The History of Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat
1995 to 2007
Ranklechick and his three-legged cat, Pumpernick started out as characters in our virtual Internet comedy, Super Information Hijinks Reality Check!. In chapter three of SIH: Reality Check! the pair escape from a cartoon show written by a artificially intelligent computer. They wander the Virtual Internet looking for a rocket when the computer who wrote them gets writer’s block.
Even before their appearance in SIH: Reality Check! these two melancholic oddballs were sort of kicking around our studio, looking for a story — and after they made their SIH: Reality Check! appearance, it still didn’t seem like enough. So I convinced Tavisha to draw two full color comics starring Ranklechick and Pumpernick and they were published by Slave Labor Graphics in 2001. In this version, Ranklechick and Pumpernick live six thousand years in the future aboard a living space station called the Europan Zoo, along with another six million other neurotic Ghouls. They have adventures.
Two comics were published out of a planned series of four. Then, somehow, that still didn’t seem like enough. I canceled the series and I went into writing a prose novel further extrapolating their adventures. SLG was slated to publish the hybrid Ranklechick novel, a combination of color comics and illustrated prose in 2005 — but the project got too big and too expensive and so by the time it was finished, Ranklechick no longer had a place to go.
The synopsis for the novel reads as follows:
I self-published the illustrated hybrid prose novel of Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat via pod-publisher, lulu.com to appease those readers who waited so long for the SLG version — but pod publishing, being what it is, meant that Ranklechick ended up being $50.00 for a full color version of the whole story. Though I was grateful for the orders, it still seemed overpriced to me.
For the time being, I’m uploading the retouched Ranklechick comics to this site. I've removed the Ranklechick illustrated novel from lulu.com, and I'm now going to start soliciting Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat as a regular ol' un-illustratred prose novel to agents and publishers. If nobody takes it I’ll just load the whole thing up here and move on to the next story. Though I do love Ranklechick so.
-Rikki
Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat is about a child Ghoul named Ranklechick. Ranklechick lives near Jupiter's moon, Europa, within a sentient space station called the Europan Zoo. He lives with his three-legged cat, Pumpernick. Since birth, Ranklechick has been accused by his father of murdering his mother and now the sad little Ghoul thinks he can make everything right if he can just talk to his mother’s ghost. This is Ranklechick’s obsession, and every Ghoul on board the Zoo must have an obsession in order for the Zoo to survive. Being that he is of the inventor class of Ghoul, Ranklechick invents an absurd collection of devices in his quest to speak to his mother, like his Bliss Extractor, which he uses to try to get an autograph from the ghost of Charles Dickens, or his Sphere of Belligerence, a spacecraft propulsion system that literally insults physics. All Ghouls are social idiots trapped in a society that thrives off of absurdity, like a vast population of Asperger’s patients. Ranklechick spends his time living in the densely populated Europan Zoo, building necrotic communicators when he isn’t being interrupted by the the strange and unnatural — and he has many interruptions: running from handshaking lessons, avoiding being made into candy by the evil android Nathan Burblepinch, getting repeatedly decapitated, suffering the company of oniomaniac children, being possessed by the Spirit of Failure, suicidal disembodied brains, melancholic ham, a sardonic talking three-legged cat for a best friend, and all the while Ranklechick continues to believe he is becoming a comic book character. When all is quiet and he has time to think, he wonders if he’ll ever get to tell his dead mother that he loves her. This is a comedy.
