lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)
if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.
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no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.
I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.
I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.
If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.
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Ghost Kitchen (brought to you by criminal entrepreneur, Red Hood)
Danny’s got the easiest job in Gotham.
He works as a fry cook at a shoddily-run, independent burger joint. Hardly anyone comes in, despite prices being criminally low, and portions insanely large, and while the manager looks like the average tough-as-nails ex-con, he lets Danny mess around in the kitchen whenever the place is empty. (Which is often. This place has to be the city’s hidden gem or something!)
Mr. Manager’s the only one ever there with Danny, except for sometimes when his buddies come over to smoke and play cards. Danny would find it shady, except part of his job is not to ask questions. Literally, he was told during the interview.
(It was a weird interview. Why would they need to hire someone who’s been in a gunfight before? Like, he has, but Gotham’s idea of “hirable qualities” is so bizarre.)
So instead he whips up some killer burgers with the frozen ingredients, and basks in the praise as the guys tell him he shouldn’t have, he does too much for this joint, ain’t that friendly!
Now, Danny’s a chef on the newer side. As a teen he’d preferred the look of Nasty Burger over anything with Michelin stars, and he only really took up cooking after Jazz moved out for college. But just like ecto-exposure used to turn the groceries sentient, Danny’s low-level ecto signature imbues all his food with something historically haunted Gothamites just love! And Danny’s never been one to half-ass a job when it makes people happy.
With fresher produce, real meat, Danny’s sure he can take his dishes to the next level. It takes a couple months of badgering, but his manager finally agrees to contact the mysterious store owner, who keeps the place going, despite profits Danny knows have to be in the red.
Danny spends the morning prepping. He pours his heart into his food, eager to impress. The big boss will be here soon, and he wants to prove that despite the dangerous location, this place has real potential!
It isn’t until the Red Hood shows up that Danny realizes he’s been working for a money laundering scheme.
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Thinkin about a DCxDP where Danny’s helping ghosts find peace while he’s laying low in Gotham.
Like, he moved away from Amity for whatever reason. Maybe the reveal went badly, maybe he just couldn’t stand staying any longer. For whatever reason, he’s in Gotham, because the rent is cheap and he’s nowhere near the strangest thing there so no one looks at him twice.
However, this city is cursed. Like, cursed beyond cursed. It’s actively alive with how many curses there are, and the ghosts there are extremely unhappy about it.
(Of course, that’s not a problem for Danny. His ghost side filters out the toxic smog and the chemicals in the water, and his human side gives a resistance to the rank ecto and the hexes that are actively trying to devour him.)
He doesn’t really want to do anything about it, to be honest.
He’s sick of playing hero, considering how it went last time, and he’s busy working at Waffle House or Walmart or whatever other store doesn’t bother doing a background check (in Gotham, that’s probably all of them), and maybe trying to find a way to get highschool credits that don’t immediately disqualify him from every college in existence.
Still, the ghosts know he can hear them. They know, and they keep coming for help.
So, hey, why not? He definitely can’t put this as experience in any sort of job application, but he really doesn’t have much else to do.
So, he becomes errand boy for a bunch of ghosts.
Sometimes he’s finding objects that are important to them, sometimes he’s giving evidence they collected together of their murders to the police, sometimes he’s getting them the last meal they never had, sometimes he’s just spending time with them like they’re not dead.
The ghosts don’t always move on, but they’re always more at peace. Occasionally they pay him back in charms and blessings and the locations of valuables that he can keep or pawn for cash.
Eventually, a new ghost shows up.
She looks like a shadow, like all the ghosts of Gotham, but she seems stronger than usual. She asks him for a favor that those who came before him were never able to fulfill.
She asks him to find her engagement ring, and give it to her son.
Easy enough, he thinks. It’s a bit of a pain to buy the ring from the seedy pawn shop it’s in (he would usually just steal it, but he doesn’t want to implicate her kid in anything, which she seems grateful for), but everything’s going mostly alright.
Then, she tells him who her son is, and wow, no wonder no one’s helped her yet.
He’s Red Hood. The guy who is(/was) the crime lord in charge of crime alley. The title sounds a bit stupid to Danny, but he’s still a genuine threat to a living person.
Good thing he’s not one of those.
And so, the next time he sees Red Hood out and about, he goes right up to him. The man seems mostly unbothered, but Danny does notice how his hand slightly drifts towards one of his many weapons.
He tells Red Hood outright that he’s there on behalf of the man’s mother, then just holds out his hand with the ring inside, dropping it into Red Hood’s open palm.
Then he leaves, not waiting for a response.
—
Jason has a mystery on his hands, and he might just cash in some favors from Babs and Tim to figure it out.
He’s got to find the guy who gave him his mother’s ring, and find out everything he knows.
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