Bat Country is back hombres and hombrettes!

Yeah you have no idea what that is, well fuck it if I’m not gonna be happy about it.

Bat Country is the culmination of my fevered imagination trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t even try to make sense. This world is so strange and full of contradictions and bullshit that we just let wash over us like steamy farts from landwhale in the mobility scooter in the front of the queue at McDonalds.

Bat Country tries to tie all those loose ends together and make a whole lot of spaghetti. I originally started it before I knew about this whole ‘social justice movement’. When I wanted to write comics about social issues and dun dun dun ‘change the world’… with comics ffs.

Needless to say I was and probably still am a complete retard. Trying to force your opinions on others in the form of prose or a visual medium like comics is just really polite brainwashing and after I saw all this cultural Marxism go down around me in terms of comics and games and… err shirts. I realised that comics and any medium in general should never try to make people think like you, they should just make people think, full stop.

Bat Country is at its heart a story of a misfit, someone who doesn’t fit in, even in his own head, someone so completely alien to this world, it keeps trying to spit him out. Ransom is a normal guy who sees something he shouldn’t have seen and after a long period of time he realises the world just isn’t a good fit for him so he locks himself away for a number of years with the help of a shadowy backer with the mind and the money to keep him quiet and hidden for the rest of his natural life.
But in the mean time Ransom starts to build his own plan, to escape the cage of his own design and go out of this world with a big bang and really bad indigestion.

He plans to go on an adventure, walk the earth, travelling a long stretch of nothing populated by obscure eating contests until at the end reaching spiritual and gastric awakening, opening the third stomach or whatever.

But there are people trying to stop him, troubles he gets embroiled in, other people’s stories crossing with him and mixing up the spaghetti even more.

Dreams and fantasy mixing in real time, 4th wall flimsier than crate paper and ultra-violent eroticism tickling the corner of your eyes… maybe??

I was just standing in a coffee shop one day and I realised how fucking out of place I was just standing there… trying to be a person, what the fuck was thinking? I could barely talk, I just wanted to use the toilet but I had to buy something, so I bought some coffee type thing, it came in a little cup and they asked if I wanted milk and sugar and for some fucking reason I said ‘no’ and changing my mind seemed like the hardest thing in the world. Like I was Hitler and someone asked me if I wanted to kill the Jews or give them all sweets and I said ‘Kill them’ then changed my mind but they already started so it seemed rude to change your mind so you just had to ride it out.

It just made me think about what a comic book character like that would be like, someone just unequipped for life, so much so that life itself is just trying to eat them and just by existing they’re barrelling forth to their own misunderstanding of a self-destruction event.

At the time I was reading noir, I think the Maltese Falcon and that was cool, I’d been a big Raymond Chandler fan when I was younger and this wasn’t as good as that but it was cool and I thought, ‘shit I should write something like this’. Then surreptitiously I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right after and I realised a freak like me could never write something that cool and I should just stick to being the weirdo lizard bootlicker that creates cool by mistake as a by-product of just being fucked in the head.

The reckless abandon and freedom of madness is what I wanted after reading Fear, and coincidentally I had been barrelling down a Lynchian path with Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and I knew I had to capture what I loved about that and pass it over.

There was something so haunting and cheesy I couldn’t not rip it off.

So I started to write a story that was about stuff but really wasn’t about anything, it was almost a sarcastic salute to the human race, beautiful and flawed and all huddled on a little ball of dirt hurtling through space sniffing each other’s farts in little metal boxes in the sky on long haul flights from Cleveland or wherever.
Calling people out on being a virus with shoes but also marvelling at their ingenuity and cruelty and tenacity, I wanted to change the world and that was dumb, I know that now, all you can really do is make someone say ‘Wtf’ and that’s enough, a smile, a nod, a little chortle and you’ve done your job, you haven’t changed the world but you did something, something invisible but very real.

Now if only they’d give me some fucking money haha.

Oh yeah fuck, I almost forgot the whole point of this fucking blog, the next chapter of Bat Country is coming soon, new pages released on a weekly basis and you can read the whole first issue free on tapastic, until I can be bothered to move it somewhere less shitty and hipstery haha

http://tapastic.com/series/Bat-Country

Peace.