible. It is also a demon of the Ars Goetia. My familiarity with the name primarily comes from a weapon used in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn.

Olliebollen is based on oliebollen, a Dutch pastry.

Mayfair is the name of a character in Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya, the first video game I ever played. Her middle name, Lyonesse, is a character from Arthurian legend.

Makepeace came from an attempt to make a name that would pair well with Mayfair. My primary knowledge of the name comes from British author William Makepeace Thackeray. His middle name, Gaheris, is an Arthurian knight.

John Coke's name was modeled on the character Wicks Cherrycoke in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. I only found out after I posted the first chapter that John Coke was the actual name of a person involved in the English Civil War notable enough for a Wikipedia page. I was more than happy to pretend this incredible serendipity was actually my plan all along.

Sansaime's name was modeled on the characters Sansloi ("without law"), Sansfoi ("without faith"), and Sansjoi ("without joy") in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which was the primary inspiration for the romance elements of Whitecrosse. "Without love" is also a notable phrase in the visual novel Umineko When They Cry.

Whitecrosse's name also comes from The Faerie Queene, being modeled on the Redcrosse Knight, an allegorical representation of England (with its red cross flag).

Many names in Cleveland Quixotic have an "allegorical" sense, being words that suggest a clear, often moral meaning. Charm, Charisma, Mayfair, Makepeace, Mademerry, Theovora ("god eater"), Condemnation, Obedience, Tricia (short for "patrician"), Meretryce ("meretricious"), Mordac ("mordacious"), Malleus ("malleable"), Astrophicus ("space plant"), Viviendre ("life ender"), Perfidia ("perfidy"), and so forth. These allegorical names are a play on The Faerie Queene being an allegory, although many of the names in Cleveland Quixotic are not an accurate representation of their character, indicating the breakdown of allegory and thus clear moral meaning.

California is the name of a location in Amadís de Gaula, Don Quixote's favorite romance.

Dalton Swaino is the real name of a semi-pro League of Legends player.

Wendell Noh's surname comes from a professional League of Legends player. His given name is the name of a character in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light.

Kedeshah is a Hebrew word that possibly refers to sacred or temple prostitutes.

Ubiquitous is an ordinary word with a clear meaning, but its abbreviation, Ubik, is a Philip K. Dick novel that was also the name of one of the demons in Berserk.

The Seven Princes, rather than refer to the traditional Ars Goetia representations of the Seven Deadly Sins, are pulled from John Milton's Paradise Lost, which was the primary inspiration for most devil theology.

Flanz-le-Flore is a corruption of Blanchefleur, a name that appears in a few romance legends.

Lalum is an alternate translation of Larum, a character in Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade.

Pluxie is a feminization of a semi-pro League of Legends player's screen name.

Tintzel is a corruption of the character's original name, mentioned earlier, which was taken from historical corrupt priest Johann Tetzel.

Jreige is the surname of a semi-pro League of Legends player.

Justin "Just" Vance is a play on J.D. Vance, an Ohio politician.

Temporary, one of the earliest names that persisted into the final form of the story, is modeled on the elves in No Game No Life, who have names like "Think" and "Feel."

The other names in the story do not have any particular meaning or genesis.

XI. Conclusion

I believe that covers the generation of Cleveland Quixotic from beginning to end. If I missed anything, or if there's anything you want to know more about, please send me an ask and I'll be certain to answer. Thank you again for reading and stay tuned for my next work!

[weaselandfriends]

I'm always fascinated by the economics of art. Once you get past oral tradition, the production and consumption of art has almost always been intrinsically tied to its economics, whether those economics are determined by state/religious sponsorship, patronage by wealthy elites, or capitalistic mass market distribution.

I shake my fist at modern literary publishing for its short-sightedness in exchanging long term staying power for short term returns (an inevitable symptom of an overly efficient capitalist system, and one found in far more sectors than art - see Boeing), but then I look at independent online writers enchained by the Patreon model and see how, even with zero barriers between creator and consumer, with no meddling executives filtering or editing what gets written, authors are still at the mercy of the economics of art. Authors must churn out ceaseless deluges of content to maintain a continuous stream of monthly Patreon donations; there is little time for reflection, thought, or careful consideration, while pointless filler is worth money and thus lucrative. Even simply reaching the end of a story is a bad financial decision, so most of these stories never end.

(When researching RoyalRoad prior to posting Cleveland Quixotic, I found countless commentators who described this or that webfic as being a "Patreon trap": Stories where individual chapters keep taunting the promise that there will be narrative development soon, driving up engagement, without ever actually delivering. Another common RoyalRoad review: "Started promising, but nothing has happened in the past 200 chapters.")

No nefarious, top-hatted, mustache-twirling CEO made that happen, it's simply an inevitable outcome of how authors make money within that system. In fact, for all my issues with contemporary publishing, its willingness to dole out generous advances to authors incentivizes authors to more holistically approach their works, rather than pump out content as quickly as possible.

The side effect of this is that basically everyone today trying to write fiction for primarily artistic purposes needs to exist outside the economic system entirely. Meaning, they need to already be rich, or else willing to starve. Even the most lauded literary fiction authors of today, the people winning Pulitzers and Nobels, can rarely support themselves on their fiction alone. They were either born rich, married rich, or make most of their money as a creative fiction lecturer at some university's MFA program. This leads to "literary" fiction increasingly being generated from the narrow, myopic viewpoint of the wealthy, making it increasingly of little interest to most of the population.

When the economics of art shifted from noble patronage at the end of the Renaissance toward the emerging capitalistic/mercantile mass market in the 1700s and especially the industrialized 1800s, the literary movement of "realism" was birthed. While not without literary antecedent (Cervantes, Austen), this mostly novel new form of literature eschewed poetic form for prose and sought to depict the entire spectrum of contemporary society from the richest to the poorest. Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, though concerned with topics of particular interest to their respective national backgrounds, all followed this basic precept. And the precept made sense, because for the first time most of the population was literate, not simply the elite, and the emerging middle class was willing to pay for literary entertainment. Realism was a reflection of the broadening economic basis for literature.

The internet has accelerated the mixing of people from all variety of not merely economic but also ethnic, religious, national, cultural, etc. backgrounds. In the 80s and 90s, when these trends began, there once again seemed to be a novel form emerging to reflect this new culture, the so-called hysterical realist novel. Big, sprawling works by authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace that assaulted readers with a half-crazed melange of times, places, and peoples. In James Wood's essay Human, All Too Inhuman, which pejoratively coined the phrase, he describes these novels thus:

It is now customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours and hours within a fictional world, without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful. Which is why one never wants to re-read a book such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, while Madame Bovary is faded by our repressings. This is partly because some of the more impressive novelistic minds of our age do not think that language and the representation of consciousness are the novelist’s quarries any more. Information has become the new character.

Information has become the new character. Isn't that line the perfect encapsulation of the internet era? Wood reads today like the reactionary he is, an old fogey upset today's newfangled material isn't like his beloved Madame Bovary (a novel written in 1857), but somehow his view has won out, at least in conventional publishing. Zadie Smith, who his essay is directly about, felt the need to respond to it directly by distancing herself from the other authors listed. Pynchon and DeLillo were already old authors near the end of their careers, Rushdie had a fatwa on him, and Wallace committed suicide. Nowadays the gigantic hysterical realist novels are few and far between in favor of smaller, MFA-style peeks into the lives of the rich (or the rich's frequent, guilt-ridden attempts to imagine what it must be like to be poor and non-white).

What happened? Where is the novel in the age of the internet? What works are grappling with the enormity of the era? Where are the works that reflect the immensity of modern society, its cross-cultural breadth?

It must boil down to the economics. Perhaps the saturation of information brought on by the internet has led to this. Not simply the popular craving for constant content, which spurs even the independent Patreon novel to a bizarre reader-writer cross-exploitation (the creator must slave away constantly to create, while the readers receive only junk). Perhaps the saturation of information has become too much, and rather than become unified, the internet era has led to a paradoxical fragmentation of niche-seekers to hole up with small groups of likeminded peers. The works that gain mass appeal today are not works that seek to grapple with the mass of humanity within the world, but works that strip away all humanity to produce the most watered-down, formulaic, and generic works: MCU movies, if you will, something that can play "in both America and China."

I don't have the answer. These are simply some thoughts I had after reading this post. I deeply apologize to the person I reblogged, because I feel as though my response has veered wildly off their original topic. Hopefully, they might still find this avenue of interest.

I feel like the "starving artist" mentality is essentially an obstacle to class consciousness, because rather than think of themselves as exploited workers in food service or retail or whatever industry they actually work in that allows them to make rent, the "starving artist" thinks of themselves as someone who has been wronged by society because they don't receive what they see as just compensation for their skilled work as artists.

And so despite their apparent support for communism, these people are only incidentally leftists as a result of living under capitalism, which has failed to deliver what they want, and so they latch on to communism as an alternative; it's hard to imagine any economic system that gives what they really want, which is not the luxury to not have to work and to be able to pursue art in their free time, but an economic system where their art skills are rewarded as labor.

And they can't believe the truth, that no one valued this work as labor in the first place, so they have to believe instead that someone has intervened somehow to devalue their work, and that this is the reason why they've been blocked out of free admission to the petit bourgeoisie. Which is why they always fall for the most reactionary politics with a bare veneer of leftist language, or support massive increase on copyright and intellectual property; they harbor resentment towards those who they believe have denied them of what they were entitled to, and so they want to hurt those they believe wronged them as much as possible, no matter the consequences to themselves!

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The Hunters’ Lodge, which organized these Patriot raids, was a secret society that resembled the Freemasons, with its Grand Lodge in Cleveland, Ohio. Given the secrecy that surrounded the Hunters’ Lodge and the Whig biases of those who reported on it, we know little of the individuals who organized the movement and less yet of the social and cultural context that might have led them on such a quixotic mission. For example, the 70 unknown delegates from five states that attended the secret, week-long “Patriot Congress” in Cleveland in September 1838 appointed a provisional Canadian republican government that included president A.  D. Smith, “chief justice of the peace at Cleveland”; vice-president Colonel Nathan Williams, “a wholesale grocer”; and the commander-in-chief of the Patriot Army of the West, General Lucius V. Bierce, “an attorney at Akron.” 

These sparing biographical details obscure the larger, multifaceted Owenite socialist movement within which, I will argue, the Patriot War should be located. Using the leadership of the Hunters’ Lodge to define a cohort, I provide here a prosopography, or collective cultural biography of the founders of the illusory Republic of Canada and of the institutional and discursive world of this wider movement. This technique has been used “when the main problem is political” but a web of purely social and economic ties existed that “gave the group its unity and therefore its political force, and to a considerable extent also its political motivation.” The method was used to similar effect by Charles Beard to explain the class interests of the Founding Fathers in shaping the American federal constitution, as well as by Bryan Palmer to explore political protests by pre-Rebellion working-class mechanics against the Kingston Penitentiary. 

This mass popular movement to wage a foreign war against the British Empire came together in a relatively short period across five states despite the concerted efforts of the US government to repress it, an accomplishment begging explanation. Craig Calhoun argues that “preexisting communal relations and attachments to tradition are essential to revolutionary mobilizations” in this period, highlighting the necessity for the collective biographical approach taken here. A comparative cultural study of this cohort’s biographies decentres the Patriot War and the military actions on which most historians have focused and instead places that focus on the sets of preexisting discursive practices that shaped this social movement and hence encouraged the cohort’s participation.

...

[A key component of this movement was] Owenite socialism in Britain and America, [which] sought to influence a number of radical social movements engaging with its core educational mission, some of which drew the movement into the labour politics of the era. It is important to underscore, given the well-known early communitarian emphasis of the Owenites, that they never proposed the redistribution of property as the means of ending social inequality; that inequality was produced, they argued, by unequal education. They proffered a series of educational initiatives, including the “village of cooperation,” as the means of overcoming that social inequality, not inequities of wealth; their stated goal was to mold a “new moral world” by shaping the ethical character of impoverished children so that they could identify their “own happiness with the happiness of society” as a whole. In the 1830s, after the collapse of the New Harmony experiment, the Owenites, with their educational concerns, thus found themselves drawn into such disparate movements as the freethinkers, phrenology, the Working Men’s movement, and its successive political parties. The social movements at the core of this study – freethought, Freemasonry, and free banking (Locofocoism) – were all associated with the emergence of Painite civic republicanism and the labour politics of the early republic and have parallels in similar movements behind the Upper Canadian Rebellion.

...

The Hunters’ Lodge had four degrees, of which non-commissioned officers held the second, “field officers the third, and commissioned officers of the highest rank the Patriot Mason’s degree.” The cohort considered for this article consists of the American members of the Hunters’ Lodge of the second degree or higher, or who held executive roles in the provisional government, and who were not killed in action or transported.17 I have excluded those transported because an analysis of the six exiles, generally of the first degree, who returned to write their defenses is available.18 A focus on the American leaders of the Lodge facilitated a later comparison with the Upper Canadian Rebellion leadership, including William Lyon Mackenzie and Dr. Charles Duncombe. Finding detailed information on many remained difficult, hence this sample is biased – as is typical in histories of this period – towards elites, for whom the documentary record is fuller.

...

As the aim of this prosopography (or collective biography) is to underscore the cultural and institutional context of the Hunters’ Lodge, and not individual motivations, I start with an examination of the life of a figure central to that context, Isaac S. Smith, who played no known role in the Patriot War. The point of this study is to decentre the military narratives of the Patriot War and to refocus debate on the underlying discursive network of networks that tied the Patriot Hunter leadership together. Smith was a pivotal figure linking the freethought movement, free banking, and Freemasonry movements in the Great Lakes region; tracing his life gives a snapshot of this network of networks and its economic basis and allows us to see the moments at which Patriot War leaders were brought together through their pre-existing relationships and shared outlooks. The Patriot leaders operated in the context of these broader networks, the transnational basis and scope of which needs to be underscored. The Great Lakes basin – or “Niagara corridor” – “is the real cradle of North American radicalism, a radicalism nurtured by movements of peoples and flows of ideas, by commerce, contacts, exchanges and transactions across and between races, classes, and local and national communities. The Niagara corridor became a transnational matrix of radicalism all through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.”

Isaac Slocum Smith (1792–1860) was born into a very large New Bedford, Massachusetts, Quaker family with ties to the shipping industry; he followed his older brother Stephen to New York, where they became supercargoes for Quaker merchants sending wares to England, France, and Spain. Having acquired some wealth, Stephen Smith moved to Syracuse, New York, where he operated the Onondaga Salt Company, which was to become one of the largest salt producers in the United States. His younger brother moved even farther west, to Buffalo – the terminus of the newly constructed Erie Canal – about 1825, where he soon lost his job as an insurance agent because of his loudly proclaimed deistic views. Isaac S. Smith then became partner in a forwarding company and canal boat line, primarily shipping salt from his brother’s company at Salina westward, over Lake Erie, thereby enabling the cheap return transport of western salted pork and beef to the East Coast. 

The salt trade evidently made him a millionaire. By 1835, the partners co-owned the Erie Canal transportation company running between New York and Buffalo and sole-owned a shipping line running between Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit on Lake Erie; he soon invested in key real estate assets in the port lands of each of these new settlements, which were the termini of canals running deep into Ohio. Smith established his adopted son Archibald in Cleveland; Archibald Smith operated a barge line on the Ohio Canal to Akron. Isaac S. Smith speculatively hoped to repeat this success in Toledo – the terminus of the new Miami and Erie Canal – through the co-purchase of 700,000 acres of “Ohio Canal lands” and by investing in the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, which was to connect Toledo with the Kalamazoo River onward to Lake Michigan and Chicago, bypassing Detroit and the upper lakes. Lastly, he partnered with several other Buffalo shipping companies to develop Black Rock (near Buffalo) as a secondary port terminus for the Erie Canal. It was this last investment that would prove to be his downfall, leading to the collapse of his empire in the general financial crisis of late 1837 when the bank he co-owned could no longer cover the interest charges on his increasing debts.

Over a decade-long period, Smith had thus established a transportation network that spanned both shores of the Great Lakes, siphoning off freight and traffic from the St. Lawrence and Montréal to the Hudson River and New York. Similar transport linkages tied other Patriot War conspirators to this network. Henry S. Handy, Patriot general, had helped build the Chicago harbour in 1834, allowing access farther west to the Mississippi along the Illinois and Michigan Canal. He was in Toronto with his brother-in-law Judge Orange Butler in 1837 to meet with reform politician Marshall Spring Bidwell; it was from Bidwell that Handy first learned of the Rebellion before organizing military aid in Detroit in the Secret Order of the Sons of Liberty. Butler was the contractor for Smith’s Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad. He and Handy were seeking to influence the routing of the Great Western Railroad through Upper Canada to link to theirs, allowing western traffic to avoid the slow passage by boat through Lakes Michigan and Erie to the Erie Canal or a longer and slower planned rail route along the south shore of Lake Erie.

Similarly, Judge John Grant Jr. of Oswego, New York, who was to become president of the Patriot bank, was a partner in two shipping lines on Lake Ontario – one in partnership with the American-born Canadian Reform politician and merchant Abraham Truax of Kingston. Truax was also the Kingston agent of the Toronto-based Bank of the People, a Reform institution intimately connected with the organization of Mackenzie’s Rebellion. With the opening of the Oswego Canal link to the Erie Canal, Grant and his partners hoped to draw Upper Canadian traffic away from the St. Lawrence, through Oswego to New York. The opening of the Canadian Welland Canal also opened Lake Erie to their line, providing another alternate route to Detroit in addition to the Erie Canal or the railway. Truax was to flee Kingston and join the Hunters’ Lodge after the Rebellion.

While Smith would clearly appear a typical speculative frontier capitalist, he – no less than the paradoxical factory owner and communitarian Robert Owen – was engaged in a series of related progressive political and social movements on the Owenite labour fringe that spanned concerns from common education to freethought to phrenology. Although there is no mention of Smith in relation to the Patriot War (unsurprising, given the business crisis he faced at the time), he appears repeatedly in connection with the later leaders of the Hunters’ Lodge in other contexts. These activities illustrate the institutional intersections that brought future Patriot leaders together. Smith’s more easily recovered biography thus makes the hidden cultural and institutional ties among those leaders more visible and provides a more vivid individual portrait of the confluence of what have otherwise been treated as disparate and unrelated cultural and political movements.

Smith took a first, unusual public political stance shortly after arriving in Buffalo, when he organized a Masonic procession on behalf of a Mordecai Noah, co-editor of the National Advocate and a prominent Grand Sachem, or leader, in the Tammany Society, a bulwark of the Democratic Party in New York. Noah had been Smith’s travel companion in Spain and, in 1825, had turned to Smith when purchasing 2,555 acres on Grand Island, in the Niagara River at the mouth of the Erie Canal, as a “refuge for the Jews.” The planned city of Ararat – its name indicating, perhaps, a new instantiation of Solomon’s kingdom – never got much further than the full Masonic procession in August organized by Smith to lay the cornerstone. Smith’s association with both Freemasonry and the Democratic Party placed him at clear odds with the antimasonic-evangelical alliance behind the emerging Whig Party....

Roberts had articled in the law office of Erastus Root, a radical Democrat nominated for governor by the Working Men’s Party, a fringe of the Jacksonian Democrats, in 1830. He had also been co-editor of the National Advocate with Mordecai Noah and went on to edit a series of newspapers, most pertinently the Masonic Craftsman in Rochester (1829–31) and in Detroit (1838–40). The Rochester Craftsman was founded specifically to defend Freemasonry from crippling antimasonic attack, but the paper was equally vocal on Working Men’s Party issues such as imprisonment for debt, the use of prison labour, and a lien law for the protection of labourers in the building trades. Roberts was also a vocal supporter of the freethought Friends of Liberal Principles and Equal Rights, a group that staged meetings in opposition to tract and missionary societies and their Sabbatarian campaigns in the midst of Charles Finney’s infamous Rochester revival meetings. Roberts’ political activity thus intersected with that of Smith, with whom he came to work.

Smith was first elected as an alderman in Buffalo’s first city council, in 1832, and again in 1834; Roberts moved to Buffalo in 1832 and served as clerk of that council before moving to Detroit. The two men had helped organize the Buffalo Mechanics Society to further Working Men’s Party issues, making Buffalo the location of the largest branch of the party in the northeast. In 1833, Smith was nominated for lieutenant governor of New York by the Owenite faction of the fractious party. As the Working Men’s Party transformed into the Equal Rights Party (or Locofocos), Smith was again nominated, this time to stand for governor in the 1836 election....

Isaac S. Smith was also central to the parallel development of the freethought anti-evangelical movement. He had lost his first job as an insurance agent in Buffalo in 1825 because he had been distributing the pamphlets of the Free Press Association, a freethought Painite organization. Later, the wealth his transportation company generated allowed him to pursue this grievance to greater effect, becoming co-publisher of the newspapers Priestcraft Exposed and the Plain Truth (the latter subtitled Devoted to the Defense of Primitive Christianity, and to the Exposing of Frauds Committed under the Garb of Religion). These papers had ties to Roberts’ Masonic newspaper the Craftsman in nearby Rochester – which shared their anti-evangelical, Working Men’s Party involvements – as well as to Underhill’s Cleveland newspaper, the Liberalist. Smith was also the Buffalo agent of the Owenite newspaper, the Free Enquirer.

....

Politically, then, Isaac S. Smith was at the centre of the Owenite labour movement as it moved beyond its communitarian phase to infuse and fracture the Democratic Party in the early 1830s. Many of those within his personal network in the Locofocos were also prominent Freemasons, which, like their affiliation with the Democrats, placed them in opposition to the emerging antimasonic-evangelical alliance in the Whig Party. As Palmer has argued, such alliances bred a hybrid radical discourse accenting social and cultural “oppositions” in a “theatrics of discontent” that was not an explicit part of political platforms. This radical discourse thus also aligned itself with the freethought movement, which had its own roots in Owenite thought, in opposing evangelicalism. These cultural, religious, and political social movements made common cause against the Whigs, those held responsible for increasing economic inequality and the financial crisis that it spawned for common producers. 

This schematic description of the institutional development and Owenite ties of the Freemasons, freethought, and free banking movements is meant to highlight the network of networks shared among the Patriot Congress conventioneers. It is an attempt to demonstrate the specific points where their life trajectories crossed and where a shared secular republican culture was developed....

- Albert Schrauwers, “Tilting at Windmills: The Utopian Socialist Roots of the Patriot War, 1838–1839.” Labour / Le Travail 79 (Spring 2017): pp. 58-60, 62-64

[haootia]

i am BUSY BUSY BUSY today but i couldnt NOT draw something after reading the latest cleveland quixotic chapter, which destroyed my life (positive)

[txttletale]

something i really fucking liked about cleveland quixotic is that it does the whole 'character uses a cane, cane actually has some awesome magic power' thing -- but notably unlike most examples of that trope the character still very much needs the fucking cane, like, for walking. i like vivi a lot and i like that she is legitimately disabled and her disability is disabling and she gets a mobility aid thats also a badass magic relic that kills people in a horirble way

[fantomcomics]

What’s Out This Week? 8/17

WHY IS TIME MOVING SO FAST

20th Century Men #1 (of 6) -  Deniz Camp & S. Morian

At the end of the 20th century, superheroes, geniuses, madmen, and activists rush towards WWIII! A Soviet "iron" hero, a superpowered American president, an insane cyborg soldier, an Afghan woman hellbent on building a better life for her people-these strange yet familiar beings collide in a story that mixes history, politics, and comic book mythology into something totally new. Welcome to 20TH CENTURY MEN, where the edges of our reality and fiction touch, overlap...and then explode.

Chilling Adventures Presents: Jinx’s Grim Fairy Tales #1 -  Magdalene Visaggio, Craig Cermak, Eva Cabrera & Vic Malhotra

Teen Jinx Holliday is Riverdale's go-to babysitter. The (often unruly) kids that she watches over always change, seemingly for the better. The key to her success? Her book of unique fairy tales, all of which tell a moralistic story-usually grim, gruesome ones that frighten the children with Jinx as the star of each and every one. What sinister, I mean, serious lessons will she teach her wards?

Crash & Troy #1 (of 4) -  Jarred Lujan & Paris Alleyne

Intergalactic mercenaries Rex "Crash" Ballard and Troy 3.0 find themselves in hot water after a prison break on Wexia-1 sets free the dictator of Wexia-2. Now they must clean up their mess or find themselves locked up. This means working with Chief Fiona Alvarez of the Earth Defense Forces to recapture Supreme Leader Jongil and stop interplanetary war. No sweat for two pros like Crash & Troy!

Parasomnia: The Dreaming God #1 (of 4) -  Cullen Bunn & Andrea Mutti

Cullen Bunn (Harrow County) and Andrea Mutti (Bunny Mask) return with their hit adventure tale of two worlds split between dreams and reality. As the hunt for his missing son continues, our hero shifts worlds from the nightmarish Lovecraftian dreamscape to a cyberpunk metropolis where a ruthless cult continues to plague him, and reality and fantasy continue to blur.

The Life & Death of The Brave Captain Suave #1 -  Joseph Sieracki & Kelly Williams

In this action-packed, debut issue, we are introduced to the madness and heroism that is Captain Suave! A champion beyond measure, Captain Suave's journey follows a modern-day retelling of Cervantes's classic, Don Quixote, only this hero is convinced that he is a Golden Age superhero. Ready yourself for an adventure that must be seen to be believed, as Captain Suave and his trusty sidekick, Champ, battle the imaginary forces of evil in Cleveland, Ohio!

The Last Shadowhawk One-shot -  Philip Tan, Brian Haberlin & Daniel Henriques

In the not-too-distant future, the world will be just as it is today...only worse. Evil has permeated the very fabric of society, from the halls of government to the darkened alleyways. Will the heroes who once defended the downtrodden fail them now? Will a new generation rise, inspired by the last of the old? Who will be THE LAST SHADOWHAWK?

Crossover #1 3D Special -  Donny Cates & Geoff Shaw

Imagine everything you thought was fantasy...was real. Now, join us in a world where reality is dead-and anything is possible... The powerhouse creative team of DONNY CATES (Venom, Thor), GEOFF SHAW (GOD COUNTRY, Thanos Wins), DEE CUNNIFFE (REDNECK), and JOHN J. HILL (NAILBITER) is proud to present the bestselling first issue of CROSSOVER in THREE GLORIOUS DIMENSIONS! This special edition uses a magical KLC Press 3D process and includes custom glasses for your viewing pleasure. Plus, an ALL-NEW story (also in 3D) with new revelations about the Dome, written by DONNY CATES and illustrated by MEGAN HUTCHISON-CATES.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance #1 -  Brett Murphy, Wilson Gandolpho, & Niko Walter

Since the capture of King Wenceslaus IV by his half brother, King Sigismund, the Kingdom of Bohemia is in disarray. The once peaceful Kingdom is now filled with screams of terror as King Sigismund and his army, full of Cuman mercenaries, slaughter those who oppose him. Sigismund is aided by Istvan Toth and his bandit army, as they are able to raid the recently destroyed villages for silver and weapons while also bringing fear to Wenceslaus loyalists. Find out what happened in the events leading to the hit video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, in the upcoming comic series, Kingdom Come: Deliverance "Death Upon Us".

Jimmy’s Little Bastards #1 -  Garth Ennis, Russell Braun & Andy Clarke

After the shattering events of his last adventure, Jimmy is on extended leave from British Intelligence-sliding slowly into middle age, with carpet slippers, tragic sweater and cup of cocoa to match. The formerly sexist superspy is even reevaluating his attitude to women! His daughter (Don't say it! Don't you dare say it!) Nancy is taking up the slack in fine style, cutting a bloody swathe through the Regent rogues' gallery. But a mysterious message starts Jimmy looking into his family's murky past...where he finds a clue to a strange and deadly new danger.

Whatcha grabbing this week, Fantomites?