"With A Picture Of An Old Oak Tree By My Side"

I finally finished scripting the rest of the Yellowstone Saga this afternoon. There are still twelve comics to do, which means another four weeks of the Yellowstone stuff. This is the longest storyline I've ever done, and really beginning to deserve the name "saga." By the time it's done, it'll have been fifty comics long. That's twice as long as the original Yellowstone storyline. I like to think I've kept it interesting the entire time, and that the comics have been funny and easy to follow. Folks keep coming back to the site on my update days, so I guess I'll continue to believe that.

The second time through with the Yellowstone story has been fun. I've changed a lot of it--mostly just added to what existed before--and I'm pleased with it. Sure, nothing in the storyline has been earthshaking as far as plot or storytelling techniques, but I was setting out to have fun, not to write the most intricate plot known to man. If other people have enjoyed these comics as much as I've enjoyed writing them, that'll be enough for me, really.

What's expanded the most this second time through has been the Vigilante thing. In the previous incarnation, more emphasis was placed on the stealth bussers. Here, it's been on the trail police and the hiking, which is really how I wanted it from the beginning. When Clif and I were in Yellowstone, work was mostly a blur, but hiking...ah, the hikes will stay with me for the rest of my life. The hiking and the scenery made that one of the best summers of my life.

It occurs to me that the one aspect of that summer that didn't get expressed in these comics was the creation of Cross-Eyed Yeti's first album, Delusions of Grandeur. Over half the songs which originally appeared on that album were written or finalized in Yellowstone, and the first extant copy of the album was recorded in our room over the course of a few nights onto a cassette tape recorder we borrowed from an old family friend. I still have the tape--the first side contains our first 14 or 15 songs, the second contains a portion of a live show we did one of our last nights in Mammoth Hot Springs at the employee pub (our folks were even in attendance). The album would evolve from that initial tape, both in terms of the songs included and recording sophistication and complexity (and in terms of our abilities--we were really rough in those first recordings), but that tape is a nice historical artifact and a physical reminder of the fun Clif and I had in Yellowstone. Listening to that tape, you could tell we were having fun--that's what it was all about for us, really. The songs were amateurish, completely live, and of exceptionally low quality, but dear Lord we were having fun. I sometimes think that summer was not simply one of the best summers of my life, but one of the best periods of time in my life at all. There was just something about the peace and the joy I found there, even after the personal hell I'd been through the last half of my senior year and the uncertainty of what lay ahead...it was a series of perfect moments, strung out over the course of two and a half months.

And I think I've recorded a bit of that peace, a bit of that perfection in not only the comics, but the music we wrote and recorded during that time (and subsequently), and the peace I still have from that summer. And for that, I'm very thankful indeed.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Bob Dylan: "Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar"