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To my surprise, I found out that I never shared these mashup comics anywhere other than my Facebook profile. Now seems as good a time as any to preserve them here as well.

It began thus:

Already in the first strip I was faced with editorial dilemmas, and I ended up offering this alternate version with some of the Fred Basset dialog preserved:

Egged on by enthusiastic friends to continue the series, I found more excellent mashup candidates.

It took a little longer for the next candidate to appear, and even then I was breaking more rules! And once again the editor in me couldn’t choose which way to present the strip.

My final entry to the series came in December.

It came with the following essay:

Newspapers across Australia, and indeed across the world, feature these strips on a daily basis. Both Fred Basset and The Phantom are long-running syndicated comics that have entertained readers for generations.

Many readers look upon Fred Basset somewhat derisively – the attempts at humour can seem strained – and sometimes, there’s seemingly no attempt at humour at all. There is however something enjoyable about Fred’s daily adventures. He seems to be a dog that enjoys life and takes simple pleasure in just existing and observing the world around him.

The Phantom is a comic with an esteemed history. In its newspaper incarnation, it tells long-form stories three-panels at a time. The Phantom carved out his place as the first costumed hero, and loyal fans in Australia have been following his adventures for decades in both newspapers and comic books.

Nestled among other comics on the “funnies” page of the newspaper, both the Phantom and Fred Basset have one thing in common – neither comic tends to end with a punchline. However the pacing between each panel still leads to an ending “beat” to each strip. This brief crescendo, usually played out over three panels or less, causes the characters in each comic to seem somewhat melodramatic.

So of course it was only natural to mash these two worlds together. Fred Basset has no continuity, so it works as a canvas onto which The Phantom’s dialogue can be projected. I hope you find the resulting Fred character strangely familiar – after all, he’s still intrepid, inquisitive and incapable of forming a punchline.

Not long ago, both strips were dropped from Australian newspaper syndication. Perhaps one day I will pick up this project again in their honour.

EDIT:
It never ceases to amaze me how exceedingly compatible these strips are – I checked the latest aligned comics for both Fred and The Phantom and they go perfectly together to create this gem.

When I was in high school I experienced an impactful loss of “someone I didn’t really know”.

There was a player in an online game I played that went by the handle Blythe; a person I looked up to as a level-headed role model. He was older than me, married with a couple of kids, and that’s probably about all I remember of him. He was probably not far from the age I am right now, writing this.

I think I did a stick figure drawing of his character that I would like to include in this blog post but I can’t find it right now.

Along with Blythe, I was a chat moderator, which put us in some shared circles. Still, I wasn’t close to him.

It was nevertheless earth shattering when I learned that he passed suddenly from an aneurysm.

I wrote a letter to him, “Dear Blythe” to process his loss. And in the years following, every now and then I would write another “Dear Blythe” as a diary entry of sort. Life updates or things that I needed to angst over. They went into the same notebook.

I often think about Blythe, in the same way that one thinks about faraway internet “friends” that one has fallen out of touch with. It’s just that in this instance, I know why we fell out of touch.

I actually wrote my most recent “Dear Blythe” a couple of months ago. It might have been ten years between that and the prior entry. It was a happy one, as I feel like I’m in a most incredible stage of life right now and it felt right to “let him know” after angsting to him in the past! I suspect I will write again to him in the future, but my most recent letter felt like the end of a long chapter.

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About three months ago we received our first visit from a cat that we have come to call “The Stranger”. I was in Melbourne at the time but received word from John that our indoor cat had observed and interacted with the Stranger in the window. I got to meet it perhaps a week later, and one day when I was working from home it hung around for quite some time, eventually deciding to use an awkward box of painting supplies to sit in.

We allocated it a cat bed instead; we welcomed its intermittent visits and the unpredictability of our relationship perhaps makes it even more endearing.

We don’t know if it’s a stray or if it’s someone else’s cat. A week or two ago we spotted it trotting around with some neighbours, and asked them if it was theirs. “No, it just sleeps in our garden in the afternoon”.

Perhaps soon we will try tying a message to its neck or bundling it off to the vet to check for a microchip (I didn’t notice any microchip tattoos). For now though, it continues to pop by and use the bed at our front door overnight, sometimes making a point to say hi and sometimes just appearing and disappearing, the only trace being an indent left in the cushion.

When it doesn’t come for a couple days, our indoor cat starts getting whiny at the window for it, and so do I. “I wonder when the stranger will visit,” we say.

Last night I said to John, “One day, the Stranger will stop coming and we won’t know why”. The idea made me a little sad, but only a little bit. I told myself that I could handle the comings and goings of life with with acceptance and grace.

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This morning I learned of the passing of Belghast, prolific blogger and founder of the Blaugust blogging festival. I first crossed paths with Belghast many years back because he picked the same name for his Blog-fest as we had, around the same time. I believe we first met on Twitter; hashtags and micro-communities linking up in their own ways.

Belghast was another person that I did not interact with much and didn’t know well, but who I saw as a role model and stand-up human being. I had learned of his significant life updates in the past few years, including his cancer diagnosis, but it was still a shock to find out that he’s no longer with us.

I think I will think about Bel often now too – another internet figure that I’ve fallen out of touch with. I am thankful to have closure and to know where his story ended, and I know he will leave behind a tremendous legacy. Still, I have shed many tears through this post – I am as gutted now thinking of Bel as I was for Blythe; all of their warmth and potential cut short.

I didn’t know how to process this news but a blog post seemed most appropriate. Rest well, Bel.

For days 2 and 3 of Avian August!

I was going to write the short version of this as another Mastodon reply to a thread that Belghast tagged me in a little while back but I realised, hey, it’s a free blog post for day 3. Let’s crank this out and be in bed before 2AM 😉

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So I did the traditional walk down memory lane for the start of the month and it seems like we landed on “Blaugust” spontaneously during our group’s first blogging festival.

The original name, if it had any, was “blogfest”, which was already corrupted by the time I made my first post of the event.

While other participants also called it “Blagofest” on day 1, UnwiseOwl, the instigator of the challenge took a much classier approach to it, dubbing us the “Augustinians”. Yes, this ties into his occasional papal blog content. Despite this seeming to be a natural term for those who take on the Blaugust challenge, I haven’t seen it widely used. Maybe we can lay claim to a little bit of original etymology there 😉

In the replies to Owl’s post, you’ll see I made a comment about the “Baubloggers”. Perhaps this was the seed that planted the next corruption into “Blaugust”, which was quickly coined on a Day 2 blog post.

By Day 8, UnwiseOwl caves to “Blagofest”, but “Blaugust” is yet to take hold. It takes another week until he concedes to “blAugust“, but it’s almost as if he still disavows it, calling it “Ale’s blAugust adventure”.

Come August 31st and September 1st, “blAugust” appears to be the victorious moniker. UnwiseOwl is the first gold star member of our group of Blaugustines – having successfully posted every day of the month. One of the blogs died an honourable death, having been set to self-delete if no new fiction was published each day. Another blog appears to have been lost to the mists of time.

Come 2012, there’s no question of what we’ll call our now-annual blogging festival. It’s canonised as Blaugust.

Despite my earlier claims on Mastodon, I found during research for this post that we certainly can’t hold any claim to the name (there are blogs still alive from 2010 and perhaps earlier that called the “Blog Every Day in August” challenge “Blaugust” rather than “BEDA”). It’s possible that we were unaware of these earlier efforts because Twitter didn’t have a great text search, and the first hashtags don’t start appearing until later years.

That said, I still believe that it was because of Twitter that we did quickly discover Belghast’s Blaugust when it began, and it’s been inspiring to see that the stewardship he’s provided has made the event one with staying power.

Alright, it’s definitely past 2am. Day 3, out!

Aaaa I wrote a piece about Light Cycles last night but the media just would not upload and then I somehow managed to lose my draft post. So here’s just a single photo from the event.

Once again posting just to keep things alive for a little while. Not sure if I’ll be posting regularly during the month (I’m already drafting “August 1st”‘s post after midnight).

I think there are things I could/should be documenting, so we’ll see what happens for the rest of the month…

I played in the Classic Tetris Australia Online tournament today, but despite that I decided to colour the pieces according to guidelines.

This isn’t the greatest execution but I’ll probably return to the concept another time.

[Also I did paint and attempt to post this on Saturday, I only noticed the “update failed” sitting in this tab when I opened my laptop on Monday morning. So still behind on a Friday post but not suuuuper behind……]