Creation Myth

Shift House is a comic book conceived by myself and Matt Mossman for the Small Press Idol contest held by Dimestore Productions.  I write, Matt draws.  The rules of the contest state that we cannot put up any material that has not already been posted on the contest website, so developments with regard to the project itself will appear here as they appear in the contest.  I will, however, try to keep this page active in the meantime.



Here is how we came up with Shift House:

Matt says to me, “hey, John, do you want to enter Small Press Idol?”  I says, “sure.”  He says, “do you have anything you want to do?”  I says, “I got a couple things we could do.  Did you have anything in mind?”  He says, “answer the question, fool!” and sends me an electrical shock through the phone.

After I woke up, I came up with the idea.  See, there’s this kid who wears a red shirt all the time.  And he’s an orphan.  And . . . uh . . . he works as a news reporter.  He says a magic word, and then he gets struck by lightning and turns into Fred MacMurray.

“Genius,” Matt yells when I tells him.  “What’s the magic word?”

I couldn’t come up with nothing.

“Try again, fool,” Matt says.

Sos I go to the butcher to see the Director’s Cut of Avatar, but the AC’s busted and all the blue ink’s running, and I can’t make heads or tails of what the heck’s going on.  Sos I head outside, eating a raw kebab, when I see a giant, floating eyeball hovering over a soapbox and runnin’ at the mouth – except he ain’t got no mouth – about the Trilateral Commission and how they canceled Arrested Development and the original Star Trek series.  It was just about then I passed out from the botulism.

While I was in the ICU, I sent the idea to Matt through the astral plane, a little at a time since the network kept crashing.

Matt drew up the character sketches while I was busy accepting the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Coma-inspired Composition.

Anyways . . .   

I am a native New Yorker, a stickball addict, and I fear no robots.

Matt lives on the Ring of Fire.  He is a professional kung fu master who teaches dogs to read in his spare time.


Note:  This information is tentative, pending fact checking.  I may be drunk.