Now, back in November of 2003, about a year and a half before I started Daily Grind, my friend Dan Coble proposed a comics version of penkwe, the old writing game.
The usual sort of penkwe involves five people. The first person on the first day of the game e-mails five words to the other four people, then everybody has two weeks to write something that uses all five of the words. It can be anything: a poem, a story, a recipe, a manifesto, what have you. As long as it gets the five chosen words in, it's OK. At the end of the two weeks, everyone e-mails their stuff to everyone else, and the second person sends out the next five words. So at the end of 10 weeks, you've put together 5 odd little pieces of writing.
Dan's idea, though, was to do this with comics. The first person would send out a title, and everyone would have two weeks to produce some sort of comic with that title.
It sounded like fun to me, so I signed up along with Marilyn Scott-Waters, Doug Barre, and Lori Thibedoux, who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't have a web site...
Dan pulled our names out of a hat to see in what order we would send out titles, and when my name came out first, I chose the title "The Return of Dr. Dragonwagon."
Why? Because I already had half a story planned and knew how I wanted it to begin: Tharka and Gana coming out of a movie theater after having seen the film "The Return of Dr. Dragonwagon." You can see the results below.
As for the others, well, what Marilyn did with the title can still be seen in her portion of the Girlamatic website. And the others came up with some fine stuff, too...except for Doug: we're all still waiting for him to do his penkwomics, as we ended up calling them.
So, here's "The Return of Dr. Dragonwagon," Part One of Hearts and Minds, a pre-Daily Grind adventure featuring D. F. Tharka and A. Gana Belea. Oh, and those other two people coming out of the theater at the same time as Gana and Tharka? They're Kestrel Finch and Terpsichore, the two main characters of my Terebinth comic. A bit of an "in-joke," I'm afraid...
Part Two: The Corner Office, inspired by Lori Thibedoux's title, can be viewed by taking that link there. Meanwhile, here's some links back to the Archive Page, the Table of Contents and the Daily Grind Main Page if you need them.
