It’s tough to write about a work in progress, in fact, it is perhaps wiser not to do so. If it were easier to communicate the ideas and intentions you are trying to convey with a story, you’d probably be able to skip writing the story altogether and just tell it to people, like you would with a good joke, or with directions to the beach. But how do you communicate all the invisible, ethereal things that go into the alchemical mixture that eventually leads to a story? All the music and sensation and hope and memory that informs the page? How to explain the mysterious thing without killing the mysterious thing in the process….?

Might be impossible. Might be better just to show you some of what I’ve been doing. Might be better to just pull the curtain back and give you a bit of the cast.

So, here we have him. BATTLING BOY.

Bb01 blog

Battling Boy is the son of a god or a super hero—it is left unspecified—who comes down from the top of a mountain (or rather, from inside a cloud/UFO contraption/contrivance from above a mountain top) at this father’s behest, in order to rid a giant city from it’s plague of monsters. Hercules had his labors, Batman has his Gotham, Battling Boy has his Monstropolis.

Monstropolis is a city the size of an entire continent—and it is absolutely overrun with monsters. These are horrible, Grimm’s fairytale, Beowulf-ish monsters, awful things. Child-stealers. Plus some of the vampires and mummies and wolfmen we remember from the old black and white Hollywood horror films. Which—if you remember—aren’t very funny. And they don’t all like each other, either. Even a monster can’t stand another monster, this has been proven time and time again.

Bb02 blog

And so, here is a taste of it, then. This is a bit of Battling Boy versus Humbaba, the toughest monster (or maybe at least the oldest—Humbaba can be traced back to Gilgamesh; he is the guardian of the edge of a city, or the place where a forest meets the edge of a city, as you prefer).

All I can say is—this story is pregnant with mystery, it is pretty much writing itself, and I am as impatient to see it in print as you are.

paul pope