Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding

Howdy friends, thanks for stopping by. The completed version of Ceaseless Fables SS#143 is now viewable on the CFB site. We are now one page away from the end of the current Saga (“The Curse of the Death Stallion”).

First, a note for my paying Patron Saints; I have groceries thanks to you. Much obliged, sincerely. I literally have to eat food at least a couple times a day for some reason. I have no idea why this is. It seems impractical and costly. I ate late last night because I am a moron and I just shove food willy-nilly into this “body” thing, with no consideration for the after-effects. Also my eyes are slowly wearing out, but that’s neither here nor there. I use them all day, it’s expected.

Okay, moving on. The image is intended to highlight the amount of effort (and ink) that went into the latest CFB page. In some areas of cross-hatching, the lines almost became three-dimensional. I tried to get a picture of the texture but this was the best I could do.

Thank you sincerely as always for your support. It literally keeps me alive.

Oh man- let me see if I can’t rattle this off real quick on my lunch hour. I’m busting my digital hump on some design work right now so I’m kind of all over the place.

1. It’s a privilege to get to forge some sort of living by entertaining you fine people, however meager that living may be at the moment.

2. It’s a privilege to get to operate not one, but two websites with their own proprietary intellectual properties, and to have done so over a not-insignificant number of years.

3. It’s a privilege to get to fiddle with a bunch of flat black squares and a keyboard, with the result being a page, or an entire book. I was just holding one Wacom tablet in my left hand, while using the other one with my right hand, alternating between looking at my laptop screen and my desktop monitor, typing this, and playing the abominable Transformers Earth Wars on my phone. This must be, to myself at 13 years old, absolutely nucking futs.

4. Seriously, sincerely, it is a privilege to get to live out the pursuit of my own artistic vision, especially in times like these. I was tested, as were we all, and I learned that the only thing holding me back was myself.

5. It is a privilege to live this life the way I want to live it, afforded me by the people who created the circumstances for it to be lived, in the places I live it.

6. It is a privilege for me to create work for you to enjoy. It is a pleasure and not a burden. It brings happiness into my life. Don’t ever think I take that for granted. I draw stuff for money; that’s as good as life gets, without random and constant sexual intercourse.

Thank you for being here, from the bottom of my slate-frigid heart, and for your unyielding (as far as I know) support. As they say, the best is yet to come, but that’s an easy bet because progress is inevitable.

P.S.: The latest Ceaseless Fables strip is so late at this point I’ll probably wait to post it until Sunday. I gotta get back to work now, lunch break is over, and I didn’t even get to eat my Moroccan sardines with sriracha!!!

P.P.S.: BALLS!!!

I hope you’re having a great holiday weekend, or just a great weekend in general. Here’s what’s up:

-Tomorrow’s Ceaseless Fables page is still being roughed. Historically this means it might be late. I hate this because I had a really good streak of on-time pages for a little while there. Now I feel like a chump, unable to get this darnable thing ready to go.

-After like a dozen revisions, I could not make my promised Bands I Useta Like article (“Some Things I Can’t Say”) work. I hate this because there’s a lot of good stuff in there, plus I threw in a positive blurb about one of my all-time favorite websites. I may go back in a few weeks and try to wrangle it into shape again, or turn it into something new for the next time a title starting with “S” is needed (if you know, you know). I hacked away at this article from February to early April. The focus was just off somehow.

-However, this morning in a fit of pique (manic phase), I blasted out a new “S”-title article, titled “Sore Subjects“. Much of the same subject matter is reused from “Some Things I Can’t Say”, pared down to two basic points. Only open-minded persons are advised to read this particular cri de coeur. I am beyond fed-up with people and this article reflects that. I am not sharing it on Facebook because as far as I can tell Facebook is dead intellectually. There are users who post messages there about how America is dead. I fucking loathe people like that and would very much like to physically harm them. So instead, I’m trying to hurt them with my words. It should work, because as we all know, words can hurt as bad as the knife of a piece of shit who kills someone over a seat. Right? Sure they do.

It’s all good, because the targets of my new article will never wise up and change the way they are, or learn anything, and I will continue to grind in obscurity and poverty. It’s all good, folks. Nothing ever happens or matters.

Thank you sincerely as always for supporting what I do, seriously, you’re about all I got, and have a great weekend.

This was intended to be posted yesterday as a sneak preview, but now the strip’s posted anyway, so I’ll just make it a freebie. Enjoy and share!

This is page #141 of the Second Solstera of The Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding, of which it is the 501st page overall. The location is the notorious mining prison Bouldershade, which was bombed (allegedly) by Imperial forces at the end of the Battle of Smisland during the Bone Wars.

Zazmene (rhymes with as-many) is scaling the other side of the interior of the crater left by the bombing. She hopes to reach what’s left of the prison complex, and possibly locate her father (who is trapped in an immobilizing “idlesuit”), and/or her old boyfriend Riv (who was unjustly incarcerated by the Empire for refusing to give her up).

Zaz has a long, painful history with the Midirian Empire, even before the Nefarian Era. An unknown informant claimed that Zaz’s father hoarded books that were forbidden under the Empire, and so her house was raided and her family was destroyed. Her father was sent to prison, her mother’s history was rewritten to include the Imperial Debt and enslave her, and her brother was conscripted into the Imperial Army. (He met his end as a general on the IMFA* Derecho, early in the battle with Refusaleth Badidea.)

*Imperial Midirian Forward Airship. I had to go look that up.

All of this happened pre-Narrative, before Zazmene appeared in the Original Saga. When we first saw Zaz, back in 2011, it was on the Drymouth Coast, and she swiped a very important map of the Beyonding from Essul. She tried to escape with her friends on a trolley, but was detained by Faddlegas the great Nard. At one point Zaz slashed Essul in the face, which resulted in a bandage and then later a scar, both of which afforded Essul heretofore impossible facial expressions. All of this actually happened.

Zaz’s friends on the trolley are her boyfriend Riv, and her friends Heglo and Sneza. As seen in recent strips, Heglo and Sneza went on to start a sub shop (as in, submersible, or in this case a Submersi-Bull), where they’d been receiving letters from Riv in prison, until those letters stopped arriving. During this period, Zaz was indebted to the ruthless sky pirate Ussurrup (pronounced like YOU-syrup), who held Zaz’s mother Tiscinivel (who had been installed as Imperial Inspectorate) hostage. By the time Zaz reached her mother, likely by design, it was too late.

In the last two panels of this strip, Zaz’s wrist is grabbed by Spaprivun, who has suddenly appeared. The last time we saw Spaprivun, he was bickering with his necklace familiar, Verru, while exploring the outskirts of Bouldershade. Coincidentally or not, that was the last page I drew for the rest of last year. Anyway, Spaprivun, whose name I hate typing, claims to sense that his body was born somewhere in Bouldershade. This is all relevant, because Spaprivun’s body is not his own; in fact, Verru has more right to it than anyone.

In the Original Saga, Spaprivun went by a different name. He claimed to be a Knight of the First Solstera, and he was merely a head that continually hunted better materials for a body. Ultimately he attached himself to the body of Curdelbludd, which he utilized until it was reclaimed by its creator, Refusaleth, who squeezed the Knight’s head to the size of a rubber ball and discarded it.

When we finally get a good look at the young Agratian cavalier Riverrun, he is sporting a necklace familiar called “Spapou”, who happens to look just like the shrunken head of the Knight. This is not a coincidence. If you recall, Riverrun became catatonic when Zazmene called him “Riv” by mistake*, allowing the WOEWON A-B to smash his skull. His fate since then has been unknown.

*I actually have this wrong. Riverrun returned from catatonia briefly after the WOEWON probed his headstone, to save Zaz. A tussle ensued, and the WOEWON touched Riverrun’s headstone again, which appeared to immobilize him.

The clues are there.

This was a fun strip to draw. It was all about making it look as sheer and dangerous as possible; Zaz clearly rushed into things by diving into the crater, and didn’t think about how vertical the opposite side would be. Even though there are visible ladders, a fact which gave me a nice continuity headache for a brief moment. Folks; I hope you appreciate the titanic amount of effort I put into this series. Like, I know I’m no Tolkien, but Tolkien is the standard I try to meet with this property. That’s more an analogy than anything; as stated in the awesome video that almost no one saw promoting the relaunch of the strip in 2020, the primary influences on The Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding are:

1. The Neverending Story
2. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
3. Dragon Ball Z (manga) by Akira Toriyama

Not so much Tolkien in that regard. Where his influence comes in is the world-building, the fantasy archetypes, and the languages. I can’t for the life of me figure out where I put the list of Beyondigan tongues, and I’m drawing a blank at the moment on examples, so you’re in luck. I’ll wrap this awesome article that’s a good sample of what you regularly get if you’re a paid subscriber, up. Please feel free to share, that’s why I put in all the links. Thanks in advance.

As a sort of bonus, here’s some notes from Zazmene’s first character design page, dated 1/13/11:

-knows constructed languages from growing up in Smislandic ghetto

-skilled in unarmed Close Quarter Combat, plus dagger-fighting (Smisland has a prison with a huge hard-labor spar mine.)

“Life is all about being forced to accept things you can’t understand.” -Zazmene (OS, #185, written 2/2/14)

Thanks sincerely as always for your support. Feel free to leave comments or questions.

Love,
Matty Boy Anderson