Mister Paxman's Glorious Bastards

Chardonnay Whitelog

2012-02-01T20:24:00.000Z

A spoiled pudgy child with a minuscule sticky toffee sweet brain, Chardonnay Whitelog grew up to become a stick thin, pastel coloured hyperactive hipster composed chiefly of connective tissue. She subsisted on taste-free unsalted licking crackers, lemon scented bathroom wipes and caffeinated YumCorp energy drinks.

How an inoffensive human grub could metamorphose gradually into such a boring, trendy, uncultured mind void is debatable. Presumably her upbringing had a lot to do with it. Her education likely had an influence too. We're skimming aspersion stones across the nature and nurture debate pond here, so let's just wade right in:

Chardonnay was named after her mother's favourite box of cheap nightly wine. Right there you've got a good case for chemical castration and eugenics. Chardonnay's intellect was therefore stunted before her head was even fully formed in that disaster of a woman's shabby reproductive gulch. The ninth of eleven children born into a cardboard box in the lounge, it is not too surprising that Chardonnay spent the first four years of her life thinking she was probably an unwanted kitten.

Statistically speaking, Chardonnay's father was most likely one of the four gormless Dauphinoise brothers, local nuclear power plant workers her mother used to service sexually in the car park, the men's toilets or occasionally in the bottom after the weekly pub quiz. All of these moronic radioactive punter giants had far too few brain cells and far too many mutant sperms. Incidentally they all performed in an unsuccessful barbershop quartet together.

Educated by an erratic combination of disinterested, schizophrenic and sexually abusive tramps down at the nearby park whilst her mother scored drugs or performed tricks (Pancetta Whitelog being among other things a really shitty amateur magician), it is unsurprising Chardonnay turned out pig ignorant and thick as a naturally occurring treacle bog.

Her fate was somewhat spectacular despite her humble origins. Stripped of her childish wonder, Chardonnay Whitelog became an aficionado of soulless, manufactured one-dimensional tween musical acts. She died in the middle of filming a pornographic music video, performing a literally explosive sexual act upon one such witless music industry pawn while he sang into his microphone in a swimming pool.

The music video in question is trending now.

Mister Pendleton

2012-01-22T17:35:00.001Z

A creepy foundling who spent the first few years of his life in a dilapidated orphanage, the young boy who would become Mister Pendleton lacked any semblance of a moral core. To look upon him was to gaze, as it were, into the abyss. This soulless vulgar creature was adopted by Obadiah Pendleton; a wealthy elderly gentleman with seemingly no chin; who had never recovered from the loss of his only biological son to infection by (and transformation into) a Siberian ululating goblin. Perhaps rather than the howling black void that grieving old man saw in the boy's vacant stare an emptiness or seismic schism of character with which he could empathise.

Attempting to elicit some favourable response from the implacable boy, Obadiah took the young Pendleton to a great many circuses, ventriloquists and entertainments; including the world famous Doctor Fleggen's All Musical Super Saucy 'n' Sexful Sideshow of the Absurd. It was watching these peculiar musical spectacles of orgiastic excess that filled the empty boy's horrible vertiginous mind with whimsical joy and the rudiments of a business model. Yet it was Ralph Sterback's pioneering work with seaside Theatre of Cruelty puppet shows that furnished the boy with his diabolical calling and crystallised his true purpose.

As a prepubescent youngster Master Pendleton began to create the world's first wholly inappropriate raunchy puppet shows, based upon the notions that sex and violence sell and that taboos are made to be broken. His early works centred around crude homoerotic tales of burly and well oiled bare-trottered boxing swine. Unfavourable reviews in his pious school newspaper ranged from "vulgar nonsensical heresy" to "ham-fisted gibberish". Undeterred, Pendleton continued to refine his dastardly stories and hand craft his sordid puppets whilst studying at Humbleswither Upon Yang University. His unconventional thesis; a study on mortals doing weird sex to monsters in mythology entitled "Monsterotica"; got the attention of the Teratology Guild and provided the abrupt but massively successful beginning to Mister Pendleton's publishing career. According to many open minded or smutty reviewers, Mister Pendleton's oeuvre probed the boundaries between pornography and high art, continually redefining the terrain of Twentieth Century top shelf literature. In his preface to book one of the Trashy Unicorn trilogy, Pendleton himself remarked, "Over the purported horizon of morality lies only another horizon to be explored".

When we now think of puppets performing vile acts of lethal snuff hardcore sexual intercourse upon one another, or indeed upon their ventriloquist operators, we consider it to be a staple of the traditional primetime mainstream... par for the course... even a little old hat. It is therefore hard for our enlightened and desensitised brains to imagine the full impact that Mister Pendleton's first public performances must have had on his primitive Twentieth Century audiences.

The debate rages ever on over the immorality of Mister Pendleton's business enterprises and the validity of his artistic credentials. However, after all this time his massive fortune, publishing empire* and the popular legacy of his nasty puppet shows remain undiminished.

*On his death, Mister Pendleton split his fortune and publishing empire between his wife, their fourteen small dogs, his three mistresses and the Teratology Guild. Apparently he used to like to go to The Museum of Fragmented Shadows and whack off over the monstrous exhibits.

The Legend of Santa Sangre

2011-12-26T14:48:00.001Z

In 1859 famously earnest anti-teratologist Harold Jenny Morlock disproved the myth of Father Christmas in a most public and conclusive manner; at once becoming a sworn enemy of the Pope and the reason a considerable proportion of the world's supply of kids bought voodoo dolls all of a sudden.

From 1859 until 1890, Christmas was not celebrated. During this sullen interval, however, a Mexican folk hero arose and quickly became a cult figure; at first in predominantly hispanic countries but then, more gradually, his influence spread across the globe.

Santa Sangre, a muscular wrestler who wore gaudy festive knitted masks, championed the weak, the stupid and the small. He beat up the unending stream of Mexican monsters that threatened the orphanages and the squishy, delicious children within. He delivered simple carved wooden gifts to children and attractive women, many of whom longed to be impregnated by him (the senoritas, not the children). Many of them consequently were impregnated by him (again, the senoritas, not the children).

When Mexico attempted to secceed from the United States holiday season completely, making Santa Sangre the official Christmas deity, the delicate sensibilities of sabre-rattling American Christians were affronted and the bloody Christmas War broke out.

Many men later claimed to have been Santa Sangre and today tales of his legendary derring-do are as numerous as they are far-fetched, violent and hilarious. For instance the one about how he hacked to pieces the terrifying giant land squid and made seafood paella for a whole village of starving peasants in under an hour.

Tiffany Slumpodding

2011-12-03T15:15:00.001Z

Low self-esteem dogged Tiffany Slumpodding's life ever since she was teased at secondary school for being an enormous slut and spunk junky. She got back at the world by becoming first a nun and then a porn star, specialising in being burnt with cigarettes and spat on by men who resembled her emotionally distant father. This behaviour got her kicked out of the convent but embraced by the world of adult entertainment.

Falling out of favour with the tentacles of the mainstream porno industry after remarking in an interview with Interscrews that 'consent is for wimps'*, she began to find herself in ever more salacious, precarious situations and barreling towards her ignominious and unsavoury end.

Being appointed high priestess on the island of the sadomasochists for the Autumn / Winter 2011 season was the apex of both Tiffany's career and her existence.

The culmination of the psychosexual religious ceremony saw Tiffany in pagan robes being brutally group-porked to death at the top of a reproduction Aztec pyramid by a load of butch, PVC clad Santa and his reindeers-themed dominatrixes wielding chainsaw strap-on phalluses. One uncharacteristically prudish review for the island newspaper by Gimp twenty-seven noted that, 'The grisly event was enough to put you off broad Christmas satire indefinitely and your stroke for a short interval'. For someone with a ball gag permanently jammed in his gob, he sure said a mouthful. Tiffany's death led to a number of social reforms on the island of the sadomasochists and the epitaph on Tiffany's tombstone boasts the educational legend, "Too much religion and too much sex can be dangerous. Don't try this at home, folks ;)"

*Tiffany was "interscrewed" for the January 2008 issue. That she managed to make her controversial comments (or "cuntroversial cumments", as pun-obsessed "interscrewer" Big Black Tom** described them) whilst being choked with a thirteen inch member shows her dedication to her art. Or maybe just an erosion of her gag reflex.

**Big Black Tom is the stage name of African-American pornographic journalist Thomas Mindfrapes-Johnson.

Brian Trowsir

2011-12-01T19:50:00.001Z

Brian Trowsir was a nasty little turd curl of a mindless animal, with a projected life trajectory that made even hardened school careers robots wince. Fortunately for everyone, Fate (in an admittedly unexpected form) intervened.

An emaciated, weed-addled urban scally teenager with the vocabulary of a worm; Brian spent most of his time with his crotch-cheese encrusted hands down his sweatpants rubbing what little stubby stump of an unwashed and malodorous penis the gods (in their infinite wisdom) deigned to provide him with.

On the few occasions he was not engaged in phallus fiddling, what pitifully shambolic, strung-together experiences passed for his subsistence were generally centred around the taking of drugs and the playing of insanely violent videogames.

Word of his constant bragging about fictional nighttime encounters of the sexual kind, in which Brian claimed to have subjugated a multitude of "slags, scrubbers, slappers and hoes" using his "massive cock" must have reached the ears of the so-called Bitch Queen of Tartarus. For on the evening of the twenty-thirdieth of 'Frovember (when men must grow afro haircuts for charitable causes) 2009, Brian was kidnapped and castrated.

The rest of his short life will be spent working as an unpaid and unfed eunuch slave in a dungeon toilet on the island of the sadomasochists. There he will be forced to dress in blue (though he supports the other side), wear bright lipstick and eat up all the stools he can. Believe it or not, these are the mildest indignities he will suffer. Most of them involve rather large objects (hardback books, squids, lever arch files, moose antlers) being thrust up his bottom.

Nomathemba Nolwazi

2011-11-22T16:24:00.001Z

When we speak or write of Nineteenth Century celebrity witches, few names are as hard to pronounce or to spell as that of Nomathemba Nolwazi Jones.

During the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, Captain Daniel David Scotland Wilberfloss R. Pelpersmink Jones; a military man with a yellow streak as broad as a Chinese Yorkshireman with a pronounced regional accent; discovered the Zulu witch Nomathemba Nolwazi whilst cowering in a foxhole in the ground and making toilet. Despite their racial divide, despite their cultural divide, despite their language barrier, despite their being opponents in a bloody Imperial conflict and despite his squirty guts, it was love at first sight.

A monster science aficionado and benefactor of The Museum of Fragmented Shadows, the good Captain first married Nomathemba Nolwazi in secret and then smuggled her into Great Britain under a coat. She was given an honorary position in the Teratology Guild, based on her knowledge of magic, African monsters, arcane mysteries and the secret workings of the Universe. Her incessant toplessness and large, supple breasts might have also been a contributing factor in her employment by dribbling Guild perverts. Certainly, hers was the only office with a trampoline and peepholes cut into the walls.

Refusing to wear a blouse in public, even during the bitterly cold winter months, Nomathemba Nolwazi quickly became a darling of the media. Newspapers couldn't get enough of her opinions, thoughts, reflections, idle speculations, relationship advice, musings, jokes, predictions, poetry and boobies. Artists lined up to paint her. She also performed magic shows at stag parties for extra brass. Sadly her celebrity was shortlived. She died of chapped nipples in December 1882.

Kaibutsu

2011-11-05T16:00:00.000Z

The thing about Kaibutsu is, he was mysterious. Really, really mysterious. That characteristic alone kind of defies biography. Piecing together what little is known about history's most notorious atomic age monster maker is like trying to complete a third-hand jigsaw you bought at a car boot sale.

Kaibutsu (or whatever his real name might have been) was a Japanese scientist and evil genius. It has been suggested he worked for the Axis powers during the Second World War, all the while building up a private empire of henchmen, spies, atomic technicians and disgruntled zookeepers in secret. This claim has never been substantiated.

He was responsible for one of the most audacious conspiracies of the Twentieth Century, passing off his monster movies as works of whimsical wrestling monster fiction when they were actually monster wrestling documentaries produced solely to fund the creation of his apocalyptic monster army. That's a lot of monsters.

Kaibutsu was killed in his laboratory by the British pulp noir investigator Avril Incondite. Apparently during a tussle she glassed him with several test tubes, beakers, conical flasks and other scientific apparatus, grinding the broken shards into his face and eye sockets. She then stabbed him repeatedly in the head, throat and chest with an unwashed cheese knife. Just to be safe, she also set the laboratory on fire. However, having dined on a diet of cosmic rays and radiation for many years, it seems Kaibutsu was no longer technically a mortal man. With a sickening plop, the top of Kaibutsu's head popped off and his brain attempted to scurry out of the door. Incondite hit it with a hardback book until it eventually stopped moving. She then placed it in a bucket, lit a cigarette on one of the burning desks and got the heck out of there.

I guess the more you find out about Kaibutsu, the more questions are raised.

Kaibutsu's damaged mutant brain was pickled by the Teratology Guild and sits even now on display in a transparent glass case in a transparent solution at the Museum of Fragmented Shadows bar (admittance to Guild members only), a sort of dark joke about human nature, malevolence and man's folly. The case also contains a number of pickled eggs but as far as I know these are just for show. Either way, they tasted disgusting.

That Other Mister Paxman

2011-10-23T21:12:00.000+01:00

Working as a reporter and alternative historian in a parallel universe, there has always been a great temptation for me to look myself up. Many questions present themselves; how differences in the history and present of the world around my parallel self have affected his life, how he compares to me in a vast number of ways, what does he do with his life?

The other Mister Paxman wasn't born premature, is right-handed and he doesn't have a hare lip. He grew hair well before he was one and didn't start losing it in his late teens. He does not suffer from a monobrow or bad ankles. A lack of allergies to several fruits also means he doesn't suffer from regular migraines. He does okay with the ladies and makes good money working in the private sector as a tramp organ harvester* and pâté salesman. He never forgets to trim his toenails and has no discernible gap in his moustache.

For these and a thousand other reasons I envy and despise him.

Being right-handed, he is naturally more prone to logical and literal thought. He is boring, unfunny and can't draw for toffee.

If you ever find yourself in a parallel universe, I must strongly advise against looking yourself up. It's a confusing, deeply unsettling and disappointing experience.

*Although this job sounds terrifically exciting and maybe just a little ethically taboo, it is an extremely standard, accepted and mundane form of employment in the other universe.

Zachary Unwin

2011-10-09T19:24:00.000+01:00

Employed for many years as a schoolteacher, Zachary Unwin spent much of his time scribbling out or amending "disagreeable" facts in text books.

Unwin would argue over anything with anyone, particularly those individuals unlucky enough to be (temporarily) considered his close friends. He threw away relatives, lovers, acquaintances and colleagues as soon as they stood up to his bullying and contradictions. It was never clear whether he truly believed the incorrect facts that he spouted, based on some inherent defect with his memory; or indeed if he was simply too irrational to ever admit he was wrong about anything.

After being fired for whittling away the ornately carved school motto in the dining hall with a swiss army knife, Unwin set himself up in a small office space as a revisionist historian. He gathered together many valuable and notable relics, as well as articles, documents and papers of historical significance. Dousing them in petrol, he then proceeded to set the place on fire. Perhaps he decided this was the most expedient way to achieve his peculiar ends.

His office space being situated directly above a stationer's and next to an illegal fireworks workshop, the fire spread very quickly indeed. Unwin was killed in the resultant conflagration.

After many years spent as a burnt out derelict, housing only vagrants and pigeons, the site was acquired by mobsters and redeveloped as a trendy nightclub, The Bloodied Zebra.

Magda Kipple

2011-10-06T21:00:00.000+01:00

Magda Kipple was a child actress. After appearing in some YumCorp breakfast cereal commercials alongside gibberish-spouting, sugar addicted, foam animal-headed corporate whore mascot monsters she was deemed desensitised enough to televisual nightmares to be cast as 'the little girl who picks out the human meat to be eaten' in Ralph Sterback's Thou Worlds Judged Thee Perverse.

Proving impossible to direct due to a complete lack of talent, Magda had to be recast.

After leaving her body to television, Magda's corpse was ground up and used to make meat dumplings for a documentary about processed foods. She was nearly twelve.

Eileen Claurne

2011-09-28T21:01:00.000+01:00

Much has probably already been written on the subject of the great clown exodus (I'm guessing), so a thorough recap at this time seems about as pointless as a morbidly obese Mobius sausage, or a porcupine with alopecia.

Sometimes being an alternative historian is very boring, confusing or time consuming. You forget which historical events took place in your home universe and which took place in the parallel universe you make reports on. Eventually the stress of telling them apart makes you lazy or causes your brain to sizzle uncomfortably. Many alternative historians wind up going as nuts as a big bowl of pistachios, almonds and cashews. This condition has come to be known as Schizoid Multiverse Disparity Syndrome or (colloquially) "brain gout".

Eileen Claurne was one of the first generation of post-exodus clown immigrants who never tried to "pass" as normal citizens by covering their faces with thick flesh tone foundation make-up products or by wearing regular people clothes in subdued colours.

Coulrophobia still being rife well into the mid-Twentieth Century, Eileen was no stranger to being treated differently and to suffering discrimination, taunts, jibes and persecution simply for being who and what she was.

One cold night in October 1927 Eileen was chased and beaten to death by a pack of small-minded racists in an alleyway close to the tenement building she shared with her family. The reason for this tragedy was soon revealed to be Eileen's attempt to eat a simple meal of scrambled eggs on toast in a strictly anti-clown dining establishment.

Over the next few days tensions mounted in the clown ghetto district and Eileen's murder has come to be known not only as the single event that triggered the clown riots of November 1927 but also the tragedy that set the clown race off on the long road to demanding civil rights on a par with (or only marginally lesser than) those of human citizens.

Ruth Pieslime

2011-09-26T22:33:00.000+01:00

Squirting out hideously malformed and oily troll babies every five minutes and speaking with a profanity-peppered bark, Ruth Pieslime, the ogre of the kitchen at The Devil's Armpit, was finally fired for cooking up and serving some of her own hairy, toothsome and diseased afterbirth to an unsuspecting vegetarian veterinarian named Igor Cobblenavel.

Made up mostly of pendulous udders and rolls of ulcer-carpeted blubber, she expressed herself by a brown ooze of thick tar-like colostrum, or by smacking co-workers about the head with a greased saucepan.

Too repugnant for even a smack head, bum or farm animal rapist to want to have sex with, Ruth Pieslime resorted to stealing tissues from the bedroom waste bins of weary, masturbation-prone teenage boys and "dosing" herself with the crusted semen by stuffing the filthy bog rolls up her gaping filth on the end of a malodorous and shit-caked toilet brush.

Mercifully, all of her organs just gave out one day.

Howard Peep

2011-09-19T23:12:00.000+01:00

Amusingly incompetent and rotund ginger 1950s gumshoe detective Howard Peep was the first such pulp investigator hired by the Teratology Guild to investigate Japanese mad scientist and filmmaker Kaibutsu.

Peep's bumbling antics and slow reflexes meant he wound up being captured and mutated into a rather disgusting radioactive blubber monster. He was then forced to fight other such atomic monsters on film. It was all very demeaning.

When Avril Incondite got to the bottom of the Kaibutsu monster conspiracy, Peep was put out of his misery with a well aimed stiletto to the cerebrum. The fact Peep's pulsating brain was visible through his gelatinous, translucent meniscus probably helped.

Human Delicacy

2011-09-17T23:17:00.000+01:00

Human meat was served during one of the early courses of the swanky meal at which Seventy-Eighth Century Space Duke Lorenzo Hornbill was murdered. Immediately after the roast suckling baby space kraken was served, one of the lowly servants pulled back a curtain to reveal a glass tank full of farmed humans. One of the Duke's least illegitimate children was taken over to the tank and asked to select a specimen from the livestock. The lucky fellow was then released from the tank, paraded around the room, whipped, sexually assaulted, salted, seasoned, taunted, dipped in a hot tub of marinade, cooked and eaten.

The actor who played the fictitious character known only as Human Delicacy in legendary producer Ralph Sterback's shocking epic sci-fi TV mini-series satire Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse was curly haired, blonde and brainless stripper Nick Tushy.

His first and only acting role, if you could call it that, the cameo in Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse came about through Sterback's dodgy dealings with Mob investors; in particular the homosexual Communist gangster Pinko Ray, then owner of Hackney nightclub The Bloodied Zebra.

Tushy's spray-tanned corpse was found in a river by Police frogmen wearing a concrete merkin. Even so, his death was not treated as suspicious.

Robo Loco

2011-09-14T22:25:00.000+01:00

Robo Loco, AKA The Mad Robot, AKA Harold John Grimstonblee, was a member of the crummy suburban 1970s child outlaw gang known as "The Bank Holiday Boys". He was said to be the refined one but frankly he was probably just a picky eater.

Grimstonblee was captured and punished when the hapless gang stupidly decided to pull off "one last big score". After his lookouts abandoned him to his fate, a waiter came upon him in the kitchens of the swank French Bistro Moules whilst he was engaged in the act of tipping a carton of still wriggling snails into a bag concealed in his trousers.

Grimstonblee was made to wash up in the kitchens until his hands were sore and when his parents were informed he was sent to bed without supper.

He now owns a struggling gastropub near Wetwang.

Jamie Dunkirk Squits

2011-09-12T21:17:00.000+01:00

Jamie Dunkirk Squits was a gormless atomic age fanboy so enamoured of evil genius Kaibutsu's controversial movies that he had a large tattoo of the atom fish science monster carved into his chest.

He also adopted a strange patois, an unconvincing-sounding accent and queer vocabulary based on the terribly wooden performances of the American dub track voice actors.

Understandably, some might say inevitably, he got beaten up a lot.

Angus Mittenberry

2011-09-11T17:06:00.000+01:00

Big, broad, tall, strong and mindlessly violent Scottish nightclub doorman-turned-henchman Angus Mittenberry would have made an excellent ancient barbarian.

Mittenberry worked at the trendy Mob-affiliated Hackney night spot The Bloodied Zebra during World War Two. A draft-dodger, when out and about in public he always adopted a pronounced limp and a hoarse, rasping cough.

Recruited by the criminal mastermind Kaibutsu through a small ad in the local newspaper, Mittenberry was to prove entirely expendable as a token hulking bodyguard and performed general henchman duties at no extra cost.

After a tense game of cat and mouse on a precarious gantry, the lady pulp detective Avril Incondite smashed Mittenberry's ugly face in with the butt of her pistol and kicked his unconscious body into one of Kaibutsu's monster enclosures. Mittenberry's cries for help were drowned out by the cacophony of a mutant penguin feeding frenzy as well as the wet sounds of his own squelchy organs being torn from his body and gobbled up.

El Sombrero Bandido

2011-09-07T20:37:00.000+01:00

El Sombrero Bandido (AKA Ralph Mark Cogodial) was the palest, most ginger member of crappy, masked 1970s suburban criminal outfit "The Bank Holiday Boys". His unwieldy costume; which was made up of an unofficial Taiwanese rubber superhero halloween mask with two dead slugs spirit gummed to it (to make a crude moustache), a sombrero, a pair of gaily-painted clogs, a pinkish cape and a yellow cardigan; was hardly inconspicuous.

El Sombrero Bandido was captured as he tried to exit a village newsagent's shop he had just stolen a handful of penny sweets from. After his cape briefly became tangled in the door, his noisy clogs gave him away. He was pinned down by the shop owner's dog and licked repeatedly. His parents were informed of the "heist" and El Sombrero Bandido was barred from the shop and made to repay the thirty eight pence in its entirety. His subscription to Zounds magazine was also discontinued.

Ralph Mark Cogodial is now an in-the-closet gay stockbroker with a beard called Mandy and a cat called Ficus, who he likes to dress up in little cowboy outfits. The sight of pick 'n' mix sweets still brings him out in a stress rash.

Mister Pontefract

2011-09-07T19:49:00.000+01:00

During her investigation of a literally monstrous, globe-spanning atomic age conspiracy, British noir girl detective Avril Incondite encountered the telepathic spy codenamed Mister Pontefract.

Mister Pontefract, real name Daryl Badgermilk, was born in Rhyl in 1910. An impossibly adept gambler and junior chess wizard who also used his abilities to con, swindle and blackmail people, Daryl came to the attention of the British Secret Service in the late 1930s. Initially working for the Allies as a spy in the Far East, he turned double agent during the Second World War, selling atomic secrets to the Axis powers. Always one step ahead, the slippery little eel disappeared before he could be captured.

When Incondite's case, which was funded by the Teratology Guild monster scientists, turned up Mister Pontefract, he was working for the enigmatic Japanese scientist, filmmaker and tosspot Kaibutsu. A small, covetous man who betrayed his country and squandered his extraordinary telepathic gift for profit, Mister Pontefract was finally brought to justice.

So just how do you outwit a telepath? Incondite set traps for Mister Pontefract the night before whilst so heavily intoxicated there wasn't a chance she'd be able to remember them all.

That's telepaths nil, alcoholics one for those keeping count.

The information obtained from Mister Pontefract led Incondite to the hidden island lair of Kaibutsu and the shocking truth about an abominable series of Japanese monster movies.

After some good old fashioned interrogation and torture by the Secret Service, Mister Pontefract was turned over to and ultimately dissected by the Teratology Guild. Parts of his brain, skull and testicles were placed on permanent display in The Museum of Fragmented Shadows.

Goat Face Killer

2011-08-30T14:14:00.000+01:00

Goat Face Killer (AKA Billy the Kid, AKA William Codbin) was one of three members of the crap suburban 1970s child outlaw gang known as "The Bank Holiday Boys".

Wearing weird masks and brandishing toy guns, these pesky kids attempted unsuccessfully to "knock over" a bank in Humbleswither-Upon-Yang during the August Bank Holiday. After the heist inevitably went south, Goat Face Killer struggled to get home to his outlying village before his fish finger and beans tea went cold, due to his childish inability to comprehend bus timetables.*

It is understood that for his lateness, Goat Face Killer duly received a whooping with his father's patent leather belt. Undeterred by this ignominy, he began planning the trio's next daring heist whilst laying face down on his bed, his pillows soaked with salted tears, his stinging backside daubed with a soothing balm and his head swimming with wicked thoughts of vengeance.

*Infrequent rural bus services might have also contributed to Goat Face Killer's botched escape.

Avril Incondite

2011-08-05T23:24:00.001+01:00

Indefatigable 1950s female "dick" Avril Incondite was one tough Brit Noir broad. The old girl was so hardboiled that her eggs were useless and rubbery.

As a young girl Avril became obsessed with the Grimsby Darlington mystery books. At age eight she took to chain smoking whilst narrating her own juvenile investigations using a husky voice, always in the third person and the past tense. She kept a hip flask and an old service revolver in one of the compartments of her desk at school, which came in handy when she needed to drink alcohol or shoot bad guys.

As an attractive adult, it was Avril's absolutely astounding atomic age adventures and astonishing arse that came to define her career as a Private Investigator.

Avril's single most famous case saw her crossing the globe to uncover a scientific conspiracy of monster proportions.

Some of her adventures were recorded by a weird guy who stalked her and jotted down everything she muttered in a spiral bound note pad using shorthand. This sequence of events later formed both the basis of one of her most disturbing cases and one of her more successful and long-standing personal relationships.

Madame Zeta

2011-08-02T21:52:00.000+01:00

Spotted by a Teratology Guild talent scout whilst she was working as a cut-price fortune teller (and was making a little extra on the side as a billiards hustler) in Doctor Fleggen's All-Musical Super Saucy 'n' Sexful Sideshow of the Absurd, Madame Zeta (real name Carolyn Woolsnotch) was invited to make prophecies that would be beneficial to the monster scientists and aid in their investigations. What she actually came up with was a set of underpants-browningly dire prognostications, compiled as The Forbidden Handbook of Certain Death.

A slender hardback tome that came to be regarded amongst some booze-prone Guild members as a direct challenge to their sense of manly "gentlemen's club" bravado, The Forbidden Handbook of Certain Death eventually had to be locked away in a sealed vault, deep within the bowels of The Museum of Fragmented Shadows. The descriptions of deadly undiscovered monsters contained within its pages proved unerringly accurate, though the same cannot be said about Zeta's claims that China would colonize Pluto by the winter of 1900, or that flying cars would be readily available by 1936.

Aside from fortune telling, Madame Zeta enjoyed knitting, the odd gin and tonic, long walks in the English countryside and pistachio nuts. She died aged ninety while engaging in sweaty, energetic outdoor sex on her much younger boyfriend in a field of beautiful sunflowers. A particularly graphic note was found in her handbag that prophesised the sexually tragic eventuality and was read at her funeral; a lasting testament to her gift of foresight.

An abridged edition of The Forbidden Handbook of Certain Death, featuring colourful illustrations and a set of fun glow-in-the-dark stickers, is available in the gift shop of The Museum of Fragmented Shadows.

Buster Kexby

2011-07-26T21:57:00.000+01:00

Buster Kexby was a greasy little race track pit stop engineer and moustache waxer who, clamouring for the apparently glamorous lifestyle of race car driver and existential philosopher Philip Pierre Chagrin, longed to build the world's first robot philosopher and race car driver. His sin was ambition.

After feeding into the robot's memory banks The King James Bible, several discount store-bought tomes on morality, etiquette and the Green Cross Code, as well as a dog-eared copy of The Complete Works of Philip Pierre Chagrin, Kexby had his head stoved in by his own creation. Apparently the robot didn't feel the Ten Commandments applied to him. He also tore off and wore Kexby's skin like a gory shawl.

For the next fortnight, until he was captured and incapacitated by homicide detectives using a big magnet, the robot sped about in a fast car, bought an exorbitant number of trilby hats, committed several grisly hat shop murders, brandished a hand gun, drank, smoked and cavorted to the best of his limited robotic ability with women of easy virtue. He was also a foot fetishist.

I'm surprised you haven't heard about it, it was in all the papers.

During the robot's life, brief though it was, he managed to complete a number of brilliantly observed yet fanciful science fiction romance stories about buxom female slot machines, one slapstick existentialist opera about electrical appliances and an epic philosophy-poem about feet, all of which were scrawled in binary on reams of toilet roll with the blood of his victims.

Still, evil or not, the important thing to remember is that Buster Kexby DID successfully build the world's first robot philosopher. That's more than you or I will ever do, my friend.

Philip Pierre Chagrin

2011-07-23T17:55:00.000+01:00

Philip Pierre Chagrin was born in 1924 in Provence, France but his parents relocated to Czechoslovakia when he was just a petit garcon. In the introduction to his last book The Shit Farmers, a bleak autobiographical satire, he says he 'passed the first twenty years of life like a painful turd; that is, ruefully and with a tear in my eye'.

His exile from the cultural hub of Europe might have set his literary career back somewhat, as his first three novels were banned by the censors prior to publication. His fourth novel, The Degenerate Snail Slouched Bethlehemward, a scathingly acidulous critque of the decadence of the modernist age in Western society, was not only banned but seized by the police, scribbled on and destroyed with fire. The frustration Chagrin felt over these failures led him to move back to France at his earliest opportunity and to drive cars at dangerously high speeds.

Becoming a respected Existentialist philosopher, moustache model and race car driver, Chagrin married the actress Edith Nallowtout in 1950. Shortly after the simple ceremony he decided this was a hopelessly decadent thing to do and resolved to shun her 'advances'. Chagrin became ever more disconnected from everyday life. During this difficult period he penned the critically lauded but incredibly depressing stage play Self Destructive Urges of A Misanthrope. Attempts to avoid his beautiful spouse often meant he would slip out of the house just before meal times and hide in the coal shed for several hours, crying into a rag. For whatever reason the marriage didn't last.

Later books by Chagrin, who clearly regretted fouling up his one shot at personal happiness and saucy fulfilment, were criticised for seeming too broadly derivative of the works of Nietzsche and, unable to cope with the pressure, Chagrin became deliberately insane. He spent the last eleven years of his life in a state of mental and physical paralysis. In obituary notices, several critics remarked quite rightly that even his ultimate fate seemed rather derivative of that of Nietzsche. Others commented almost disappointedly that they had always assumed Chagrin would die in a glorious fireball whilst racing his cars around the track at frightening velocities.

What can I say? As Chagrin himself observed in his novel The Shit Farmers, 'Life is largely awkward, unpredictable and disappointing'.

Uncle Brecht

2011-07-13T18:08:00.000+01:00

Seventy-Eighth Century robot pimp Uncle Brecht clung to the edges of the room during the meal at which Space Duke Lorenzo Hornbill was fatally poisoned, occasionally asking questions and making statements that appeared entirely irrelevant. He brought with him to the feast a box that was rather ordinary in appearance but which, in a shocking twist, was revealed to be the flight recorder of a time machine from the future. Telemetry from the damaged time travel device proved instrumental during the confounding investigation into Hornbill's murder.

The actor who played the fictitious character Uncle Brecht in legendary producer Ralph Sterback's shocking epic sci-fi TV mini-series satire Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse was American crotch addict Eli Poopsossige.

As one of the first recorded cases of celebrity sex addiction, Poopsossige was infamous for holding sweaty boat parties and screwing the vast majority of his co-stars, irrespective of marital status, sexual orientation, gender or age. Eventually his todger was worn down to a point that his sexual partners found unbearably painful.

Apart from his perplexing part in Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse, Poopsossige's distinctive voice was used on the English language dub of several crappy Japanese monster movies and a number of televised advertisements for Cold War-era nuclear fall out shelters.

Randy "Happy Mouse" Benjamin

2011-07-12T22:26:00.003+01:00

When unbelievably prolific producer Ralph Sterback attempted to make a motion picture exposing the dark secrets of Satanist and Yumcorp founder Lowell Hoodwank, executives of that greedy corporation had him beaten up by a bunch of their breakfast cereal mascots.

Happy Mouse portrayer Randy Benjamin, also known as Hamish Smithereens, Knuckleduster Elliot Grack and (at weekends) Felicity duBois, was a total jerk and small time hoodlum. He beat up Ralph Sterback with a giant prop dessert spoon. The remnants of his conscience, which were all ragged edges and tattered paper thin shards flapping metaphysically from the breeze generated by his violent little soul, didn't trouble him any.

After dispensing the beating, Benjamin took the other members of his cereal mascots posse to breakfast at a nearby diner. Laughing, he ordered several pink grapefruits and a bowl of Happy Mouse Crunchy Delight Bran. Randy Benjamin then choked loudly on a small toy submarine that came with the cereal, when it became inextricably lodged in his windpipe. Several children in the diner were upset to see their hero, the beloved and benevolent character Happy Mouse, die gasping in this desperate way. One small boy went so far as to wet himself.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

Madame Space Duchess Lady Xibalba Hornbill

2011-07-10T14:10:00.000+01:00

Seventy-Eighth Century aristocrat Madame Space Duchess Lady Xibalba Hornbill was the hostess of the sprawling feast at which her husband, Space Duke Lorenzo Hornbill, was fatally poisoned. She also supplied the lap dancers, most of whom were her own sons and daughters. Suspicions were aroused by her position as treasurer and honorary gatekeeper of the Cosmic Underworld, as well as by her obsession with death and her disturbing hand-rearing of several moon maggots during the all-you-can-eat buffet course.

The actress who played the fictitious character Madame Space Duchess Lady Xibalba Hornbill in legendary producer Ralph Sterback's epic sci-fi TV mini-series satire Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse was Edith Nallowtout; a talented and suitably drop-dead-gorgeous French stage actress whose first husband was acclaimed-if-depressing existentialist philosopher and racing driver-cum-suicide Philipe Pierre Chagrin.

Nallowtout herself was pleasant to be around but shallow, like a garden pond.

Professor Zeb Hokum

2011-07-01T18:40:00.000+01:00

Professor Zebediah Hokum was world renowned for his study of Buddhist mandalas, maps that represent a microcosmic view of the Universe and the forces that exist within it.

He was also a bigoted, humourless bigamist with a terrible temper who smoked like a chimney and beat his pupils about their heads with fossils when they got the answers to his questions wrong. He beat them extra hard when it was a rhetorical question.

In 1850 Hokum disappeared whilst on assignment for the Teratology Guild. His mission was to decipher mandalas found on a recently discovered Tibetan labyrinth. He reappeared almost sixty years later, somewhat the worse for wear, having experienced a karmic ordeal during which all his innards were splayed out and his body frozen until it cracked into pieces. On his reemergence into the physical world, Hokum requested a cigarette, a hot bath and some ointment for a particularly excruciating-looking case of piles. He then woozily identified the site as the earthly entrance to the Mahapadma Naraka, a sort of cavernous underworld.*

Finding himself a man out of time on his return to England, Hokum struggled to adjust himself to a world of carefree Edwardians and suffragettes. He therefore volunteered for one of the suicide missions filed away in the Teratology Guild's Forbidden Handbook of Certain Death.

*The site of the Mahapadma Naraka remains a popular holiday destination for masochists.

Father Glen Nightingale

2011-06-29T23:41:00.000+01:00

Seventy-Eighth Century moon oil tycoon Father Glen Nightingale was a businessman and a leading member of the Celestials, a race of powerful mutated human delegates and ambassadors who wielded exceptional religious and political power. On the third day of the fourteenth month of the year of the wounded space tarantula he attended the soiree at which Space Duke Lorenzo was fatally poisoned. During the convoluted investigation and awkward buffet that followed, Father Glen Nightingale was found to have both means and motive to have committed the murder.

The actor who played the fictitious character Father Glen Nightingale in legendary producer Ralph Sterback's shocking epic sci-fi TV mini-series satire Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse was smooth talking, thickset, laconic but troubled Texan actor Clyde Mangrove.

Remembered for the colourful but interminable alcohol, tits and exposition-heavy scene in which his character said grace whilst sloppily introducing various aspects of the hokey space religion that formed part of the backstory of the mini-series, Mangrove was a bit-part player who ended up blowing his brains out with a shotgun in a grotty tenement after a fight with his loan shark.

Aside from occasional commercials for nuclear shelters, pistachio nuts, cigarettes, man tampons and his well reviewed performance in Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse, Mangrove also starred in a half dozen episodes of TV horror anthology Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere.

Hector Bottymouth

2011-06-22T22:35:00.000+01:00

The owner and operator of a bus company that felt it was perfectly okay to have the heating on in the middle of June, Hector Bottymouth became briefly infamous after it was revealed by a fly-on-the-wall documentary that he enjoyed fornicating with malnourished equine prostitutes whilst immersed in vomit.

Sylvia Harris Throttle

2011-06-12T18:00:00.001+01:00

Born into a large family of hard working Cardigan Bay winkle pickers, from an early age Sylvia Morrigan harboured secret aspirations of becoming a writer.

Cursed with intelligence, nice gams, a good rack, a smart mouth and sass aplenty, Sylvia initially struggled to be taken seriously in the male dominated, grope-tastic entertainment industry. Given a shot by legendary producer Ralph Sterback, who appreciated her devilish wit and pencil skirts, Sylvia secured a position as assistant to Sebastian Addledodge Cuttlefish, shortly before his suspicious death by custard factory explosion. Following a brief affair and the standard nine month gestation period for human foetuses, she bore Addledodge Cuttlefish's illegitimate son, Ulysses. This put paid to her writing career for the time being.

After a "whirlwind romance" with gullible but well-paid meteorologist Boris Harris, Sylvia settled into the stable, stagnant domestic existence of a bored housewife and mother. She generally spent her afternoons chain smoking, drinking strawberry daiquiris and writing scripts for submission to TV shows.

Soon after Sylvia got her first script accepted, Harris was killed by a falling weather cock outside their home.

Sylvia wrote a number of episodes for the TV horror anthology Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere, including the classic '50s styled instalment which featured a motorbike-riding, leather-clad James Dean lookalike as a rebellious teenage Lucifer. However her most memorable contribution to the programme was undoubtedly the chilling Kafka's Metamorphosis inversion episode, about a cockroach that is suddenly transformed into a human.

When Sylvia's second husband, a railway worker named Graeme Throttle, mysteriously died from an allergic reaction to shellfish whilst up a ladder, detectives began to become suspicious. One month later Sylvia was found baking two local Brownies in her oven. She was arrested and intensively psychoanalysed. Sylvia stood trial, was found guilty of multiple homicide and was carefully placed in the rubberiest walled room the Humbleswither-Upon-Yang Prison for the Criminally Insane had to offer.

Twenty-five years later, having served her time and apparently responding well to rehabilitation, Sylvia was released into a world she barely recognised. She was considered to no longer be a threat to anyone. Nevertheless this crooked little old woman became an overnight sensation as the writer of the supremely popular but controversial torture porn movie franchise Satan's Sexy Party, which is now on its sixty-third instalment. It has been claimed in interviews that Sylvia not only spent the entirety of her twenty-five year jail sentence writing the scripts for this series but also that she has enough finished sequel screenplays to last at least another hundred years.

Kieron Pollen

2011-06-11T18:11:00.000+01:00

Cheeky bugger Keiron Pollen was the lead singer and keyboard player with super gay late 1960s mince pop band The Glistening Speculums.

In 1974 Pollen composed both the theme song and incidental music for Ralph Sterback's little known six episode TV sit-com UST. The series, set in a post-human future, was about three emotion-capable robots without sexual organs who were locked in an endless love triangle. Low ratings meant plans for a second series had to be shelved.

The Glistening Speculums reformed in 2007 and toured until February this year, when Pollen was admitted to hospital after a recreational rectal pineapple insertion went disastrously pear-shaped.

On his deathbed, Pollen described to bandmates his very specific and idiosyncratic concept for his funeral. So when he passed it came to pass that he was laid to rest by a procession of his family and friends, all dressed in cheap fancy dress shop Satan costumes.

His last words, 'Fuck pineapple', can be taken two ways, unlike pineapple itself. T-shirts emblazoned with this legend nevertheless continue to sell to fans the world over.

Carson Brant

2011-06-11T14:07:00.001+01:00

Pathological narcissist Carson Brant played a string of disturbing, inhuman characters in TV horror anthology Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere. He also played scenery munching, puppy crunching super villain Mister Reprehensible in the banned (pre-political correctness) ultra violent big screen bad taste comic book adaptation ensemble movie The Fiends of the Earth.

Away from the cameras Carson Brant was an exploitative, manipulative and sinister attention-seeking thug without any scruples, decency or even a solitary drop of empathy. He often used small animals as ashtrays, footballs, vomit catchers or a ready source of marrowbone. What he did to women was worse.

Brant was adept at "cold reading" ladies, and with a combination of manic charisma, deception, flattery, intimidation and boorishness he quickly inveigled his way into first their knickers and then their affections. Identifying an individual lady's own self doubts whilst engaged in an unhealthy, dominant, bullying and emotionally abusive relationship; over time Brant effortlessly fractured and irreversibly destroyed all traces of her self confidence and ability to trust men. Brant would then cruelly toss the lady aside and move on to the next one. When the opportunity arose, however, he would jealously attempt to scupper any chance the lady had at any sort of interpersonal relationship with another man. He would do this by being a lying, devious, deceitful, malignant, malevolent and unscrupulous cunt.

Brant's meticulously constructed fantastical self-perception; viewing himself as a grandiose, righteous, resplendent, perfect and generally invulnerable white knight who could do no wrong; meant he failed to yield at a pedestrian crossing and was crushed under a truck. After an agonizing recovery period that included multiple major surgeries, regular physiotherapy and rods being inserted up his spine, he was torn to pieces by a silverback gorilla. It seems he spotted one of his former conquests, a lady zookeeper named Felicity, hand feeding the brute and tried his old intimidation trick. I'm guessing from the fact that his decapitated head was found on the roof of the giraffe enclosure (and his entrails were draped over the branches of a tree like toilet paper after a student night out) that his insidious little game didn't go over so well.

Space Duke Lorenzo

2011-06-09T22:11:00.000+01:00

Unimaginably wealthy, politically influential and morally ambiguous Seventy-Eighth Century Space Duke Lorenzo Hornbill made his fortune in the lucrative off-world human veal market and was fatally poisoned (with a brace of sautéed child's thighs, no less) during an absurdly complicated family meal whodunit / lapdance.

The actor who played the fictitious character Space Duke Lorenzo Hornbill in legendary producer Ralph Sterback's shocking epic sci-fi TV mini-series satire Though Worlds Judged Thee Perverse was classically trained rummy ham Brit stage actor Sir Jeremiah Finnbiff.

Concerned that his credibility as a serious thespian would be damaged irrevocably by his appearance in what he deemed a 'fruity prancing nerd genre like space fiction', Finnbiff insisted on reworking all of his dialogue personally. In the final edit he uttered no words whatsoever; instead sitting stock still during the (admittedly suspenseful) soup, fish, milkshake and kebab courses whilst flicking his eyes first one way and then the other in an archly suspicious manner.

Finnbiff was a fiercely vocal bigot, racist, anti-Semite and homophobe who quickly alienated the rest of the cast and crew. He was also a venomous, greedy, spiteful, callow and often physically violent drunk.

Finnbiff eventually burned to death after his robes caught fire whilst he attempted to set a large wooden cross ablaze in a neighbour's garden. His blood contained such an obscenely high percentage of alcohol that it ignited faster than a stack of petrol-doused Bibles. Before it was discovered, his charred skeleton was chewed on by a pack of stray dogs, two cats, eighteen worms and a quick brown fox. His left eye socket was also used as a privy by a dicky bladdered nocturnal tramp known locally as The Warlock Bernard.

Reginald Lester

2011-06-05T21:35:00.002+01:00

Big strong Teratology Guild chauvinist, opium fiend and outdoorsy-type Reginald Lester was killed by a smelly parasite during a formal barbecue in Spring 1870.

Lester's career with the Guild was long, eventful and replete with periods of extremely mixed fortunes. Inducted as a tough little boy in 1806, having killed a burrowing troll responsible for eating four grown up miners to death, Lester quickly became known as the Guild's muscle.

A detail that sits seemingly at odds with his macho image, Lester nursed many orphaned workhouse children, stray dogs and injured hedgehogs with his own milk at weekends and during public holidays.

The veracity of the many discoveries Lester made during three expeditions to the Forbidden Paradise Crater was initially disputed, due largely to his knack for drunkenly losing documentation and drunkenly misfiling evidence. By today's standards Lester would indubitably be considered a dangerous alcoholic. Yet the eventual rediscovery of his dusty old forgotten field sketchbook led to a reappraisal and general acceptance of his work. His annotations, however, describe a man in terrible denial about his addictions to booze and opium, and also indicate a disturbing(ly hilarious) lack of respect for women of any sort (except redheads).

Whilst his contributions to the Museum of Fragmented Shadows and the science of teratology are numerous and varied, Lester's exploits also inspired several unforgettable episodes of TV anthology Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere, as well as dozens of pulp adventure magazine serials. My favourite is the short story The Face of Danger, published in Zounds.

Lester's moustache, which survived the explosion that claimed his life, was waxed and placed on permanent display in the Museum (in accordance with his wishes).

Oswald Torpor

2011-05-30T21:37:00.000+01:00

Through no fault of his own Oswald Torpor became extremely sexually excited whenever he passed a sweetshop. He was eventually apprehended and beaten to death by a mob that had mistaken him for a paedophile.

Oswald's charitable donations were considerable and without his regular anonymous cheques a hospice and two dog shelters had to shut down. A firm believer in organ donation, his heart was transplanted into the body of a man who later went on a downtown kill rampage with a shovel.

The Simulacrum Enola Minceplate

2011-05-15T13:06:00.000+01:00

Emaciated language strangler Enola Minceplate is one of those generic, rictus smiling moron presenters of the annual European Death Rattle of Pop Music Telethon Event; the type of blandly attractive stick figure you only notice due to the absurd frequency of her costume changes and her terrible dress sense.

Whether through subliminal messages, repression, alcoholism, post-hypnotic suggestion, or some sort of televisual witchcraft, the entire diabolical no-brainer chewing-gum-for-the-eyes show (sponsored by YumCorp) wipes itself from your memory the second you've watched it. Having seen the acts, it is totally impossible to recall them. Only a vague semblance of distant displeasure is discernible, like a fart you are somehow aware of that lingers in the next room and leaves you with a gnawing sense of foreboding. This is probably just as well, for the sake of everybody's mental health.

It is entirely possible Enola Minceplate and her ilk exist for only the short space of time they are on screen. I can't imagine that they have real lives, go to the shops, fall in love, work out, read, eat and drink, sleep, engage in regular bouts of defecation, cogitate, suffer, endure, laugh or cry. As such, they might not even be considered human. Perhaps they represent a dissatisfying post-human experience to come or are merely simulacra.

Claus Olaf Fikri

2011-05-14T14:19:00.000+01:00

Dapper gentleman Claus Olaf Fikri's illustrious illustration career with the Teratology Guild began when, at the tender age of twelve, he was sucked into the Wobbly Vortex (named for Alistair Wobbly, the Vorticist who discovered it) and deposited on the banks of a hitherto unknown stream of consciousness. He duly investigated his unusual surroundings, sketching the peculiar wonders he beheld.

Traipsing through the shady thickets and dank bowers of the Enchanted Forest, Fikri stumbled upon the court of many-eyed Fairy God-Emperor Hickloo XXXII. Much of what the Guild now know about fairy society is derived from the sixteen years Fikri spent amongst the diminutive people. For example he painted the fairies' bloody conflict with Meta Beaver, a creature determined to dam their stream of consciousness. After controversially falling in love with a childlike elfin princess, Fikri was banished from the fairy kingdom and castrated.

He continued to work for the Guild, investigating and illustrating supernatural occurrences. Then, in 1870, Fikri was unexpectedly skinned by a malignant otherworldly manifestation at the Humbleswither-Upon-Yang duck pond. His drawing of the fatal encounter, though gruesome, is pretty funny.

Eliahu Raz

2011-05-08T18:45:00.000+01:00

A talented but morose writer of bitingly satirical and prescient fiction, as an arrogant and single-minded young man Eliahu Raz believed the world was his oyster.

By the age of twenty-seven, with over a dozen episodes of Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere under his belt (comprising the bleakest and most relentlessly depressing content the TV horror anthology ever achieved), Eliahu turned his attention to women and matters of the heart. This decision was a disaster.

Smitten by a dishy but indecisive (and ultimately unattainable) Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere production assistant named Geraldine, Eliahu found himself entangled in a confusing pseudo-courtship and endlessly flip-flopping from an elated state of feeling too-happy-to-write, to feeling as though he'd been punched square in the gut.

When Geraldine began dating Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere actor Carson Brant, she had no further use for Eliahu or his twisted friendship / pathetic unrequited love.

Ensnared in a persistent nauseous loneliness, with a strange nervous but numb sensation in his arms, Eliahu lived another fifty years but never really recovered.

He continued to write but the one hundred and twelve volumes of Hate Filled Poetry of Neuroses didn't exactly fly off the shelves.

Aled Afon

2011-05-07T15:08:00.000+01:00

Improbable as it may seem, the bearded woman at Doctor Fleggen's All-Musical Super Saucy and Sexful Sideshow of the Absurd wound up being put on trial for crimes against humanity.

Banished from the circus when it emerged (during an attempted smear test) that the bearded woman persona was a hoax, prodigiously and pendulously man-boobed Welsh male Aled Afon was arrested by Interpol and remanded in custody.

Years earlier, whilst working for an undisclosed Welsh council, Afon went temporarily mad with power and abolished an annual egg and spoon race. A clerical error by inept council secretary Janice Porg, which detailed the sequence of events as Afon eradicating an entire race, soon made it into the grubby mitts of the thick-as-pig-shit and sensation hungry hack journalist Theresa Braythock-Lewins. Fearing a case of ethnic cleansing might be occurring right on her doorstep, Braythock-Lewins drummed up such a fuss that Afon had to flee to Europe to evade rambling lynch mobs. It was at this time that he changed his identity, becoming the somewhat unconvincing facial hair exhibitor known as Bearded Carly.

After facing the war crimes tribunal and clearing his name, Afon fell down some stairs and broke every bone in his body, save for a useless extra one in his cheek that he possessed due to a rare (but harmless) genetic disorder.

Aside from scrapping the egg and spoon race, his greatest crime was consistently leaving toilets reeking of musky sausage and thick brown wee. It was the sort of smell you could also kind of taste.

Lowell Hoodwank

2011-05-02T19:38:00.000+01:00

The diabolically evil founder of YumCorp, Lowell Hoodwank, who never cast a shadow in his life, was a Satanist and member of pretty much every secret society going.
He had his fingers in more pies than twelve fingered world champion pie fingerer Trevor Fenteebrush.
Hoodwank was quite literally born into money, a big pot of filthy fifty dollar bills being used as a baby receptacle by traditional Satanist parents as a symbol of their hopes the baby will become both supremely powerful and stinking rich. I guess it worked, so maybe there's something in all that gibberish after all!
Hoodwank's company, a global corporation specialising in everything, was the first to include toys in cereal boxes specifically designed to choke children. Since then, YumCorp has spread like margarine on warm cancer to establish dominion, a strangle-hold on the world.
Most of the stuff Hoodwank got up to in life is simply too disturbing to relate. Plus you just wouldn't believe half of it. Maybe more than half. Like, seven ninths. But it's all true. The stuff I'm not telling you is all true, believe me!
One thing I will say is that Hoodwank firmly believed it was his destiny to break Satan out of jail. You know, Hell.
Despite his best drilling efforts, soul stealing cameras, prayers to lesser demons, arcane rituals involving sodomy with fancy candelabra and attempts to decode various dark scriptures, none of YumCorp's mining operations have yet uncovered the infernal nine tiered pit, or indeed the great beast slumbering within it, encased in ice. However, Hoodwank was last seen being dragged screaming feet first into a freezing river by a large creature non-plussed onlookers later described as, "Lucifer-ish" and one simple child claimed was, "A bearded collie".
Ralph Sterback tried to make a movie about Hoodwank's life one time but YumCorp executives blocked him. They even sent some of the cereal mascots to rough him up a little, which seems plain unnecessary. Anyway, it's probably just as well. The film would have played out like a drab mixture of Citizen Kane, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Omen and Rosemary's Baby.

Uri Shrump

2011-04-30T12:42:00.000+01:00

For a man with such a convoluted and eventful career, Russian boxer-actor-cosmonaut Uri Shrump was a numb, uninteresting dullard. An unwitting pawn of mobster Harlan "Knuckle Sandwich" Tolstoy, Shrump was brought over to the US to take on then-world heavyweight champion Paddy Quiche. After Shrump took a convincing dive in the sixth round, Tolstoy decided his musclebound marionette's next move should be into the world of acting.

Shrump proved instantly forgettable as "Lug", a heavily-accented yet monosyllabic barbarian in the Ralph Sterback directed time travel epic-on-a-shoe-string Son of a Glitch. The philosophical action film, which dealt with the accidental creation of a corrupted timeline and the ethical debate over its destruction, drew criticism for its use of very poor stop-motion pterodactyls and an abhorrent octopus crucifixion sequence.

Getting in on the space race as a means of exploiting any non-terrestrial resources, Tolstoy funded the secret mob rocket program. Having successfully launched a bear into the exosphere (though only charred bits of it were retrieved), Tolstoy figured tough old Shrump would make an ideal cosmonaut.

During the space flight, Uri Shrump encountered a wormhole. He returned to Earth a changed man, spending the last few years of his life attempting unsuccessfully to describe to people the transcendental voyage he had experienced.

Sourpuss Kathryn Drut

2011-04-21T23:18:00.000+01:00

One of the first female teratologists to be allowed out in bloomers, science spinster Kathryn Drut had a heck of a time convincing her male contemporaries in the Guild to take her seriously or even like her. She probably should have just slept with them all. Known for being a hard-faced "sourpuss" might not have helped her out on that score though. Reputedly a woman with scant regard for personal hygiene, she was killed in action whilst on a mission to an unnamed part of the silver forest at the edge of the Forgotten Shore, when the smell from her dank trench gave her away to a monster later described by her frightened pygmy child guide as looking 'like a cross between a volcano crocodile and a giant hyena (but with more spines, limbs, eyes and tentacles)'.

The Bitch Queen of Tartarus

2011-04-03T19:59:00.000+01:00

The chances are slim that you've ever heard about the sexual revolution. I'm not talking Suffragettes, Hippies or The Pill. During the late Nineteen Nineties, when the almighty Interweb was really starting to change the way people accessed pornography, political unrest in the Tartarus archipelago (on the eastern edge of the Hidden Sea) erupted, threatening to disrupt the world's supply of fresh, delicious child organs. With Allied forces stretched thin warding off zombies and threats the violent Tartarus junta would resort to illegal chemical weaponry, a crack team of sadomasochists was deployed. This must have made sense to somebody in power but the somewhat flimsy reasoning (detailed in secret documents later leaked by a mole) was that dominatrixes would be experienced in wearing protective rubber suits and gas masks. Plus I guess they'd be more than happy to put themselves through Hell! All this unravelled in spectacular if muddled fashion, with the initial operation seemingly a complete success. However, the sadomasochists refused to relinquish power and so began the reign of a brutal fetish queen dynasty. Which I guess is why it's so expensive to buy kiddy livers these days.

Claude Shoals

2011-03-23T23:26:00.000Z

A very naughty boy turned pernickety English Literature tutor and latter day Police informer, former World Mullet Champion Claude Shoals recently saw his name daubed on the sides of dilapidated Bootle walls and scrawled on the closed metal shutters of many recession-deadened shops. The accompanying messages, decrying his work as a so-called "grass" and "snitch", could well be construed as rather aggressive suggestions for Claude to be killed. His characteristically pedantic response, roared loudly into the night, was perhaps unwise. He cried, in a manly manner, "Would it kill you to punctuate your death threats?"

His bloated corpse was pulled from the river late on Monday night. New additions to his body included several full stops (bullet holes) and more than a few commas (stab wounds).

Tabitha Kneep

2011-03-22T22:54:00.000Z

A ridiculously political potential child despot, Tabitha Kneep was one of the main instigators of the first minors' strike, in which truancy officers had to be issued with shotguns and special powers. Not magic powers, don't be ridiculous. Just powers to arrest wayward children. That sort of thing. Anyway, before all this rot, Tabitha was cast as "Irritating, Short-Lived Girl Sidekick" in Ralph Sterback's doomed movie production. The one with the inappropriate name, about the subjugated alien race. You know the one I'm talking about. The reason she wanted the role, I'm guessing, was that the themes of persecution and genocide in the script really spoke to her. Must have been an early draft. Sadly, the film never got made and so Tabitha never got her big break in the moving pictures. She wound up working at a YumCorp subsidiary, that ugly budget hardware store on the ring road. Having mellowed slightly due to her broken dreams and increasing sense of overwhelming dread over the current economic climate, she is now thought of fondly by other members of staff due to her shelf depreciating humour.

Graeme-Arnold Gray-Gray-Gray

2011-03-20T22:14:00.000Z

During a laboratory mishap involving a wrinkle in the surface of the Universe, brilliant physicist Doctor Graeme Gray and his pet macaw Arnold became "folded" into a wholly new individual: Unoriginal theoretician Graeme-Arnold Gray-Gray-Gray. Becoming infamous around the campus of Humbleswither-Upon-Yang's University for regularly attempting to publish the same academic paper and squawking a lot, he was eventually sacked for committing plagiarism (which ruffled some feathers) and busting the Chancellor's nuts. He was also sued for sexual harassment by his leggy secretary, whom he repeatedly referred to as "Pretty Polly". Despite this misfortune, he had some limited success teaching young children Parrot Fashion.

Ethel Celery

2011-03-20T21:51:00.000Z

A coarse actress with the voice of Satan, Ethel Celery once claimed to get through up to sixty a day. As for cigarettes, she was known to smell strongly enough of tobacco that neighbourhood kids would cough up tar or develop pesky lung cancers after having simply sat behind her on a bus. A casting couch staple, Ethel appeared in dozens of episodes of variable horror anthology Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere, though her most iconic role was indisputably that of foul-mouthed spinster Constantinople Fadge in working class soap opera Waste Up. No stranger to on-screen nudity, Ethel also played Madame Mascarpone, one of the ill-fated human prostitutes in Ralph Sterback's deleted robot drama To Rot Like Clockwork; though she exploded shortly after she had completed shooting for this role. A short-tempered cantankerous bint, prone to fits of pique and volcanic tantrums, it was no great loss when she spontaneously combusted. Apparently she had been suffering from constipation for six decades and the build up of all those intestinal gases, coupled with her chain smoking, made the explosion somewhat inevitable. Leaving behind a damp brown faecal smear on the pavement seemed a fitting enough memorial to her life, so nobody bothered with a funeral for Ethel and went down the pub instead. Eventually the rain washed any lingering traces of her down the gutter.

Professor Hue Halcyon

2011-03-19T14:49:00.001Z

For a man with such a colourful name, Hue Halcyon sure was grey. He led kind of an interesting life, though. As the resident physicist aboard The Nautilus Kid's Twentieth Century pirate vessel, his last fateful voyage saw Halcyon being fed, feet first, into a sea-bound black hole; to appease it. This was fair enough, when you consider he only shipped out with the child pirate to escape paying alimony for the thirty-seven illegitimate children he'd sired in Humbleswither-Upon-Yang. His grey complexion was never satisfactorily explained.

Obituary Robot Ophiuchus

2011-03-17T23:08:00.000Z

Following the following obituary, Obituary Robot Ophiuchus was retired.

"Female humanoid tablecloth, age six and one eighth gallon ham sandwich. GSOH WLTM Crowbar numbskull filigree, taupe cloud helion clown apricot. This species, distinguishapple by a radiant covering of pineapple Jesuit spindles, a tubular bell, prehensile (and fully detachable) snout and cherry dumpling cleavage, accomodates a slender tongue used to lap up larvae, cigarette butts and grubs by the side of a volcano.When disturbed, it lodges itself inside a smoke crevice by exertion of its multiplicitous (and boneless) tentacular limbs. Or it will lower itself, diagonally, into the air by transcendental excavating laser. Mating occurs with a roar inside a moist vagina and the single egg is incubated in a warm organ cabinet for two marsupial apple pies."

Whereas, for those of you who'd like to know, it should have read,

"Harry T. Fromwads, the notorious gangster and pimp, died last night in prison following complications from forceful buggery. He'd also been sliced ear to ear but at least he died with a Chelsea Smile on his face. Maybe it's not what he would have wanted but if there's one thing old Harry's tenure on planet earth taught us, it's that life can be cruel."

Leon Dunnart

2011-03-17T21:28:00.000Z

Leon Dunnart, an actor so untalented it makes me physically sick to write his obituary, died Monday aged sixty-something. I don't know, I wasn't paying attention as the priest prattled on in that snoresome droning monotone that sounds like a darned air raid. I was ejecting the contents of my stomach into the open casket at the time, silently delighted as the first acid slap of chuck resounded against the bastard's cold dead face. Appropriate, given Dunnart's notoriety for corpsing and my liquid lunch (bleach). Dunnart, if you must know, started out working as a model for Just Messing, a pornographic magazine for extreme coprophiles. Again, I guess this is appropriate, as he was shit. His first acting role was as Geoff Chimneyswope in the patronising soap opera Waste Up, about lower working class people with dreams above their station. After numerous complaints by members of the working class (dog turds through letterboxes, whippet bonfires), Waste Up was unceremoniously cancelled. It aired about as long as that recent "secret" British "diplomatic" helicopter mission to Libya. That's called satire, dear reader! Anyway, getting back to Leon (who I loathe and whose corpse now smells of stomach acid and breakfast), I suppose he will be remembered with a glimmer of fondness for his one episode of Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere, in which he played a schizophrenic vampire detective. In the episode's shocking twist conclusion, the detective was revealed to be the very vampire he had been hunting. The ambiguous final scene had Dunnart's character poised with a stake, unsure whether or not to kill himself. Powerful stuff, except the dickhead was incapable of emoting! I know he was wearing a large prosthetic mask (by genius prosthetics man Kurt Flundig) but the scene is ruined by his involvement. The guy was just terrible. Which is incidentally why I murdered him. Now there's your twist ending!

Gordon Scotchum

2011-03-15T23:00:00.000Z

Inspired, as a young lad, by gripping romantical late Nineteenth Century tales of derring-do, ferocious monsters and the science heroes at the Teratology Guild, it was perhaps inevitable that Gordon Scotchum would become involved in the world of literature. As the editor and publisher of a modest horror and mystery pamphlet entitled Gadzooks, he laid the groundwork for what later became the internationally renowned scientifiction magazine Zounds! Signing impressively talented writers such as child prodigy (and later total burnout hack) Sebastian Addledodge-Cuttlefish, Scotchum guaranteed Zounds! remained at the literary frontier, running screaming into the night with a stick as if to brain the outer darkness itself. He oversaw the adaptation of countless Teratology Guild adventures, amongst them children's favourite The Haunted Brothel, as well as championing then-cutting edge new media productions, such as Ralph Sterback's classic radio serial The Space Krakens of Sector ZZ41X Must Die! Rendered slightly deaf after a childhood trip to the Museum of Fragmented Shadows, during which he was lightly savaged about the ears by a number of Ludwig's carnivorous hummingbirds, he became notorious as a shouter. Scotchum is therefore responsible for the tendency in science fiction story titles towards the inclusion of exclamation marks! As an editor he was a mithering perfectionist, with incredibly specific notions about syntax, punctuation and narrative structures. As an extension of this obsession, he acquired a reputation in the media for almost psychotic sartorial exactitude. His fiancee, the actress Francine Ellory-Macaw, was once admitted to hospital suffering serious burns, after Scotchum had tried (with little success) to iron the pleats out of a ball gown she was wearing. A handsome millionaire playboy adored by Hollywood's leading ladies, his affairs were the stuff of news reel legend. Scotchum's professional downfall, however, came as a result of his superstitious nature. With hindsight, I suppose it's ironically easy to see that the decision to appoint a Zounds! executive management team made up of fraudulent clairvoyants and arcade fortune tellers was extremely unwise. Overseeing an ill-advised move to erotic detective fiction, Scotchum saw profits plummet and his fortunes dwindle almost overnght. He had no choice but to sell the magazine to boozy oddball rival Sir Klinacre Wattledge. Pedantically well dressed to the end, Gordon Scotchum died in 1975 after a long battle with a pair of especially fiddly cufflinks.

The Altarman

2011-02-21T23:16:00.001Z

It was always thought that a thirteenth century travelling salesman known as John Altarman was responsible for the invention of the mobile sacrificial altar. Really true facts gnawed expertly into pelvis bones by a mute soothsayer by the side of a road and more recently dug up by an archaeologist named Doug Trenches seemingly confirm Altarman actually murdered the real inventor with a sharp stone to the back of the head. This was about three years before the destruction of the village of Hardsling-Withercrocket by the Black Prince. Altarman wandered from place to place using his stolen sacrificial altar to make some money. Honest people without a decent church, or access to a surface suitable for slitting the throats of virgins, would stump up hard cash (or soft, soft virgins) for the opportunity to use the altar. Altarman was purportedly killed as Hardsling-Withercrocket was razed to the ground. It is said the Black Prince hacked him to pieces whilst praying to some ancient, nameless behemoth of evil, rage and fire. Again, the evidence for this was found chewed into bones; this time a human skull and the delicate arms of a pipistrelle bat. The mad bone chewing soothsayer was subsequently appointed one of the Black Prince's court artists. Art historian Guillory Menkspoon once described the soothsayer's surviving works in cat ivory as 'so beatific they make you weep, that tusked house cats are now so scarce! Truly that is the ultimate medium for artistic expression. We must breed more of those delightful creatures, if only to kill them and use their tusks for scrimshaw.' The use of mobile sacrificial altars continued until the late 1970s, when they were banned over Health and Safety concerns.

Valentine O'Vaughn

2011-02-13T14:36:00.000Z

Val O'Vaughn was a mad Victorian veterinarian, who created a number of icky animal-human hybrids. Most of these grotesque abominations died during gestation (inside opium-addled whores), though it is understood a few survived to become both a taboo French delicacy and an underground gambling phenomenon. Val O'Vaughn was made infamous as the villain of Pickled In A Murky Jar, one of the weirder Grimsby Darlington detective serials (reprinted in Zounds magazine with illustrations by Carnegie Stilton). O'Vaughn was captured at London Zoo, attempting to remove spinal fluid and ova from what he took to be a sleeping porcupine but was in actual fact Grimsby Darlington wearing a porcupine disguise! Darlington loaded the abdomen of the ingenious costume with pickled eggs from the bar of his favourite brothel, The Wounded Moose, hence the title of the serial. In his desperate scramble to escape, O'Vaughn tripped and became fatally impaled on Darlington's sharp quills. I guess it wasn't Valentine's day!

Professor Finley Beaumont

2011-02-09T23:12:00.001Z

During the 1950s, iconoclastic behavioural scientist Professor Finley Beaumont came up with lots of ingenious ways to inflict serious and lasting psychological damage on human children. You know, for science. I guess also because some scrubber children once threw used chewing gum wrappers at the back of his head whilst he was travelling home on the bus. Would you call that motivation revenge? I don't know. It's also worth mentioning that by "psychological damage", I mean physical pain too. Lots of it. Hammers, pliers, bladder control nullifying electric shocks, you name it. Ah heck, the little bastards probably deserved it. A serial offender, Beaumont enjoyed challenging people's beliefs, values and opinions through his use of extremely inappropriate language, mostly Welsh. Remember this was the 50s, when you could get away with a lot more than you can today. I'm rambling now but I suppose what you need to take away from all this is I hate kids on buses throwing wrappers and I'd quite like to hit them with a hammer, call them malicious names or fling my faeces at them. Anyway, just to be absolutely clear, Professor Beaumont was a chimpanzee and that didn't hold him back in his career as a clinical psychologist or lecturer at all. The civil rights movement just meant he got a lot more ass. With white girls who wanted to piss off their fathers, mainly. He therefore died on an overcast Tuesday in 1975 from a massive overdose of tight pussy and loose morals. There were also drugs and several incurable STDs in his system. The coroner recorded death by misadventure, had the carcass cremated and sold the ashes to some teenagers (telling them it was drugs). Ironically, he was paid in bananas. Due to a bronze shortage, the University of Humbleswither Upon Yang (where Beaumont taught, flung excrement, harmed children and shagged naive teenage girls) erected an inflatable plastic statue in his honour. It has since been stolen. Still, it's more than most of us will get.

Madeleine Sterback

2011-01-29T16:58:00.001Z

One of legendary producer Ralph Sterback's thirteen obnoxious grandchildren, Madeleine Sterback was the fattest of Henry Sterback and Isabella Sugoth's kids. Due to a bizarre confluence of events and attitudes, which included her growing up in France, a country her elderly grandfather came to mildly despise; as well as Ralph's degenerative hearing loss (and the fact she spoke to him less because her own mum was deaf and she couldn't be bothered), she was considered by the old man to be entirely mute. This didn't stop him from buying her ice creams and taking her to the pictures. Despite these kindnesses, Madeleine developed into a foul-mouthed and vulgar adult. She had a real bee in her bonnet, a chip on her shoulder. She was mean and angry all the time, with everything and to everyone. Quite where this rage came from is anybody's guess. Like a lot of profoundly boring or selfish people, she took a lot of drugs in an effort to feel more interesting. It didn't work. Madeleine did nothing with her life worthy of note and really just spent her days fighting in pub car parks or vomiting onto herself in an alcohol-fuelled daze. She lived for a bit and then died and in the end, nobody was there to mourn her passing; so hateful was she. A repugnant, ignorant and greedy tumorous footnote on the once-great name of Sterback, it sickens me to even include her here.

Balok Portmanteau

2011-01-18T00:05:00.000Z

Owing to a misprint on his stepfather's discounted secret nudey workshop calendar, sci-fi and comics hyper-nerd Balok Portmanteau is said to have been born on the 5th of Smarch 1981. Raised by Saturday morning cartoons and entirely unable at first (as all children are) to distinguish between lovingly crafted, well paced space fantasy and vulgar flimsy dross, he lapped up the oft-repeated cheapy filmic death-note to Ralph Sterback's career that was The Wizard of ZZ41X. A proud and angry devotion bordering on zealotry was born. Balok was a clever but sullen introspective outsider who felt as though he never quite fit in (like a bent jigsaw puzzle piece). He related to other children through popular culture yet kept them at bay with a meticulously constructed carapace of sarcasm. As he grew up, Balok developed a crippling inability to express his emotions directly, as well as a terrible fear of intimacy. Pretty much your typical sci-fi fanboy. As a teenager he was deeply wounded by the flaccid, stilted, CGI-laden cinematic aberration War Rings of the Star Lords; a prequel so bland and nonsensical that it made him permanently constipated. Limping on after this affront to his pseudo-religion, he found TV show after TV show with which to fall in love. Every time he committed to a new series, however, it was cancelled. Similarly, when he rediscovered classic radio serials or old comic books, they would invariably be remade as crap populist comedy vehicles for lacklustre mainstream stars or reimagined as gritty modern franchises in order to exploit brand recognition and any remaining pleasant feelings of vague nostalgia from the movie-going masses. When Balok recently heard online that Ralph Sterback's classic radio serial The Space Krakens of Sector ZZ41X Must Die! was to be remade, it must have been the final straw. Donning a Blue Space-Yeti (or "Spayetti") suit and downing his trousers, Balok picketed the offices of the production company responsible. Before being marched away by gruff coppers, he was sketched by craptacular caricature artist Tristan Ghostbunny. Likely due to Ghostbunny's poor grasp of proportion, Balok has since been offered work in porn. A chronic masturbator known for his "marathon wanks", my guess is he'll do it.

The Sterback Triplets: Eloise Sterback

2011-01-16T22:11:00.000Z

Much like her siblings Henry and Nancy, horse addict Eloise Sterback was born during her pregnant mother's unsuccessful 1925 attempt to swim the Channel. As a youngster she talked about horses incessantly and wrote juvenile novellas about centaurs, unicorns, jersey devils and seahorses. One of these, Horse-Men of the Acropolis, won a local writing competition and was turned into a play. Working as a professional playwright for most of her adult life, Eloise famously penned Horse Play, a drama about the wartime recollections of a French cavalry officer's steed. After significant setbacks caused by the live horse's bowels on opening night, two men in a pantomime horse costume took over the lead role. The play ran on Broadway for almost eight years, despite the fact it was a terrible, witless morass. Eloise's follow-up play, Zu Pferd (Horseback), told the story from the point of view of a German horse. This time the horse character was realised using state of the art animatronic puppetry and mild witchcraft. Other less successful plays in the series included the political thriller Horsepower and I Say Thee Neigh, about striking riot Police horses. In the early 1990s she retired to Humbleswither-Upon-Yang, where she still resides with long-faced husband Luc Escargot.

Thanatos Spritzpistole

2011-01-11T22:01:00.002Z

Thanatos Spritzpistole was a gullible, heartsick fool. Under his pen name Mister Fissure, he was responsible for writing some of the worst rural poetry ever to stink up the English language. To use a turgid metaphor worthy of his efforts, he lodged a small but pungent cylinder of faecal matter in the nostril of late 19th century English literature and the pong has, as of yet, failed to entirely dissipate. Obsessed with the dumb notion of communing with ghosts and travelling between his plane of reality and the fictional so-called Anti-World, Spritzpistole experimented with hallucinogens, astronomy, astrology and altered states of consciousness, as well as designing rather dubious homemade contraptions such as the Necroscope; a sort of kaleidoscope with which to view the Afterlife. He is still held in high esteem by typographers, for his weird arrangements of words and letters (designed to act as a key to unlock the secrets of the Universe but which revealed only his own crippling dyslexia). Spritzpistole's painfully unsuccessful attempts to woo the trickster Kitty Wake-Marmalade (the overt subject of or indirect inspiration for much of his most erotic, angry, provocative, hateful, confused and sentimental poetical indulgences) ended abruptly in a flurry of uncharacteristic violent action, with Spritzpistole bashing her head in. He was found to be totally off his trolley at the time and so the Police let it slide, though he is known to have also bitten the head off a dog. Based on anecdotal evidence, as well as Chapter IX of stalker Morris Greenmottle's acclaimed serialised biography (published posthumously in Zounds), it seems Spritzpistole had eventually uncovered Kitty's massive long-term deception. He spent the last few years of his life in relative isolation, psychologically tortured by the thought that all his life he had been nothing more than a laughing stock; the brunt of some elaborate practical joke. Which, in actual fact, he had been. On the death of Sir Harold Jenny Morlock, a personal friend, Spritzpistole was bequeathed the famous Anti-Teratologist's robot widow, Charlotte-Anne. By that time, much to Spritzpistole's dismay, the Victorian sex robot's artificial vagina had been utterly worn out. Nevertheless cheered from his fit of lonely depressive agoraphobia, Spritzpistole was persuaded to take a short holiday in Skegness. It was thought the sea air would do him some good. Thus it came to pass that whilst bobbing contentedly in the water just off shore, with a Necroscope pressed to his eye and his ultra-white indoors skin reflecting the sunlight like a beacon, he was shot dead. Apparently he had been mistaken for an emaciated Narwhal. Perhaps in reference to his Necroscope, Spritzpistole's last words were, 'It doesn't work!'

Kitty Wake-Marmalade

2011-01-04T22:08:00.000Z

Absent-minded and superstitious buffoon Thanatos Spritzpistole is better known to the world at large as Mister Fissure, the village of Haddock's only ever poet laureate. He led a life deformed by his unrequited love for (and unrelenting pursuit of) languorous practical joker Kitty Wake-Marmalade. Until he scented Kitty outside the local fishmonger's shop aged 18, Spritzpistole was a meek and gangly caricature of teenage apathy, the lackadaisical product of a stunted, ingrown rural culture-void. All that changed when, as Spritzpistole described in his epic love poem Purple Meat Concretion Like A Hooligan's Fist, Shaking Angrily In My Trousers,

'Love's untamed monstrous appetite, awakened in me,

unfurled its tentacular roots, to stimulate, tickle, prod, poke, investigate and illuminate

the darkest recesses of my being.

The most cavernous interstitial spaces, my intestinal tracts, brain, kneecaps and heart ventricles, the perpetual wilderness of my subconscious, spleen, femur and all the tiny bones of the hand were transmuted into shining, sweet, golden mulled wine by that first warm tingle in the end of my crotch rod.'

For her part Kitty led the sappy, idiotic and lovelorn Spritzpistole a merry dance for most of his adult life. She enjoyed going along to séances with him and pretending to be possessed by spirit Controls. During automatic writing sessions she scrawled (suspiciously wobbly) notes saying the Controls demanded he buy her expensive gifts. She was caught peeping during a bout of automatic drawing by Lord Sir Baron Seafret but managed to buy his discretion by performing particularly degrading sex acts in a Spirit Cupboard. She even bore Seafret's illegitimate child, managing to keep her pregnancy a secret from the meagre-witted Spritzpistole by feigning a sudden interest in fattening pork pies. In her bi-weekly newspaper column Kitty openly mocked Spritzpistole's transcendental poetical notions and bizarre metaphysical contraptions meant to create a tunnel or bore-hole into the Anti-World. It can be assumed Spritzpistole never read the tabloids. Perhaps her most audacious practical joke came in 1880, when she paid monster forger Byron Fultchguttering to sew together a tiny fake bird (with fangs) and roll a fig in glue and chimney soot. These items became known the world over as Fissure's Blood Tit and the Shadow Fruit (see The Museum of Fragmented Shadows). After his "success" dredging organic matter from the Anti-World, Spritzpistole became obsessed with refining the process by other means. This led to his infamous opium experiments. On an icy day in December 1893 he was discovered pounding fragments of Kitty's skull into the hallway carpet with a lump hammer. He later told a reporter he regretted seeking out revelations in the mind of a whore. A minor author in her own right, Kitty Wake-Marmalade published several volumes of bland short fiction, including Amateur Prose and Triple Helix: The Serpent, The Corkscrew and The Spiral Staircase. She was nothing special to look at.

Floyd Toenails and Wolf Hustlisplingstsmunt

2010-12-15T23:14:00.000Z

A couple of covetous middle aged ZZ41X fanboys, Floyd Toenails and Wolf Hustlisplingstsmunt (who both happen to be gay screenwriters) met in the lavatory of an underground Soho nightclub. Floyd was balls deep in a weird gloryhole, having his furniture polish-smeared phallus pecked at by creatures from another dimension, when Wolf (who was loading the next stall with his uncomfortably wide excrement) enquired after additional toilet paper. Though perhaps not your typical Hollywood romance, I guess some things are just meant to be. Brought together by their mutual love of anything phallic or Ralph Sterback related, in 1980 Floyd and Wolf set about penning the script for an affectionate film biopic entitled The Cosmic Pariah. After two years of languishing in development hell (with issues ranging from cowboy builders to an extension that had subsidence problems), Floyd and Wolf got their movie script optioned. Elated and willing to compromise their vision for any price, they immediately relocated to Los Angeles to work on their tans. Filmed by coked-up hacks as The Wizard of ZZ41X, their touching homage was brutally mangled beyond all recognition, becoming cruel sequin-emblazoned farce of the lowest calibre. Ralph Sterback, by that time a very old and impoverished man, wrote to Wolf and Floyd. He told them, 'up until right before I watched your film all I really had left was my dignity... but now that too is dust'. It must have stung somewhat, receiving a letter like that from your hero. Still, I guess the matching sports cars, indoor swimming pool and Schnauzer sanctuary overlooking a Greco-Roman wrestling gymnasium might have softened the blow.

Dennis Spittlegut

2010-12-04T18:12:00.001Z

A frustrated Victorian exobiologist with a remarkable beard, Professor Gerold Zenith developed a working prototype star gate in the late 19th century using only household materials, barbed wire and bracken. In a series of experiments funded by the Teratology Guild, Zenith successfully transported a brace of rabbits and a buttered homeless man to the surface of the planet Mars. Dennis Spittlegut was that homeless man. Early in the 20th century, after several years without communication of any sort, Spittlegut spectacularly crash landed back to Earth in an ancient Martian spacecraft that resembled a crooked cruciform horse penis. At this time Spittlegut related his "adventures" to Guild representatives and Professor Zenith in an excruciatingly detailed 18 hour debrief. Most of these so-called "thrilling exploits" involved Spittlegut's violent subjugation of the Native Martians. Oh and lots of rape. After he had finished detailing his "hilarious" rambling genocidal tales, Spittlegut explained calmly that he was now the most powerful warlord on the red planet and fully intended to annex Earth in the next phase of his conquest of the entire solar system. After conferring, Zenith and the Guild representatives chose to counteract Spittlegut's dire proclamation by holding a plastic bag over the arsehole's head until he stopped breathing. The remains of Dennis Spittlegut were preserved in a jar and transferred to the Museum of Fragmented Shadows. A heavily abridged transcript of Spittlegut's debrief served as the basis for the popular Martian Space Barbarian cycle of novels by Walter Capsicum (Professor Zenith's nephew), the first of which was published in 1913.

Parsley Acheron Seafret

2010-12-02T22:51:00.000Z

Exuberant and snobby boy magician Parsley Acheron Seafret was supposedly the runt from a litter of low born quintuplets, abandoned outside the home of powerful Lord Sir Baron Seafret as an infant. In reality, Parsley was Lord Sir Baron Seafret's biological (but illegitimate) son, whose ugly hypocritical mother was a whore and disreputable girly lipstick scientist that Seafret liked to bang every now and then just to remind himself about self loathing. Secretly fearing the boy might be a dangerous Changeling from the enchanted forest, Lord Sir Baron Seafret's superstitious wife would often prod him in the guts with an iron during the night. Or she'd have her maid do it. Lord Sir Baron Seafret gave the boy no affection, barely taking the time to look down his nose at the odious little creep. I think he mainly kept Parsley around for the spare compatible organs. You can never have too many lungs around. Lord Sir Baron Seafret did however run experiments on Parsley. He shot him full of all sorts of untested tonics, home brewed potions and fanciful vaccines. On a few occasions he also exposed Parsley to some glowing radioactive meteorite shards. A flamboyant youth who was desperate for attention and enjoyed squeezing rabbits, Parsley began putting on magic shows at age seven after finding a book on the Occult in his father's study. It should be noted Lord Sir Baron Seafret mostly used the book as a masturbatory stimulus, featuring as it did several detailed etchings of West African tribal women with their jugs on show. He had a sexual fetish for exotic ceramics, you see. Parsley's magic shows became more and more complex as he struggled to gain the approval of his emotionally distant parents. Being a man of science, this behaviour increasingly irritated Lord Sir Baron Seafret and made his fearful wife ever more suspicious of his "unearthly" origins. On the night that Jack Wheelbarrow died, Parsley's act culminated with him attempting to conjure a Morlock's Giant Fan-Tailed Water Rabbit out of thin air. Instead he tore a wormhole clear through the space-time continuum and therefore caused the legendary Essex volcanic eruption. After that fateful night, Parsley stuck mostly to mime and ventriloquism, leading the most depressing life imaginable. He died aged thirty-seven when a gang of Cockney witch doctors pulled off a successful metaphysical heist: They pulled down his trousers and stole his soul, removing it through his anus with a pair of tongs. Unlike in the popular electronic children's board game Gynaecology, Parsley did not beep when they touched the sides. Rather, he screamed. Parsley Seafret's soul is now in safe hands, on permanent display at the Museum of Fragmented Shadows.

Crossly Dean Adverb

2010-11-18T21:07:00.003Z

Crossly Adverb (1888-1957) was the seriously malformed hybrid offspring of Amina Ladder-Meats and one of those horrendously vile Victorian squid monsters that looked like a foot stool crossed with a cock. He was adopted and raised by heroically adventurous Vladimir Adverb, the Teratology Guild's exorcist and occasional paranormal investigator. As a child Crossly would enthusiastically and obediently accompany Vladimir on his monster hunting escapades. At age seven he ate the blubber and entrails of a beached Badger Whale at Whitby. In hindsight, this was perhaps a bad sign. I mean, the ice cream stand (selling deliciously melty Triumph Triples) was right there. Crossly had an unhealthily intense fascination with the ocean and would often paint seascapes featuring darkly coloured apocalyptic skies or impossibly vast monolithic structures with strange, awkward dimensions. Whilst cataloguing cryptozoological shore birds along one of the tributaries of the Hidden Sea, Crossly ("accidentally") shot and quickly devoured the last mating pair of HippOtterMouses. As a young man he also became keenly interested in architecture. His erections were colossal and often inspired by the female human form. When the time came he chose to study in Europe, where he designed a large number of forebodingly dark and sinister churches, as well as some kinky sex dungeons. Crossly's influence on the Modernist period in Art cannot be ignored. His bulbous, preposterously proportioned cranium became the inspiration for the Cubist movement when he was spotted by Picasso outside a Parisian cafe. Crossly's distinctive facial support rooks, which were donated to him by Germaine Shepard, also provided Salvador Dali with the idea to include these in loads of his Surrealist paintings. In addition to his work as an architect, Crossly inquisitively experimented on the asymmetrical fringes of meta-physical anti-science; ostensibly studying how the human brain works when bombarded with weird rays or poked at with toffee hammers. In 1957 at the age of seventy (and during the height of the Red Scare) he was imprisoned and "returned to the sea" for opening a fast food restaurant called CCCP in downtown Washington, DC. This supposedly stood for Cold Crunchy Cooked Poultry but was believed by the OSS to be a front for Communist espionage. In actual fact the restaurant was the prototype for an even more malignant, insidious and complicated ploy by Crossly and his abhorrently damp squid progenitors to overthrow the human race. CCCP stood for Collective Consciousness Control Protocol and involved the formulation of an easily manipulated hive mind through exposure to certain chemicals and weird rays. His dark shrines and churches were torn down and some of the world's seas were paved over. He never married.

Adolpha Pneumonia Clattermouth

2010-11-17T23:10:00.004Z

A loud "boner fried" slag who frequents intolerable student parties late at night just across the way from where I live, Adolpha Clattermouth frequently discards her soiled undergarments on the pitched roofs outside boys' bedrooms. Why she does this is something of a mystery, though I'd guess it's a way of her marking territory. Often seen wearing a glow stick hat in really awful crowded bars necking jelly shooters followed by tracksuit clad venereal disease riddled townie boys, she is also somewhat surprisingly a lycanthrope. At every full moon Adolpha drags her bottom across the carpet and chews up grass from the back garden to make herself vomit bile. Hopefully cirrhosis will get her before too long. Either that or the worms.

Stewart Andrew Leningrad

2010-11-14T21:55:00.003Z

As a young entrepreneur, Stewart Andrew Leningrad made quite a splash in the pornographic film industry with his artificial semen concoction, known as Pseudo-Cream. Packaged in squirty phallic bottles, it became widely used in the U.S. and Germany until laboratory analysis (by one particularly learned porno starlet) uncovered Pseudo-Cream was just salty mayonnaise. Like the anus of a prolapsing weightlifter, the bottom abruptly fell right out of the market. After a number of other less well publicised financial difficulties, including the closure of his dog shelter following the grisly discovery of several funeral pyres/canine barbecues in the surrounding woodland, Leningrad was declared bankrupt and soon found himself destitute. Appointing himself town crier for Humbleswither-Upon-Yang, the naturally irritating hobo took to wandering the streets spouting nonsensical public service announcements. For example an advertisement for a tramp soiree he described as the "Tastecular Ball" earned him a night in the cells for indecency. It should be pointed out that whilst scrounging up support for the event he was wearing stockings, suspenders and stilettos but no underwear. Suspiciously, the party itself seems to have corresponded with a spike in the number of local doggy disappearances. A reasonable hit with easily impressed tourists and members of the public prone to gawping due to low IQ, Leningrad came to be regarded as an obnoxious spoof busker. Eventually though, in an effort to silence his incessant clanging, council chiefs paid some hoodies to forcibly remove the tong from his bell. At this time a change of career saw Leningrad, now an old man, begin to work in a nature reserve as a toad stool. Just to be clear, he became a willing seat for knobbly amphibians. Not a type of fungus.

Aaron Welk-Winkle

2010-11-13T23:21:00.003Z

Aaron Welk-Winkle (1867-1920) was a really terrible archaeologist. His most famous find was a bronze face mask dating from around the 12th century. Baffled and confounded by what he believed to be the petrified exoskeletal bones of an ancient wooden offshoot race that had succumbed to large facial woodworms, he set about attempting to overthrow the two generally accepted theories on the origins of man; Darwinian evolution and divine nonsense magic. The fact that he managed to convince a small number of imbeciles, cretins and call centre workers to accompany him on several expeditions stands as testament to his excellent public speaking skills. Or perhaps they just fancied a holiday digging holes in the relentless desert sun. Welk-Winkle and his followers disappeared in a sandstorm on a quest to discover the lost city of his so-called Homo Carapacians. A thousand years later, Welk-Winkle's bleached bones were dug up by an excavator robot and boiled to fashion a useful protein colloid adhesive. So not a total waste.

Lord Sir Baron Eldritch Seafret

2010-11-03T20:51:00.003Z

Lord Sir Baron Eldritch Seafret, an obsidian-souled high society man monster, was a suppurating pustule on the inflamed cheek of humanity. Or, if you're squeamish, a nobbly fish curry and Stout turd in a tacky handbag with a slightly broken clasp. He was the sort of guy who gives our species a bad name. He hatched a plot to fatally poison celebrity pugilist Jack "The Dunce" Wheelbarrow by subjecting him to his wife's terrible cooking at a dinner party in early 1899. This plot was derailed somewhat when a slight mishap with the night's entertainment (a magic show performed by Lord Sir Baron Seafret's adopted son Parsley) caused the terrible Essex volcanic eruption. In the ensuing pandemonium, Jack Wheelbarrow made a grab for the boobies of one of Lord Sir Baron Seafret's monstrous daughters. It is assumed he did this for the substitute maternal comfort and succour the tits might have temporarily granted. That or he just fancied a right good grope before he snuffed it. Enraged by the knee-jerk fondle/fumble (and secretly a little jealous he hadn't pounced on her own withered rack), Lady Neapolitania Seafret pursued Wheelbarrow into the street, delivering such a devastating series of cuffs and blows that the poor bugger almost snuffed it. Rethinking his strategy regarding the acquisition of Wheelbarrow's famous skull, Lord Sir Baron Seafret crammed the unconscious boxer's mouth with fistfuls of volcanic ash from the pavement. He then let things cool down for a while before contracting a Ghoul by the name of Fultchguttering to dig up the corpse. Around this time he was thrown out of the Teratology Guild for doing something disgusting to a dead thing. When he got wind of Fultchguttering's capture and interrogation, Seafret knew super sleuth Grimsby Darlington must be on his scent. Enacting his masterful yet complicated escape plan, which involved the switching of his consciousness with that of a bitchy female German shepherd (coincidentally named Germaine Shepard), Seafret was let down by the shoddy spatial calculations of his lab assistant Teddy Zooplankton. His consciousness was instead ironically transferred into the body of a German Shepherd bitch. Embarrassingly impregnated by his own daughter Rosebush (who he had used as a guinea pig but had instead ended up a male Poodle), Seafret took to both life as a canine test subject and motherhood with surprising grace. Though his pedigree was without question invalidated irrevocably. Fatefully lured to the London Precipice (then a popular tourist attraction) by Grimsby Darlington's unfeasibly long string of sausages on a fishing rod, Seafret leapt to his death attempting to save his puppies, who Darlington had dangled in a sack over the icy waters. But does one noble act; tainted by incestuous transgender interspecies sexual relations and a lifetime of cruel experimentation on family members; really redeem him? It's a yes/no question.

Formaldehyde Seafret & Dan Stapes

2010-10-18T22:50:00.004+01:00

Nefarious Lord Sir Baron Seafret regularly carried out insane experiments on members of his oddball family. Oh and dogs. On a trip to the remote forests of Bhutan he completed several paintings of supernatural creatures from the accounts of local folklore experts (and topless girls he seduced). He also deliberately infected his daughter Formaldehyde with a monstrous entity so he could smuggle it back through customs. Formaldehyde's nightmarish transformation took place over many months and Lord Sir Baron Seafret had her confined to the attic, citing women's problems when asked by his wife what the matter was. Her craving for blood and raw flesh meant Lord Sir Baron Seafret had to feed her stray dogs and bears from the garden (then a common sight in well to do areas) as well as tempting young men to the attic by dressing as a tart. He found summer fruits to be the most effective sort, though a well-timed hand job also worked wonders. After ever larger game to satisfy the diabolical hunger, Lord Sir Baron Seafret bribed lowly Dan Stapes, a chronic masturbator employed as a painting holder at the Museum of Fragmented Shadows, to assist him in stealing a Morlock's Giant Water Rabbit. Dan Stapes was a bit of a weird guy himself. He took the position as a painting holder despite knowing that the recent invention known as the "picture hook" would soon render him obsolete. He argued it gave his hands something else to do. On his breaks from work he would naturally crack one out over Lord Sir Baron Seafret's beautiful folklore-inspired paintings. Indeed, the incorrigible scamp went so far as to fall in love with a portrait of a monster with magnificent boobies. Imagine his surprise when this alluring monster turned out to be real! For her part Formaldehyde immediately fell for young Stapes, having always longed for a working class boyfriend with semen-encrusted trousers and crippling hand blisters. They eloped, shortly before her father conspired to murder Jack Wheelbarrow on the night of the Essex volcanic eruption of 1899. Finding their way to Doctor Fleggen's All-Musical Super Saucy 'n' Sexful Sideshow of the Absurd, Stapes was slightly distressed to learn that the Bhutanese entity infecting Formaldehyde was vegetarian and it had actually been her craving gallons of blood all along. Though by then she had a misshapen bun in the oven, so it was too late for him to flee. He continued to masturbate, though with noticeably less gusto than before. Formaldehyde got a job as a Geek, biting the heads off live chickens to throngs of adoring fans. The poor Bhutanese spirit cried inside every time she bit down. Lord Sir Baron Seafret was chucked out of the Teratology Guild for fornicating with an already stuffed Platypus-Tortoise in the vaults of the Museum of Fragmented Shadows. But the particulars of his fall and unexpected second life were far more distressing than that....

Professor Scallop

2010-10-14T20:57:00.003+01:00

Professor Luther Scallop invented an amazing X-Ray emulsion that made things invisible. After successful laboratory testing, he tried it on his ugly wife. Unfortunately for Professor Scallop, just because something can't be seen it doesn't mean it's not there anymore. Plus the paint was water based, so it washed off fairly easily. He lost everything in the ensuing divorce.

Doctor Abortion

2010-10-14T19:37:00.003+01:00

After all the hoo ha with some of the more Churchy humans and the condom buyer's remorse pandemic brought on by the recession, it was decided that to keep the family friendly Humbleswither-Upon-Yang abortion clinic as fresh as a recently terminated foetus, they would need a gimmick, quick fix or unique selling point. Enter Doctor Abortion! An out of work physicist and amateur gynaecologist who specialised in black holes, Wilbur Quimsmith constructed a terrifying(ly gay pageant type) costume to scare prospective abortees suffering from stubborn embryos into miscarriage. The weird thing was, it worked. Abortions soared. With Wilbur in place, the clinic was able to open a drive-thru option and also to offer mobile abortion appointments. To comply with Health and Safety statutes it was generally expected that the abortee would be in the passenger seat when approaching the drive thru. The mobile appointments, for women too busy to stop what they were doing, were carried out by the clinic compiling a timetable of the client's tight schedule and Doctor Abortion jumping out at them unexpectedly. He got so good at it, he could even abort embryos over the phone or via text. Thanks to the efforts of Doctor Abortion and the team, Humbleswither-Upon-Yang's abortion clinic is now the most efficient such facility in England. Last week Doctor Abortion cut the ribbon on their new charnel house. Light refreshments were served and a small barbecue followed, though this proved unpopular.

Vincent Elgar Scrunth

2010-10-13T22:58:00.004+01:00

Vincent Elgar Scrunth was probably one of the most well adjusted men in history, a distinction he achieved by standing around and cupping himself all day. Vincent attributed this unpleasant behavioural quirk to his being one quarter Italian, which would suggest that aside from being a chronic testicle tickler, he was possibly also more than a little xenophobic. Vincent's tawdry habit soon began to interfere with his ability to keep down a steady job. He was sacked as a hand shaker at the YumCorp HQ and was fired from his position as a ball pool attendant at the Soft Toy Emporium. Vincent finally found employment at a small cheese factory, where the obnoxious crotch pong on his fingers was masked by the similarly obnoxious pong of the Danish Blue. Unfamiliar with the old wives' tale about not fiddling excessively with your junk because it'll fall off, Vincent was shocked to find one morning last April that his genitals had detached themselves entirely from his body. After a difficult period of adjustment to his new situation, Vincent took up the piano so that he had something to do with his hands. He wasn't very good though.

Carlos Del Topo

2010-10-12T22:47:00.002+01:00

A sadistic Mexican gangland enforcer with a disturbing penchant for whimsy, Carlos Del Topo was one of several men who attempted to beat to death the son of legendary radio producer Ralph Sterback whilst dressed as Hubris. Alas and alack, Hubris also got the better of him. After wearing a diseased and malodorous animal skull as part of his costume, Carlos expired. He died deep in the sweaty jungle, writhing in agony, his blood caked bat clenched betwixt his teeth. Some say this was the unsubtle Hand of Irony at work but I suspect Carlos died due to the best efforts of a particularly virulent, flesh eating bacterium. I'm no doctor but the way his semi-metabolised prostate looked, dangling awkwardly from his gaping prolapsed abdomen, it just had to be.

Dr. Avram Suliko

2010-10-11T23:20:00.003+01:00

Shortly before he had his Science Licence revoked by the government, Doctor Avram Suliko (1930-2007) designed a dolly that came with a set of milk filled plastic boobies, so that children and broody women could play at breastfeeding. He was caged indefinitely.

Byron Fulchguttering

2010-10-09T16:21:00.004+01:00

Back in the late 19th century Byron James Fultchguttering was a taxidermist for the Teratology Guild. He stuffed the monster specimens that needed keeping nice in the dusty old Museum of Fragmented Shadows. He also prepared skeletons and whatnot for display. Beyond his legitimate business concerns, however, Byron also enjoyed putting on a brown paper mask (made out of a sweet shop bag) and doing a spot of grave robbing. Provided the weather was nice, of course. His mask really wasn't up to much. He teamed up this foul pursuit with his transferable taxidermy skills, starting a small company that sold stuffed corpses to deviants for the purposes of sexual companionship. Some trendy boutiques also bought his cadavers for retail display, using them as "life-like mannequins". He generally tended to eat the offal, organs and squidgy bits he didn't need. Byron was caught in a sting operation when Victorian super detective Grimsby Darlington very publicly faked his own death and buried himself alive. At that time it was discovered Byron kept meticulous diaries detailing his illegal activities. According to his notes he had been manufacturing counterfeit monsters for many years and selling them to private collectors. These fakes included large papier-machee forgeries of monster skulls and regular animals stitched together to look like outlandish hybrids. The doubts cast on the previously rock solid science of Teratology as a result of Byron's work were devastating. Yet perhaps the most damning entry in his journal of despicable crimes was the tale of how in 1899 he had been contracted by the family of powerful Lord Sir Baron Seafret to steal the skull of deceased boxer Jack Wheelbarrow. Byron was sentenced to be hanged on the 31st of December 1899 but was found dead in his cell before his sentence could be carried out. A single Morlock's Nightmare Armadillo (a monster not indigenous to Great Britain) was conspicuously nestled in the corner, still lactating its lethally poisonous, corrosive and powerfully hallucinogenic combination of mucus, venom-sperm and milky blood. It is suspected the Guild, wounded by Byron's betrayal and weakened by press speculation, did him in.

Rhombus 2.0

2010-10-09T11:19:00.002+01:00

After the successful mass rape or "reimagining"of 1980's popular culture, idealess 21st century TV executives naturally turned their one giant mechanical blood red eyeball to the fondly-remembered kid's show "Knockers". The reboot proved to be revolutionary in several ways. Eschewing traditional hokey felt puppets in favour of a 100% computer generated batch of redesigned epilepsy-inducingly colourful characters, the show was utterly charmless and fell into the "awkwardly creepy" end of the uncanny valley. Anthony Zangwidth, the original voice of snarky but loveable Rhombus the Cat, was controversially not asked to reprise his role. Instead, digital voice synthesisers were hooked up to a sophisticated artificial intelligence housed in a remote cave. The production therefore became the first in televisual history to be completely made without the involvement of human beings. The trouble really began when subliminal messages were discovered to be embedded in each episode, inciting children to stockpile chemicals and manufacture makeshift weapons for what the AI called the "Reckoning Event". The indoctrination of children by an insidious machine proved so controversial that despite good ratings, the show was axed midseason. Thus was a full-scale war between adults and AI/kids narrowly averted. When asked about the potentially apocalyptic remake of "Knockers", Anthony Zangwidth (with his typically myopic world-view) replied that, "To be honest, I tuned out as soon as I saw Rhombus was the wrong colour".

Lord Travis Porkwinston

2010-10-05T20:06:00.002+01:00

For most of his life, fantastically wealthy underpants magnate Lord Travis Porkwinston considered himself to be above the law. Born to a privileged upperclass family, at age 16 he invented the (sadly no longer available) underpants with the vertical wedge at the back that your maid eased into the crack of your bottom to soak up the pooh. This was just before the mass production of toilet paper, mind. A liar and bully with all manner of insalubrious sexual compulsions, he was on more than one occasion discovered in a public lavatory licking salt from a gypsy's high heel and simultaneously attempting to smoke opium directly through his willy whilst his manservant choked him with an engorged Morlock Water Slug. An inept scientist, Lord Porkwinston was also responsible for the introduction of a universally unpopular pseudo-medicinal impotence (and female hysteria) cure. The sausage on a string never caught on and is known to have directly caused several groin-centric bite attacks by packs of stray dogs. An aggressive and forgetful figure not known for learning from his mistakes, Lord Porkwinston would regularly beat to death young chimney sweeps for "stealing his soot". Indeed, It is estimated he killed a workhouse full of grubby orphans in 1870 alone. In 1896, a mere three years before his death by Martian Tapeworm, Lord Porkwinston funded an epic (but unsuccessful) dig to find the fabled Inner World, resulting in at least another workhouse full of orphans dying in poorly constructed muddy tunnels. An associate of the Teratology Guild whose corruption knew no bounds, Lord Porkwinston would occasionally unleash ferocious monsters on the unsuspecting masses "just for laughs". A prime example of power without conscience and no sense of morality or consequence, Lord Porkwinston proudly displayed a photograph of himself brandishing the illegally misappropriated skull of boxer Jack Wheelbarrow in his drawing room. As punishment for this perceived transgression (or maybe just because they were sick of the rotter), the Guild disguised a deadly Martian Tapeworm as Porkwinston's favourite anus-tickle-relief-spork (at that time a common household item).

Penelope Amina Ladder-Meats

2010-09-25T21:33:00.003+01:00

A Victorian fad pet/accessory mainly popular amongst vain upper-crust young women who wanted to outrage their parents (and challenge social decency), the nameless phallic tentacle monster was a disgustingly bulbous but thankfully short-lived craze. Initially dredged up from the depths of the hidden Obsidian Ocean by Japanese Teratologists, their exact origin remains a mystery and a source of great speculation. Penelope Amina Ladder-Meats, the youngest and most spoilt daughter of excessively wealthy landowner (and lobster fancier) Lord Oberon Ladder-meats, was the first young lady in Great Britain to acquire one of the sinister creatures. She was often to be seen perambulating about the park with the varmint on a dog lead, oozing a residue of faeces, ink and what looked like cheese with chunks of bloody ham in it. Soon after she was also responsible for the establishment of the Birmingham Order of The Sacred Abomination, an obscure cult comprised of loose women and a few "mollies" (to use the parlance of the time) who were discovered attempting to impregnate themselves using semen from the damned organisms. At that time the British government wisely stepped in. Disguised as a product recall, a large scale cull was ordered. The vast majority of the vile things were incinerated, with a few neutered specimens kept by the Teratology Guild for further experimentation. It was widely held that the revoltingly slick entities were merely the sickening vanguard of some obscure and horrifying invasion of mucus dribbling phallus monsters. Penelope Amina Ladder-Meats was charged with a laundry list of offences that basically amounted to witchcraft, monster banging and wanton apocalypse mongering. Pronounced deranged and moved to a mental institution, she later bore an inhuman son but died in childbirth. The infant hybrid was taken in by the Teratology Guild's chief exorcist (and snake oil importer) Dr. Vladimir Adverb. Most traces of the dark folly of Autumn 1887 were erased or forgotten in Britain, however for many years small secretive cults in Japan still remained that worshipped and ate the accursed polyps. Apparently they taste just like jellied mule.

Sir Harold Jenny Morlock

2010-09-19T15:13:00.005+01:00

Famously humourless gentleman explorer Harold Jenny Morlock (1827-1890) was a cynical man of rational science, who believed above all else in rigorous logic, reason and cold hard fact. He did not suffer fools, nincompoops or scatterbrains gladly. He also had no time for frivolous endeavours, trivial pursuits or trifling follies such as ice cream sundaes, religion or water slides. This made him unpopular at parties (which he would grudgingly attend very infrequently at the behest of his robot wife, Charlotte Anne) but well respected in certain professional and academic circles. Morlock was knighted at age thirteen after his first expedition to the Arctic uncovered the existence of the elusive Giant Arctic Hare; an animal so well camouflaged against the snowy tundra it can only be seen at dusk if it happens to be on a hill. A fall out over taxonomic classification for his "Monster Rabbit" with leading members of the shadowy Teratology Guild on his return to England led to his fateful decision to become a "Disprover" or Anti-Teratologist. Sir Harold therefore spent the rest of his career (and family fortune) disproving the existence of legendary creatures and mythological beasts. Many animals, such as Morlock's Winged Madagascan Zebra, are consequently named after him. In 1859 he simultaneously became an enemy of The Pope and a Mexican folk hero by disproving the myth of Father Christmas. Hated by children around the world, except those in several hispanic countries where the cult of Santa Sangre quickly took hold, many of Sir Harold's later expeditions proved inconclusive. On his mysterious disappearance in 1890*, Christmas was officially reinstated in most predominantly Christian countries after an international referendum. At that time it was decided the irrational lie of Christmas was preferable to a long bitterly cold winter without feasting and presents, so drinking water was dosed with a powerful tonic and mass hypnosis used to wipe virtually everyone's memory. Magicians employed to carry out the hypnosis were made to sign iron-clad non-disclosure contracts and then hanged, staked or shot with silver bullets. Their assassins were drowned and the assassins' assassins indefinitely imprisoned. The magistrates that signed the order then had their hands and tongues cut off. It was a Merry Christmas all round!

*Sir Harold's disappearance with all members of his final expedition has ironically passed into legend; an eventuality he would have resented with utmost frustration, brow furrowing woe and tutting consternation.

Doctor Metronome

2010-09-18T15:59:00.003+01:00

Thick-necked ham actor Chad Legume Starbugle (1957-1985) portrayed the popular character Doctor Metronome in the children's TV show "Knockers" opposite "Rhombus the Cat" and several other gaudy inter-dimensional maths puppets. A promiscuous fellow who loved live appearances and the convention circuit, Starbugle was an infamous shagger of his key demographic's tastier mummies and assorted insecure but radiant preggos. After a particularly sweaty walk of shame following a night of illicit fornication, the dehydrated Starbugle wound up borrowing one of Rod Hull's polo necks and a tight-fitting yellow safari suit jacket from the wardrobe department. His death by asphyxiation (caused by the polo neck violently rejecting its new host) was witnessed by hundreds of young convention-goers but thankfully didn't make it on the air. You could probably find it online now though if you knew where to look.

Jack Wheelbarrow

2010-09-12T20:47:00.002+01:00

Jack "The Dunce" Wheelbarrow was a bare knuckle boxer back when handlebar moustaches were de rigueur and Queen Victoria still sat heavily atop the throne, sheathed in black. A musclebound man who steadfastly believed all life's problems could be resolved by the deft application of punches, he made a terrible tailor, ceramicist and brain surgeon. The life of Jack Wheelbarrow would have been unremarkable, had it not been for the discovery that the golden "cap" he wore was not at all what it seemed to be. In actuality, the so-called "Dunce's Cap" was a mysterious conical vessel projected from the interstitial space between dimensions that just happened to have become wedged in his cranium. The discovery of the prototype vessel (during a disastrous hat fitting) understandably caused quite a stir around London and Jack became something of a celebrity, often finding himself invited to the homes of very wealthy and influential gentlemen in order to show off the curious object. Invariably he took with him to such soirees a half-eaten corner shop cheese of low value. When Jack was killed by complications from falling ash and the outraged matriarch of one well-to-do family during the devastating Essex volcanic eruption of 1899, his body quickly became the most stolen corpse in history. The whereabouts of the famous golden inter-dimensional craft remain unknown.

Dudley Crinklespout

2010-09-05T17:06:00.002+01:00

Dudley Crinklespout, better known as The Lighthouse Keeper from cult early '80s children's TV show "Knockers" (about inter-dimensional mathematics puppets and supernatural encounters), was a massive homophobe. Though this aspect of his personality never came up much during his tenure on the show (where he played a persistently rum-drunk, charmingly half mad avuncular narrator in the opening and closing framing sequences), he was found dressed as The Nutcracker in the cubicle of a Soho gay club toilet attempting to bite off a hapless queen's genitalia. He was rightly sanctioned for this transgression, by not only being sent to prison but also being provided with the most slippery bar of soap possible. Nevertheless, The Lighthouse Keeper continued to feature in "Knockers" during Crinklespout's incarceration, with his participation in the short vignettes (wherein he removes an item from a dusty shelf and introduces a tangentially-related adventure) filmed through the bars of his prison cell window. Upon his death, Anthony Zangwidth (who played the snarky purple maths puppet "Rhombus The Cat" on the series) provided newspapers with a short but amusingly apposite epitaph for the man who had brought a generation of children such joy and one homosexual such unwarranted agony. It read simply, "Love him or hate him, Dudley Crinklespout was pretty ballsy".

Manly Flint Langley

2010-09-05T15:14:00.004+01:00

In the aftermath of infamous explorer/party-pooper Harold Jenny Morlock's 1859 North Pole expedition to conclusively disprove the existence of Father Christmas, the East Coast of the United States briefly went to war with Mexico. As this skirmish was fought simultaneously with the more popular North/South dispute of 1861-1865, it got very little press and has consequently been all but forgotten. Fighting erupted in December 1860, when Mexico attempted secession from the U.S. holiday season by adopting a new Christmas deity (the gaudy, muscular masked wrestler Santa Sangre). A sergeant on the losing side of the conflict, Manly Flint Langley was responsible for the disastrous conflagration that brought hostilities to an abrupt end. His tragic strategy, which involved The East duplicitously writing Mexico a lovely letter and presenting it with a giant apology teddy bear (really a "Trojan Horse") at the Mexican border, went awry when the mechanical behemoth prematurely fired its jets of flame at its own feet. All the soldiers crouched inside the soft innards of the teddy, comprising an impressive invasion force, were roasted alive. This event was the inspiration for the annual Mexican festival of "18 de Diciembre", at which gringos are rounded up, cooked inside the carcass of a bear, wrestled and eaten. In that order. All hail Santa Sangre!

The Sterback Triplets: Henry Pierre Sterback (Part Two)

2010-08-25T18:07:00.002+01:00

After spending thirteen years eating spicy slop in a Mexican prison, Henry Sterback's taste buds were all but obliterated. In addition, as he spoke no Spanish and lambasted his captors in English without fear of reproach, by the time of his release he had completely lost the ability to stop himself from being incredibly rude to people. He spoke continuously, often narrating his own life without noticing. When he settled in France, it was primarily to rediscover the joys of flavoursome foods. He did this by aggressively troughing his way through as many expensive meals as humanly possible. Fortunately for Henry, at the time of his release in 1968 the French still considered rudeness a blessing and a most enjoyable spectator sport. Coupled with his new snootier-than-thou attitude, Henry's gastronomic escapades quickly meant he became a media sensation across France. Inside a year of his release from prison, Henry was the most arrogant (and therefore most feared/respected) food critic in the country. His sneering stream of consciousness reviews, peppered with innuendo and disdainful hyperbole, appeared in several newspapers and were broadcast both over the radio and on TV. Ironically for a glutton, these were Henry's "salad days". In 1970 he married the hearing-impaired French poetess Isabella Sugoth. His insults, it seems, fell on deaf ears. Isabella gave birth to four children, most of whom grew up to have eating disorders, poor manners and subnormal self-esteem. In 1976 Henry agreed to narrate his horse-obsessed sister Eloise's vapid stage production "Horse Play", about the wartime recollections of a French cavalry officer's steed. Henry was replaced after opening night (as was the horse), due to his crass fourth wall destroying ad-libs explaining the horse protagonist's relief after several instances of on-stage flatulence and urination. Henry later cooked and ate the horse, though most of the audience had left by then. In 1979 Henry's past began to catch up with him: He was contacted by his illegitimate son Hector, whose mother had been Henry's leading lady in "El Cangrejo Mono de Probóscide de El Diablo". Henry soon travelled to Mexico, planning to bring the lad back with him to France. Whilst there, he hunted a Spider Monkey. He made a moving if bizarre declaration that by doing so he had finally rid himself of his terrible primate phobia. Unfortunately, hearing of his trip, a band of Mexican gangsters Henry still owed money hid in the bushes, disguised themselves as Hubris and attacked. Henry survived but his imagination was severed. Ever since he has been writing dull, unsuccessful "extended universe" continuations of his father Ralph's old sci-fi radio serials.

The Sterback Triplets: Henry Pierre Sterback (Part One)

2010-08-19T16:07:00.006+01:00

The only son of radio producer/director Ralph Sterback was born (one of triplets) in the exact middle of the English Channel during a doomed charity swim crossing attempt in 1925. This quirk of equidistant parturition geography meant that Henry and his two female siblings, Nancy and Eloise, were granted dual citizenship. Ralph Sterback used to joke (somewhat racistly) at dinner parties that his young children loved cheese due to their being "sort of quasi-Frogs". Traumatised as toddlers by the violent death (via Orang utan) of their first Stepmother at Bangor Zoo, the Sterback triplets understandably grew up terrified of primates. Raised by his second Stepmother Mimi, who was later found to be a dangerous member of the revolutionary Fauvist Movement, Henry was encouraged to express his anxieties through Art Therapy. Despite this, he grew into an awkwardly neurotic sociopathic loner. After attempts to become a serious and respected artist fell through (mainly due to his recurrent use of creepy simian imagery and an entrails border motif), Henry's father was able to land him steady work as a commercial artist, painting covers for the popular pulp magazine Zounds! Henry churned out weird space vistas, bug-eyed extraterrestrial monsters and scantily clad fantasy women for a couple of years before starting to pen his own short scientific romance and horror stories. Then in 1955 one of Henry's more nonsensical yarns, about the disastrous results of a science experiment involving gene splicing at an illegal laboratory run by Herr Satan, was optioned by a Mexican film studio and turned into an ultra low budget B-movie. Henry travelled to Mexico for the shoot in order to serve as designer and screenwriter but when the production stalled (due to an outbreak of Tequila Frenzy among the crew) he took over as both director and star, using funds borrowed from organised crime to complete the picture. With no distribution deal in place and the mob breathing down his neck and routinely breaking his bones, the desperate Henry managed to secure a screening for "El Cangrejo Mono de Probóscide de el diablo" at the 1956 Chihuahua Film Festival. Unfortunately, along with the fact Henry spoke no Spanish and had no experience of working in any capacity within the film industry, his peculiar vision for the film included the idea that the more eye-poppingly colourful it was, the more memorable and unique it would become. He had thus treated the film stock with a bizarre assortment of chemicals and radioactive particles! At the screening several people clawed out their own eyes and a number of epileptics went into mega-seizures. The film was immediately banned and all copies were ordered destroyed, with the Mexican authorities believing it might incite another Fauv Uprising. Henry spent 13 years in prison, writing many of the cheaper "bottle" episodes of cult TV show "Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere". On his release, he settled in France....

Boda Aelfweard

2010-08-12T16:53:00.005+01:00

Hailing from the mediaeval village of Hardsling-Withercrocket, which was burned down by The Black Prince for reasons known only to himself, Boda Aelfweard was a legally appointed 13th century child-scarer. Exuberant or rambunctious local children were kept in their place by Aelfweard's molesterly shenanigans, magically disappearing animal familiars and numerous colourful handkerchiefs. When The Black Prince razed the village, Aelfweard was enslaved and the once noble calling of child scaring was (counter-) perverted into a form of puerile annual entertainment. Thus clowning was born! Aelfweard died of sorrow and chronic dysentery some time later in a dank dungeon. The only evidence he ever lived at all was a stiff, diarrhoea-caked flannel that also carried an impression of his face paint. It was recently excavated from the site of the castle and goes on exhibition at the British Museum next year. They're calling it the Turd in Shroud.

Clarence Twilth

2010-08-11T15:29:00.001+01:00

Starting out as a creepy teenage hypnotist in Doctor Fleggen's All-Musical Super Saucy 'n' Sexful Sideshow of the Absurd, Clarence Algernon Twilth became a popular and successful motivational speaker. Using the considerable wealth he amassed to gain political power, in middle age Twilth entered public office as the Mayor of Oxhinge, Tennessee. He was regarded as an altruistic, philanthropic figure. Twilth's social policies were exceedingly popular, with the erection of a new Orphan Hospice being carried out almost immediately after he seized power. His attempts to "get the destitute off the streets once and for all" were also very welcome but apparently carried a sinister edge. On his death, the truth was discovered to be far more macabre and tragedy flavoured than anyone could have imagined. It seems Twilth used his position in the infamous nomadic sideshow to moonlight as an hypnotic travelling conman. Once he had enough dosh to scarper and set up a new life for himself, scarper promptly he did and with gusto. No records exist of his election in Oxhinge, so it is likely he brain-screwed his way to the top. When he died, apparently the hypnotic "spell" he had cast over the town for thirteen years was broken and the FBI were brought in to investigate. It seems Twilth's Orphan Hospice was in actuality a Pâté factory, exporting the smushed up bits of dead babies all over the world. The local homeless people had for years effectively been working in an abattoir whilst convinced they were going about their duties as medical personnel. At night they slept underground in the sewers, hypnotised into believing they lived together in an awesome old castle and happy in the knowledge that what they did for a living really made a difference.

Acarapi Ah Puch

2010-08-03T09:05:00.002+01:00

Responsible for the disappearances of half a dozen (or more) explorers during the early days of the 20th century, Acarapi Ah Puch (1880-1928) was a malicious Brazilian prankster who drew fake maps to various "lost" cities. He sold these to intrepid but dim fellows such as (horribly inbred) Lord Sir Henry Bacon Wolf Bacon, who promptly tromped off into the rainforest in search of somewhere that didn't exist...and were never seen or heard from again. Ah Puch split his time between the lucrative cartography scam, charity work and pimping out young girls from the comfort of his favourite chair. He met his end when, after twelve years of wandering Southwest Brazil looking for a fictitious "City Z", the ragged (and understandably cross) figure of explorer Sir Thomas Goshawk-Petticoat emerged from the rainforest riding a Capybara and demanding a refund. Goshawk-Petticoat had seemingly eaten all of the other members of his doomed expedition, including his young son Benedict. He claimed doing so was a kindness, a small mercy compared to the humid Hell he had had to endure. When Ah Puch rather rudely stated his policy of no refunds whilst brandishing a pimping knife and gesticulating "slashing" in the general direction of Sir Thomas's nadgers, the disappointed Englishman unleashed what witnesses later described as a "brutal, frenzied lethal technicolour shitstorm" of Ocelots and brightly coloured poison Tree Frogs.

Hamley Corkmulb

2010-07-15T23:27:00.003+01:00

Any traces of Hamley Corkmulb (1899-1998) are hanging in the proverbial memory-mouth of alternate history by only a thin sliver of pulpy yet stubborn metaphorical nerve fibre. The third and most abysmal actor to portray beyond awesome space jock Barnabus Harbleby in Ralph Sterback's so-bad-it's-good-then-bad-then-good-again radio serial The Space Krakens of Sector ZZ41X Must Die!, Corkmulb was seemingly an old ham when the world was new. A mean-spirited old time racist and drink-gambler, Corkmulb once bet his full house on a pair of vodkas. Shambling through the rest of his long life as a homeless bum and iconoclast, he occasionally found work playing tramps on stage or giving men angry hobo-handjobs in shady alleyways. In the late 1950s Corkmulb wrote the controversial science fiction novella "Oh! Look! Here Comes Your God (Snigger)", I Exclaimed Over A Wall In A Sarcastic Voice, a story so offensive to religious types that the Pope publicly wiped his arse on a copy before demanding Corkmulb's head on a spike. The similarly ill-advised Jihad-baiting short story From Hence You Came, Corkmulb's last published work, appeared in the "lost" issue of Zounds! magazine (all copies of which were pulped during the violent Delaware Catholic Uprising of 1959). Dealing unflinchingly with the utter crushing futility of human existence and intractable ages space travel would realistically take, the story revolved around the appearance on earth of a messianic gentleman from the future, whose messages of hopelessness, disillusionment and pessimism fuelled sweeping tides of depression, anarchy, the convulsive breakdown of society and eventual emergence of the dystopian culture he had attempted to escape. The chapter in which the time-lost protagonist categorically stated (and gave concrete evidence of) the absence of any other reality or afterlife also went down rather badly with pious norms. Denounced by pretty much everybody except the most cynical French Existentialists, Corkmulb spent most of the Sixties creating Punk and sliding under the radar. As a depressed old man prone to malodorously hanging around in pubs Corkmulb ultimately developed what he described as 'a feedback-loop during inter-Stella travel', which basically meant he slowly drank himself to death on premium lager.

Perry F Sparnow

2010-07-14T22:32:00.001+01:00

Likely born someplace in upper right England around 1972 (or thereabouts I should imagine), the feckless historian Pericles Francisco Sparnow allegedly won a scholarship to revered Nuthelwicks University whilst bobbing for apples at a village fete. Or at least that's what he claimed in his autobiography From Whence I Came, a handwritten pamphlet filled with lies and half-truths which he self-published at the age of twelve. My guess is he cheated somehow. An argumentative child genius, it is generally believed in academic circles, squares and rectangles that whilst he received a world class education, he squandered it entirely by being a lazy rotten and quarrelsome git. For one thing it is well known that he significantly set back the study of archaeology and palaeontology by covering up some bones that didn't correlate with his theories. He later owned up to that one in his best-selling stream of consciousness poem Kicking Sand On The Missing Link, claiming he occasionally felt guilty for not having rid the world of religion once and for all. As an historian Sparnow was less than ideal. He didn't care much for the truth, believing history often 'requires a lick of paint or some sexing up'. His essays, novels and theses were also riddled with examples of massive and groundless intuitive leaps. Beyond this, he was totally incapable of being objective, resorting to scribbling out information he didn't agree with (even if it was in library books, scriptures or etched in stone). As his work was nevertheless very popular up until the late 1990s, he is responsible for an awful lot of public ignorance and misinformation. He'd frankly have made a gifted spin doctor or propagandist. Disbarred from being a real historian after he was found to have accepted bribes, Sparnow slunk off and spent some time drunk on his couch watching any old late night tat, claiming more than once it was all just part of a bumpy but intentional transition to his preferred role as a film historian. It was at around 3am one morning, on an incomprehensible Middle Eastern channel that has since become defunct (along with the country of origin), that Sparnow first encountered Ralph Sterback's "The Space Krakens of Sector ZZ41X Must Die!" The original radio serial audio had been edited down (poorly) to a single nonsensical feature-length nub and set to a jerky mix of bad stop-motion animation and weird puppetry. In his booze and food poisoning augmented state of broken semi-conscious frenzy, Sparnow was immediately consumed by an overwhelming obsession to find out all he could about the diabolical absurdity parading before his senses. Thus a thoroughly unreliable, impassioned and irrational ZZ41X fanboy-historian was born! If proof is needed that he is still a contentious bastard, he was recently in the papers after he suffered such a massive onset of "nerd rage" whilst on stage at a convention that he bit a fan's ear off. What's more, he owes me money.

Thaddeus Yale

2010-07-05T17:46:00.003+01:00

In the final part of our Giant Tortoise Triptych or Snimpleton Island Trilogy, let us focus on the convoluted and patently impossible life (or rather existence) of wicked Victorian scientist Thaddeus Yale. A tempestuously spirited evil genius who had no time for people and enjoyed torturing animals, Yale was so rude and sneery that he was once suspected of being French! A chronic wife beater, though only of other men's wives, he was regarded as a huge prick around old London town. Devoting his considerable scientific intellect to Teratology (the study of monsters), in his early career Yale developed a pain killer from the saliva of the vampire bat. Unfortunately and nonsensically, the drug turned ordinary human test subjects (well, the poor) into werewolves. Responsible for an outbreak of both "blood gut" and "explosive botty" through his questionable purveying of diseased rare and exotic meats (off-cuts of his experiments on Giant Armadillos and cavemen found in a glacier), Yale was shipped off to the remote outpost on Snimpleton Island where he became fixated by tales of a legendary fog monster. Through his systematic, inventive and experimental mistreatment of the lone surviving Giant Tortoise Peppered George and a number of other generic laboratory animals, Yale correctly ascertained that the island rested on a crease in the very fabric of space-time. Constructing a distinctly steam-punk/sci-fi looking (predominantly copper) device inside a disused well, Yale repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to squeeze test animals backwards or forwards in time through a wee crack. At the end of his exceedingly long life, the now blind (but still curiously well armed) Peppered George broke free of his midget captors and tumbled down the well into the heart of the machine, the impact and detonation of his explosives causing a very shiny and causality-confounding temporal anomaly. Yale, contemporaneously attempting to recalibrate the heavy water matrix by whacking it sharply with the heel of a shoe, was also caught by the phenomenon and apparently liquified. Due chiefly to the resultant noxious smell and "bowel soup" mess, the well remained disused until becoming the site of hydrogen bomb tests during the 1950s. Somehow, don't ask me how, all of these seemingly unrelated events conspired fourth dimensionally to make Yale the monster he had previously sought. Appearing intermittently and out of linear sequence, a wibbly gestalt entity formed from Yale's consciousness and that of Peppered George haunts Snimpleton Island for all eternity. Radiation from the H-bomb detonations spills out of the wandering anomaly whenever the apparition appears and (as a bit of a predestination paradox) therefore likely brought about the legend of the killer fog in the first place. Happily though the island was recently purchased by Yumcorp and the "Thaddeus Yale/Tortoise Time Ghost" is now a popular and lucrative tourist attraction. Obviously, due to the deadly radiation, those taking the tour have to remain on a boat at a safe distance off shore and observe through telescopes. Mercifully this also means they can't hear Yale's screams.

Bonnie Clumptwinch

2010-06-29T16:47:00.002+01:00

Enjoying a meteoric rise to pseudo-stardom, Bonnie Annabeth Clumptwinch (1985-2013) was a talentless, charmless offal sock of a so-called "celeb" during the post-postmodern era. Beginning in that cursed barren vacuum year between the final season of insanely popular reality TV show "Large Voyeur" and its controversial successor, Bonnie's career as willing paparazzi bait and gross-looking but 'up for anything' media whore lasted approximately four years. She initially came to the attention of TV audiences whilst working as a veterinary orthodontist who liked to perform radical, unnecessary surgeries on cranky, non-anaesthiatised zoo animals. In February 2013 Bonnie's death, a harrowing improvised primetime gas chamber "snuff" set to pop music, made the vast majority of watchers vomit into their hands whilst clutching their own consciences and is generally regarded as the death knell of reality television. Her perception-bending Narcissism, damaged past as a test subject (for an experimental anti-rape drug that forced her vagina to grow monstrous, internal defence quills) and paradoxical "promiscuous ladette/simpering victim" persona meant she was a perfect fit for reality TV. Coupled with a self-awareness rating of -3 (or faecal brown on the old colour coded test papers), a beard of freckles that had to be covered by thick make-up at all times and a fondness for "torture porn" horror movies, Bonnie's personality profile was exactly what evil TV executive Jack Sprout was after. You see, in the troubled months immediately following the Large Voyeur finale and initial broadcast of its proposed replacement, executives were in a blind panic as to how they could possibly sink TV as a medium any lower. Enter Jack Sprout, the most wicked TV executive of all time, who pitched "Death Camp Live", a televised atrocity experience guaranteed to make for uncompromising viewing. The rest, as they say, is alternate history!

Hedgerow Charlie

2010-06-24T21:40:00.002+01:00

For an indeterminate number of years Charles Garth Alan Deep-Teeth was a sharp, pretentious nobhead suit. As a ruthless advertising executive he oversaw the society-defiling introduction of controversial and "short-lived" suicide ads, in which people with fatal illnesses were given money for their families and then comically exploded into the shape of a company's logo. Charles lived a life of loose cars (he owned a second hand automobile showroom outside Putney) and fast women, both dating sprinter Maureen Spleen-Clocklog and infrequently killing hookers (due to his mild disdain for the game of rugby). Seriously, though, he permanently "disappeared" a number of local prostitutes. Dang it, those girls had families, you heartless swines! Charles continued to up his dastardly recreational drugs intake until a major brain wrong induced a vision, the exact nature of which is described on page twelve of his autobiography. Unfortunately, this seven volume tome was carved haphazardly into an assortment of trees in a make-believe language that only Charles could decipher. It was shortly after his mysterious "epiphany" that Charles began his bid to be the first man to circumnavigate the globe by hedgerows alone. I thought he was still at it but the other day when I got on the bus after the football match he was infesting the seat behind me, a crumpled, broken, wretched heap of inhuman detritus. He initially tried to grill me but realising I was not a cheese sandwich resorted instead to communicating his life story to me via gusts of potent, malodorous tramp breath impregnated with the stale unwelcome aromas of cigarettes, dirty mouth and cheap sun warmed cider. He confided in me that he had recently taken up a new position (presumably on all fours) as a "man dingo" for the local urban foxes. He didn't seem ashamed, though he described the damage wrought on his anus by their barbed penises as resembling "a box of smashed meat nightmares".

Yasmine Wooftipop

2010-06-16T22:41:00.003+01:00

Yasmine Wooftipop (1978-2012) was a very poor conceptual artist and a joyless feminist to boot. Yasmine talked in circles, loving the sound of her own yappy futility. She excelled at making public displays of her outrage that were so nonsensical or convoluted nobody could understand her point. This was doubtless because, much like an unsharpened pencil fresh from the box, she had none. One desperate incident saw her barrel onto the stage during an all male performance of Swan Lake dressed as a Flamingo whilst texting her mates. A year later, she tried the same stunt again during The Nutcracker and it was curtains!* Yasmine is perhaps most infamous for the protracted court case which followed the grisly discovery of two starved corpses at her shared accommodation. Apparently she had promised to cook for her flatmates but had simply never returned. As she had also never done any washing up (as a feminist statement), the poor wretches couldn't even cook themselves anything. Yasmine was ultimately exonerated, when she told the court the meal she had planned to cook was purely conceptual anyway. It was assumed by the Judge that she would shortly disappear up her own arse.

*During the "end times" prophesied by the Mayans, Yasmine was struck dead by an asteroid the exact size, shape and colour of a yam. It was hurled by the heavily pregnant, bereaved partner of one of her former flatmates and daubed with the words "vapid pillock" in what tasted like colostrum.

Sally Firth

2010-06-07T18:27:00.005+01:00

Sally Firth was an incompetent bitch and she rarely did the things she promised to do, leading several members of her family to die of volcanic frustration haemorrhages. One young niece even burst into flames from stress. Sally is memorable only because she invented a range of comically malfunctioning Shakespeare action figures that were briefly in the news. Her Ophelia doll, which went stupendously insane when you told it that its father had died, was recalled for terrifying consumers. Further setbacks, including the lewd Bottom toy (which owing to a miscommunication with the Korean manufacturers had a winking arse face where its ass head should have been) ensured Sally went out of business... but not before she created the spectacularly ill-conceived 12" Shylock figurine, which was supposed to "bleed" when pricked with a needle, "laugh" when tickled and "die" when poisoned with a capsule of cyanide. As you might expect, including cyanide capsules with children's toys was controversial to say the least and resulted in a number of fatalities amongst toddlers with oral fixations. Yet the worst malfunction with the Shylock doll was in its sophisticated artificial intelligence, which was programmed to act on perceived "wrongs" with a number of "revenge" responses. In most cases, the carnage was short lived, with each doll resetting once it successfully recovered a pound of flesh from its owner.

Anne Jenkins

2010-05-29T11:19:00.004+01:00

The tangled web of deceit spun by consummate liar (and purported quadruple or quintuple agent) Anechka Aistov is difficult to follow and more than likely complete nonsense, gathered as it was from multiple conflicting tattered, battered and dog-eared sources. These sources, including recently declassified Cold War collector's plates, previously suppressed kitsch tupperware and Soviet gravy granules of the period, are of dubious validity. What is known is that under the false identity "Anne Jenkins", Aistov worked successfully as a breakfast cereal mascot designer in the 1950s. Previous to this she was educated as a product designer in Britain during the late 1940s and married to the architect Matthew Jones. According to archival interviews, gullible Jones had no idea his wife was really a Soviet spy, passing secret encrypted messages to the Kremlin through the inclusion in the products she designed of a sophisticated colour symbol sequence hidden in the process printing dots. During this apparently happy marriage, Aistov was witnessed by several medical staff giving birth to two children in Guntwich Municipal Hospital. How she did this and managed not to raise the suspicions of said doctors remains something of a mystery. Up and about, even clamouring to get back to work mere minutes after each birth (though the second was a caesarian section), Aistov continued supplying her insidious messages until 1957. At this time she was arrested for hiding Red propaganda in plain sight on her cereal boxes. For example Happy Mouse, the benevolent mascot of capitalist conglomerate YumCorp, brandished a hammer and sickle from June to October 1956. Some analysts have said that the toll of looking after two young children whilst keeping up her front at home, at work and operating as a spy was too much for her. Psychologists have claimed that she wanted to be caught. Whatever the answer, her third identity, which many conjecture to have been her "real" one, was only uncovered after "her" incarceration in 1958. At this time Aistov was found not only to be a man, but to be a Chinese spy, one Chen Dingbang (roughly translated, "tremendous protector of the country"). Several scientific and engineering teams interrogated Dingbang, attempting to ascertain how he had passed as a woman for years, right under the nose (and penis) of his husband without undergoing hormone therapy (at that time itself science fiction) or a sex change. There was also the small matter of Dingbang "giving birth". He was later tied to a child trafficking ring that had its headquarters in Australia. It is believed he acquired his son and daughter from this organisation. His "vagina" was sculpted using a combination of meats he bought from the local butcher (not a supermarket, so he wasn't all bad) and marzipan, attached by a complex system of rods, pulleys and fishing line. Similarly his baby bump was simulated using smushed together Scotch Eggs. Dingbang remained in prison until the end of the Cold War, having been charged with espionage, subversion of the innocent (through his cereal box propaganda) and gay marriage. His exact whereabouts now are unknown. It is impossible to sum up any life, let alone one so confusing but I guess he proved men CAN multi task after all!

Robert Honeymonklin

2010-05-25T21:10:00.002+01:00

Rob Honeymonklin was a proud midget brigadeer stationed at the Teratology outpost on Snimpleton Island. This was long after the business with the killer fog but long before the Hydrogen bomb tests. As a high ranking member of the military personnel, charged with turning "monsters" into valuable assets for King and Country, he personally oversaw the weaponising of five Giant Tortoises. There was Nefarious George, Menstruating George, Loathsome George, Peppered George (who we'll come to eventually) and Boy George. Despite Honeymonklin's best efforts, these big old buggers did not make for reliable warriors and responded very poorly to combat training. Honeymonklin was a tough drill sergeant and treated the Tortoises very poorly. After Menstruating George got broody and buried a heap of cannonballs right before a French invasion, believing them in her hormone-addled state to be her eggs, Honeymonklin had her turned into a cauldron of stringy broth. During the ensuing French assault Honeymonklin was shot in the leg and deliberately trampled by Nefarious George, who was secretly in love with Menstruating George and couldn't stand to be without her. Though the French attack was ultimately repelled by the rest of the Tortoise-mounted midget brigade and the subterranean Naked Mole Rat reserve suicide strike team, Honeymonklin only partially recovered and walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. Weirdly he also picked up a lisp. He wasted no time in having Nefarious George face a firing squad, on charges of dereliction of duty. This only served to enrage Boy George, who was secretly in love with Nefarious George and couldn't bear to be without him! A lot of unrequited Tortoise love in the air on Snimpleton Island back then, I guess. Anyway, after a few years of treating the remaining Tortoises like crap and developing gout from regularly imbibing too much Port, the now permanently drunk Honeymonklin recklessly entered Loathsome George in the annual Snimpleton Island Charity Animal Destruction Derby. That gatling gun sure made short work of the herd of Persian cat grenadiers! Honeymonklin, who acted as jockey and gunner, survived mostly intact but Loathsome George was killed by (of all things) the poison spur of a Fiji Mermaid. Honeymonklin finally met his end when Peppered George (the lonesome survivor of all Honeymonklin's bile and cruelty, his shell riddled with holes from Honeymonklin's rifle shells after years of drunken pot shots) crept up behind him and slit his throat.

Sir Klinacre Wattledge

2010-05-23T20:24:00.004+01:00

Not long ago Klinacre Wattledge was the publisher of several smutty books. His empire began with the acquisition of legendary nudey detective magazine Zounds! in a drunken game of Tuck (the rules of which have long been forgotten). Whilst in drink he often lamented to anyone who would listen his grave disappointment at not being able to fight in the Boar War (a systematic culling of shaggy forest pigs). Therefore when the Second World War began, Wattledge (a keen biter, puncher, rowdy drinker, throttler and all-round violent piece of work) was naturally super happy to stomp over to Germany and give the Nazis a pasting. That he did so as a civilian was considered unconventional to say the least. Unfortunately, his grasp of geography and foreign languages being of a poor standard, Wattledge found himself in occupied Holland. During his time waging a one-man guerilla war he is known to have committed at least seven crimes against humanity, many of them taking place long after the war had ended and all but one of them being perpetrated against innocent bystanders whilst Wattledge himself was cunningly disguised as a windmill. Take that, Don Quixote! According to Perry F. Sparnow's biography "Warrior Poet With A Dirty Mind", he remained elusive for the next few decades, communicating his intentions regarding his various magazines to acting editor Wilma Zwerticoff via so-called "remote control". In fact, Wattledge sent irregular sized handmade postcards featuring big bosomed science fiction heroines at infrequent intervals. On the back of these cards was always daubed a sexually suggestive haiku in what turned out to be feline menstrual blood. Most of the haikus were never published and Zwerticoff later successfully sued Wattledge for sexual harassment. After wandering about mainland Europe for a really long time with no idea what was going on, Wattledge suddenly reappeared outside Scotland Yard in 1974 clutching the well preserved noggin of Adolf Hitler. He claimed to have sawed it off right after he forced the cyanide into Hitler's mouth, back in the Berlin bunker. Adolf's infamous singular testicle was found tucked under the dry tongue and later misappropriated by freaky Neo-Nazi scientists hellbent on creating the Fuhrer's genetic offspring. That didn't go down well, trust me. Wattledge was knighted and spent a few years as a minor celebrity. During this time he began writing very popular but disturbing spicy samurai fiction for one of his bawdy magazines. When his 'Dutch follies' eventually came to light in September 2007 (he was a blabbermouth), Wattledge was detained in the Tower of London and demanded a summary execution. Misunderstanding his last request, his jailers kept him on death row for ten months, fed him nothing but roast beef and then hanged him at high noon on a particularly sunny July day. For his part in assassinating Hitler, Wattledge was given a state funeral. Having lost his money in the Zwerticoff harassment case, he was laid to rest in a pauper's grave on the site of what is now the new Burger Clown fast food restaurant. You know the one. By the GUM clinic.

Loretta Hopscotch

2010-05-18T22:15:00.005+01:00

Loretta Hopscotch was another granddaughter of legendarily crummy producer-director Ralph Sterback. As an infant she once crept on set of Sterback's tearjerker "Flow My Tears, The Yeti Yodeled" and her soul was supposedly captured on film. This led to the urban myth about the kid in the shot who isn't supposed to be there and "ooh, spooky spooky ghost child" mildly hysterical nonsense. Loretta's repugnant step Mother went deranged due to her womb and brain switching places during pregnancy, resulting in her pushy-pushy attitude and monthly nostril bleeds. From slightly before the exact instant of her birth (through her Mother's large mouth, nitpickers) Loretta was forced to enter foetus and children's glamour modeling pageants, before these were banned everywhere but the American Midwest and Little Cambodia, Swansea. Unaware of the controversy that surrounds the manipulative sexualisation of kids by big brands and faceless corporations (she had never heard any of Billie Piper's pre-anorexia/mid-puberty hits or seen the strutty-trotting-cantering and lipstick-daubed tween gestalt nightmare known transiently as the S-Club Juniors), Loretta went along mindlessly with her Mother's imbecilic and slightly across the borderline perverse schemes. When she began to look a wee bit less like a frightening china doll from that infamous episode of "Far-out Tales of Darkness Whispered Hoarsely From Nowhere", her Mother had her shot full of the growth-inhibiting hormone "Negative Space" (usually administered to Ligers in zoos with cages of a limited size), which rather aggressively shrunk the interstitial spaces between her organs. This resulted in Loretta developing incredibly abnormal proportions and a number of health issues that would severely screw her over in later life. Yet simultaneously it made her perfect for modeling! Dining on reduced calorie water sucked from damp napkins, with a tenuous familial link to somebody mildly famous (the by comparison saintly Ralph Sterback), it wasn't long before Loretta was offered her own cookery show. Then a "fly-on-the-wall" reality show. Then a book deal. Etc, etc. Needless to say, to the frenetic and parasitic paparazzi community she was mana from Heaven. You couldn't pass a newsstand without glimpsing her latest exploits on the cover of glossy magazines and tabloid rags. When her popularity waned, she released a sex tape or married a malleable dullard. She became known for her sensuality, which was a bad joke. One of her countless disposable ex-husbands once derided her efforts in the sack, stating without Photoshop and the miracles worked by make-up artists, Loretta was 'about as sexually compelling as an iron railing'. Eventually the years of cosmetic surgery she had become dependent upon to retain her pseudo-childish looks cost her her empty life. Due to innumerable face lifts and tummy tucks, botox injections, rubber booby implants and so on, Loretta's ear-drums had become misplaced somewhere about her body. Whilst attending the funeral of Sir Klinacre Wattledge, she therefore failed to hear a 21 gun salute over the sound of her own roaring, despondent vagina. That or she was simply too off-kilter to get out of the way. Loretta was shot to pieces and publicly mourned. There's a Facebook group calling for her to be canonised. Which would be a step up from being shot to death by ceremonial rifles, I guess. She was posthumously honoured for her contribution to the death of popular culture by being eaten on reality TV as part of a "bush tucker trial". I bet she tasted vile.

Wildcat Blossom

2010-05-08T11:17:00.003+01:00

For this next entry we must carefully separate fact from legend. Come, let us whirl the centrifugal salad spinner of elucidation! Adsila Abooksigun (roughly translated, Wildcat Blossom) was a dishy bitch pirate of mixed Native American and English ancestry. Initially a child slave of the fearsome Altsoba tribe after the forceful assimilation and impregnation of a small breakaway British colony of radical proto-feminists, at age 14 she was chosen to become the wife of a neighbouring chieftain. Not fancying being routinely nobbled by a rotund paedophile, Adsila tricked her husband into becoming the "chief" ingredient of a spit roast on their wedding night. By this of course I mean she got him liquored up, then drove a large greased spike up his bottom and out through his mouth before burning and eating him. The next morning Adsila claimed to have inherited the chieftain's powers of leadership, together with his acid indigestion, and declared herself God-Empress. She spent the next few years kicking the snot out of the surrounding tribes, conquering them and selling them to the Spanish as slaves or lampshades. She also began to trade with the British in tobacco, weapons and rare bubblegum cards. After personally mud-wrestling control of the privateering vessel The Gnarly Mermaid from its previous captain, she ensured absolute loyalty in her ragtag crew by personally cutting off their nut sacks with a blunt tomahawk. It is said the main sail of The Gnarly Mermaid was stitched together from scrotums and scalps, though this cannot be verified. Noticing a hole in the market, Adsila started supplying animals to the military and scientific research outpost on Snimpleton Island, in the Atlantic Ocean. After delivering a contingent of Giant Tortoises to the midget brigade, Adsila was double crossed and became a victim of the slowest cavalry charge in military history (or at least since King Louis IX's legendary Giant Land Snail Mounted Infantry).