183: The Lone Muckraker’s Thanksgiving

There are three (3) NEW colored artworks and three (3) black & white sketches for DISCIPLE members. Sign up & log in to view to images by visiting our secret fine dining establishment. For more details on membership tiers, ways to support the site and how to purchase comics/collections, click here. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. 

Happy Thanksgiving! Why does it seem that I keep putting out Thanksgiving themed updates? Perhaps there's something that intersects visually the image of a splayed turkey and that of a luscious young fille. As a note, I will be putting out 2 more updates this month, but with enough artwork to make up for three. I also plan to begin putting updates earlier in the month instead of towards the end to combat this procrastination.

This update will touch on the events of 1919 that I had posted a year ago. See Carte du Jour 148 and Carte du Jour 149. Right now, this is still up, but don't hold your breath as one day, I may soon archive these posts when I consolidate them eventually into a potential comic or an illustrated novel. I'm starting to prefer the approach of a creepy-pasta style 1st person narrative from the point of view of an outsider looking in as I feel it adds to the mystery of the Tales of the Vanished world. So starting from now, I will starting putting on masks, drawing the curtains close, as it pertains to the secret society, as a build this world and its lore. I've learned that the more mysterious these characters who inhabit this world, the sexier and effective the tale.

Let the shadows come alive!

So I will be introducing a tale that follows an anonymous current-day investigative journalist, (whose pseudonym shall be revealed on a later time), as he begins to unravel this dark conspiracy of human flesh feasters, and its history.

Journal entry of freelance investigative journalist, Anon, 24 November 2020.

It is Thanksgiving and I can't look at this holiday the same way again. And it's not just because I'm stuck in my God damn apartment because of the pandemic. The strangeness of my ex's disappearance and the rabbit hole that opened up ever since is beginning to lose me some friends. My family thinks I'm crazy, maybe even heartless to suggest certain horrors that could have happened to her, and most of all, my faith in the world I used to know is shaken. I feel a paradigm shift happening. I know I don't have hard evidence and this is all conjecture but I really feel I'm on to something. There's something there just behind that corner. I can see its shadow. I keep seeing stuff between the spaces. And now, I feel it's best that I just keep quiet, do my work, keep digging some more and lay low. Come to think of it, this lockdown has been a great excuse for me to do this. I don't have to put on a brave face and hide these horrors  to my relatives at the dinner table.

Real journalists are a dying breed, the muckrakers who get down and dirty to find the truth. It's all quick click-bait now and pandering outrage. And that's why they're winning. They want us to be sheep... or to channel the spirit of the holidays, we're like turkey led to a yearly massacre. Watch Thursday night football, clamor for deals on Black Friday... buy now, save big, what's new on TV, anything to keep us off their trail so they can hunt indiscriminately.

I'm a vegetarian now. Have been for a few days now since the blinds had been pulled away. I can't bear eating meat these days. How could we not see? How have we willingly allow ourselves to be trapped in the "matrix", and loving it? That's the discouraging part of it all. We put on our blindfolds to the horrors of what we are doing to the turkey, the pig or cow... slaughtered for meat on our dinner table, eaten by those who couldn't even stand the sight of blood. If they knew what these people could be doing to the missing girls, how when they gorge on a piece of turkey leg, that somewhere else, that sick men may be eating the leg of a young woman in the same way?

And this brings me back to this old handwritten journal from the old spinster's grandfather. She had been too senile to notice and has no offspring to inherit this infernal tome. What I can get out of this, I'm not sure yet but this is likely to be another puzzle piece to the larger picture. My gut feeling is that something did happen in that Manhattan apartment building in 1919. The timelines align. The clues may be vague, but they are there. The missing socialite. What I know about the people there and the occult practices and symbolisms I'm starting to uncover. I just need more time to connect the dots, dig some more and get to the heart of darkness before these devil worshippers kill many more.

Journal entry of Anon, 26 November 2020. (Private addendum)

I couldn't sleep again. Nightmares haunt me. Things, unimaginable, so dark I cannot relive it and write them down in the main journal. Things like what did they do to the corpse before eating it? Are they necrophiles too, having their way with their bodies before eating them. Did they have their heads on, or off? Am I going crazy? Over time, with absolute wealth and power, I wonder if it conceivable that I could become like these men? Men who started out as innocent babes, living the good life, slowly and surely tempted and seduced over time, uncover their latent hungers.

My hard on disturbs me. What's wrong with me? Is this a fucked up part of just being male? We may be evolved, but deep down, we’re still animals. Some become predators, others become prey. Enough about that. I'm going to see a friend of mine I haven't seen in a while if he can hook me up to some Benzos.

Here lies some bonus artwork from commissions and panel pieces of future comics. The first being a nice leg of "lamb", fresh on a deli's wooden tray as if ready to be roasted.

The 2nd being the next progression of a commissioned piece, now in shades and lighting.

Hope you are well fed and sated this festive week. Bon appétit!