El Aleph

From Cage! #2 (2017)

01:11:47 Dr. Richard Powell: Tell me what you see.

01:11:52 Daniel Carter: I see... A monster that thinks he's god.

01:12:02 Dr. Richard Powell: I'm disappointed. Of all the things I've shown you and you still don't understand.

01:12:10 Daniel Carter: No. No, you're right, I don't.

01:12:15 Dr. Richard Powell: I refuse to let death be the end. I defy god. There are things much older. Older than time and they blessed me.

01:12:27 Daniel Carter: Well, congratulations.

01:12:30 Dr. Richard Powell: I spent my life resisting death, but now I understand. I must embrace it. I'll have my beautiful daughter back. I just need one final thing. Come, join me. The others have all gathered to witness my daughter's rebirth. My disciples ready for their own transformation. You'll experience it yourself, but first, you have to die for me.. Like your father and son before you.

Pencils by Tony Harris / Inks by Wade von Grawbadger  / Colors by Gregory Wright

“Am I telling stories out of school? Was it a secret that I preside over a large sweaty pile of people in a useless fake profession who somehow didn’t have the mental fortitude to play pretend in return for paychecks all day? While I, Chief Asswiper to the Thought-Leader Elite, have to pay for three evil children, two shitty houses, and one supposed woman who stopped fucking me five years before she threw me out, literally, onto the street, where I was hit by some fat neckbeard on a Vespa so now in addition to all of the above I have to pay for five stupidly costly medications prescribed just to stop me from shrieking like a stuck pig all fucking day. And your issue is what? That I am revealing to people who piss their pants if they see a TV remote that they are in fact so damaged that they piss their pants if they see a TV remote? Eat shit and die. One or some or even maybe all of our precious inmates lifted another patient out of his room in the dead of night and probably fucking ate the poor bastard. Well, it doesn’t matter. Normal Head is on lockdown and in the morning we are calling out for a specialist investigative team. Staging privileges have been pulled. Go to bed. Tomorrow we begin working out exactly who decided to ruin my life.”

00:02:15 doom-head: Hello. They call me doom-head. Now, I don't call myself doom-head, mind you, but they do. Who's they? Well, some mysterious folks that pay me a whole lot of scratch to do what I do. And what I do, unfortunately for you... I do real well. Now. Let's get one thing between us straight. I ain't no fucking clown. Now Mr. p.T. Barnum may claim clowns are the pegs on which this circus is hung... But I isn't no fucking clown. Now you may think you see a grease-painted performer sitting before you who would usually elicit an amused response from an audience, but trust me. You do not. I'm not here to make you happy. I'm not here to brighten your dismal day and I am certainly not here to elicit an amused response. I am here to end your miserable fucking life. But first... Mm. First, I'm gonna bless you with a story. See I don't think the last sound to puncture your ear drums should be the twang of your body falling apart. Snap! Oooh. Crunch. Interesting fact: Did you know that a cockroach can live up to 168 hours without a head? I find this... fascinating. But what really blows my fucking marbles like a 50-cent skank, I mean the real mind-fucker, is that for several more hours this same decapitated head will keep on truckin' for Jesus. If properly nourished, of course. You know, all in all, you've had a pretty good run. But, uh, deep down inside you must have known it all had to end somewhere. Might as well be here. Might as well be now. And it might as well be with me.

Art by Emi Lenox and Jordie Bellaire

Chaos is order yet undeciphered

01:05:21 Amber: Hey, I want the rest of your pep talk.

01:05:25 Pat: Oh, no. It no longer applies.

01:05:28 Amber: Oh, come on. I'm curious.01:05:33 Pat: It was paintballing... you were cowering...

01:05:42 Pat: Yeah, Rick Silva. We were getting slaughtered by these legit Iraq vets.

01:05:51 Amber: It totally applies.

01:05:53 Pat: Full camo, thousand-dollar automatic paintball guns. They knew real war and they played real war. Tactics, hand signals, flanking. Just wiped us all out. So Rick gets fed up and says, "Fuck it." Didn't care about getting shot. Didn't care about taking cover. It was hopeless, man. So the last match, the whistle blows, and he just tears out there, full jackass, in... in sneakers and cut offs and he... wipes out their whole team. Doesn't stop. Just keeps running and laughing and shooting... until they're all dead.

01:07:14 Amber: Pretend dead. And we're up against real guns.

01:07:20 Pat: Yeah. Either way, we can't play real war.

01:07:55 Amber: Let's pretend.

Miles Davis: Don't call it jazz man, that's some made up word. This is social music.

From Pride of Baghdad (2006)

When at last an elevator arrived, the doors opened to reveal a solitary passenger, a thin-shouldered and neurasthenic young masseuse who lived with her mother on the 5th floor. Laing immediately recognized her as one of the "vagrants", of whom there were many in the high-rise, bored apartment-bound housewives and stay-at-home adult daughters who spent a large part of their time riding the elevators and wandering the long corridors of the vast building, migrating endlessly in search of change or excitement.

Art by Adrian Alphona

Words by G. Willow Wilson

00:25:01 Howard: There’s no one left to call. See that? Nothing’s coming through. You think I sound crazy. It’s amazing, you people. You wear helmets when you ride your bikes, you have seat-belts, You’re in your cars, you have alarm systems to protect your homes. But what do you do when those alarms go off? Crazy, is building your ark after the flood is already come.

From The Private Eye, vol. 2 (2015)