In the dim history of my mumblings there are mentions of a property called, intriguingly, Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat. I first read this and wrote about it back at Table of Malcontents, mentioning it in a post on comic book MBQ. The post earned me to scorn of an entire generation of American manga fans (“white, fat, mousy-haired, wire-framed and lacking in personal hygiene”), and perhaps was not the best venue in which to introduce Rankle.

Allow me, instead, to quote from creator Rosearik Rikki Simons:

Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat is about a child Ghoul named Ranklechick. Ranklechick lives near Jupiter’s moon, Europa, within a sentient space station called the Europan Zoo. He lives with his three-legged cat, Pumpernick. Since birth, Ranklechick has been accused by his father of murdering his mother and now the sad little Ghoul thinks he can make everything right if he can just talk to his mother’s ghost. This is Ranklechick’s obsession, and every Ghoul on board the Zoo must have an obsession in order for the Zoo to survive. Being that he is of the inventor class of Ghoul, Ranklechick invents an absurd collection of devices in his quest to speak to his mother, like his Bliss Extractor, which he uses to try to get an autograph from the ghost of Charles Dickens, or his Sphere of Belligerence, a spacecraft propulsion system that literally insults physics. All Ghouls are social idiots trapped in a society that thrives off of absurdity, like a vast population of Asperger’s patients. Ranklechick spends his time living in the densely populated Europan Zoo, building necrotic communicators when he isn’t being interrupted by the the strange and unnatural — and he has many interruptions: running from handshaking lessons, avoiding being made into candy by the evil android Nathan Burblepinch, getting repeatedly decapitated, suffering the company of oniomaniac children, being possessed by the Spirit of Failure, suicidal disembodied brains, melancholic ham, a sardonic talking three-legged cat for a best friend, and all the while Ranklechick continues to believe he is becoming a comic book character. When all is quiet and he has time to think, he wonders if he’ll ever get to tell his dead mother that he loves her. This is a comedy.

I was so taken with Ranklechick’s cast and setting that I penned two pieces of fanart, something I never, ever do, one of which can be seen to the right. That is Sister Toovibohnes (I’m iffy on the spelling), a straight-laced space nun that lives aboard the Europan Zoo with the rest of the gang.

Ranklechick has been generously made available for free on Simons’ website, along with Super Information Hijinx: Reality Check! (which I have not read, but I believe it involves catgirls and also “the internet”).

Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat; Reality Check [Studio Tavicat]

I’d love to get my MacBook Pro modded like this.

Clockwork Powerbook [Mac Mod]

Unhallowed Metropolis is the tabletop roleplaying game of retropostapocalyptic horror that I’ve been working on for the past couple years. The process has been arduous, the art draining, the photography persnickety, and the entire concept so ludicrously appealing that I did it anyway.

It has been two hundred years since first the outbreak of the Plague, when without warning the dead rose to feed on the flesh of the living. [...]

Seventy percent of the world’s population succumbed to the Plague, secondary epidemics, or the mass starvation that followed.

The year was 1905; it was the dawn of a new dark age.

In the following decades, the survivors to learned to fight back and to retake what they had lost. Recalling the golden age that had come before, the Neo-Victorians set out to rebuild their shattered nation. [...]

London 2105. The capitol of the Neo-Victorian Empire is a vast, densely crowded city surrounded by fortifications fifty-feet high. The dead walk the Wastelands beyond the walls, and spontaneous outbreaks of the Plague ravage the population within. It is only through constant vigilance and massed firepower that order is maintained.

I heard recently from Jason Soles, one of the writers and project heads (the other being Nicole Vega) that the first UnMet book will be released at GenCon Indy, a gigantic gaming convention in Indianapolis. I will probably be in attendance to sign and shmooze, we’ll be hawking books and prints, and you’ll finally get to see what the hell we’ve been posting about for the past however many months.

I recently wrote an article on steampunk DIY hacker Jake von Slatt, Explaining his design for a clockwork trilobite, Jake explained: “A clockwork trilobite is an intrinsically cool thing,” which consequently led me to observe: “Not when dozens of them are crawling all over your naked genitals as you lay paralyzed in your bed at midnight” Wired did not decided to include this blunt, factual observation…

You can file this clockwork arachnid by Cazouillette under the same genital-shrinking subcategory of autonomous, cog-sprung robot insects. That said, I must have one and programm it to scurry around me, yelping like a puppy.

The Clockwork Arachnid [Brass Goggles]