Not the Blueprint

Here is another mask from our portfolio of unpublished mask designs by Alice Aroumbeyski. I think we can assume that Yost at one point intended to publish this panel as part of the final episode in the tragedy at Dreams Come True. This mask of the Skumpan-jammattu is rendered in a traditional style, easily recognized by jackalope children everywhere as the scary monster in one of their favorite stories.

The Tragedy at Dreams Come True

Today’s Geranium Lake Properties comic is a panel from the re-telling of an old folktale, “Korri Avastusek and the Skumpan-jammattu”, an oft-told story much loved by Jackalopian children (despite, or perhaps because of, its sad ending). Yost presents the tale as a murder house mystery to GLP readers. The deaths happen on the grounds of a house owned by Korri Avastusek, an eccentric person who named their house The Actual Place Where All Your Dreams Really Really Come True (but everyone shortens the name to Dreams Come True).

This panel, “Complicities and Opacities”, is from a later adventure when Jack Loki re-visits Dreams Come True a year after the Tragedy. He discovers the house is now empty except for one resident, the Skumpan-jammattu, who dwells almost exclusively in the Orangery.

(It is the usual thing to construct an Orangery to protect tender woody plants from the harsh frosts of winter, but the Orangery at Dreams Come True was built to protect its interior environment from the extremes of the desert: fierce heat, drought, wind, bitter winter nights and spring hailstorms.)

…and before you get to thinking that this story, this later story, has an unhappy ending, I will tell you that at the end of this story, when Jack Loki is walking away from Dreams Come True, he hears the Skumpan-jammattu singing in the Orangery:

I’m a rich girl
I don’t try to hide it
Diamonds on the soles of my shoes

He was a poor boy
Empty as a pocket
Empty as a pocket with nothing to lose
Sing ta na na
Ta na na na

I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes

Ta na na
Ta na na na

I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes

The difficulty of crossing a field

Asemic comics are still published here three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, although lately I have been missing my Saturday post and posting it on Monday.

Geranium Lake Properties, Three-Boots-in-a-Barrel

On the first Wednesday of his Fifty-Cent Trip, Jack Loki encounters Colonel George Armstrange Havock, the Sheriff of Sisquickarroyo, whom the local inhabitants call “Three-Boots-in-a-Barrel”.

Geranium Lake Properties, the Return of the Jackalope

Jack Loki’s Raindance

In the summer of 1992, golden California was baked brown and burnt from a drought that had lasted 5 years. Wm. Yost was a California resident at the time, living in a trailer park* near Oceano Beach. GLP’s sporadic protagonist, the irrepressible jackalope named Jack Loki (or “Holmes Tuttle” to his close friends), lived in an undetermined desert that could have been the Sonoran, the Mohave, the Gobi, the Mongolian-Manchurian steppe, or the deserts of Barsoom. Yost, born in Wickenburg, Arizona, and Jack, a wild creature native to deserts, were both accustomed to drought as a natural cycle of their environment. Even so, the situation in California in 1992 seemed severe, almost dire. In response, Yost created a series of GLP panels called “Jack Loki’s Raindance”. That winter (1992-1993) the drought broke with rainfall totals that nearly reached record amounts.

California is suffering from another tremendous drought right now, so I thought it would be a good time to break out the raindance panels.

*The trailer park grew up around a Victorian-style mansion called the Coffee T. Rice House. Before the trailer park was built, the house was surrounded by a Christmas tree farm where my family would find and cut our tree when I was a child. Here are two encounters with the Coffee T. Rice House by bloggers writing about California’s central coast: