Six Strings (comic story)

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Six Strings
First page of the story.
Contents
Villain(s)	Man in black
Featuring	Gabriel Singer Mike Drummer Young man
Setting	unnamed universe
Technical Specs
Length	12 pages (5 extant)
Format	Black & White
Crew
Writer(s)	Alasdair Watson
Artist(s)	Nelson Evergreen
Background
Dates	June 1, 2002 (print release) July 2002 (online release according to One's A Crowd) October 2002 (online release according to Black Ink)
Original link	[1] [2] [3] [4]

Six Strings (styled as Six Strings... on the story's first page, and referred to at one point during production as Six Strings That Drew Blood) is a partially-lost standalone comic story written by Alasdair Watson and drawn by Nelson Evergreen for release at the UK Comics Festival in 2002. It is thought to have featured a cameo appearance by Jenny Everywhere, which would make it a contender for the title of first Jenny story to have been released in a print medium.

Contents

Plot

As the story is largely lost, this summary is only a partial description of the events that can be gleaned from the surviving pages

In a suburban neighborhood, a young man approaches a man cloaked entirely in shadow, then pulls a knife on him with the intention of stealing the guitar which he carries. The man responds with an eerie grin, saying "You don't want this guitar", before slashing at the young man with a knife of his own, disemboweling him and leaving him to die in the street.

Later, two young musicians, a singer and her boyfriend Gabriel, share an intimate moment in the backstage area of a nightclub, encouraging each other, before going on stage to perform - she as the lead singer and he on guitar - alongside two other band members; one playing bass and the other on drums.

Later still, the man in black is seen walking away from an establishment which appears to be called the Blue Bar. It bursts into flames behind him as he strides calmly across the parking lot, and the building is quickly consumed by smoke.

In the city, Gabriel and Mike, the bassist from his band, pass a wall covered in posters for a band called 'Blaise', featuring an image which echoes the appearance of the burning bar. Gabriel, noticing the posters, begins bitterly talking about the fact that "she" (presumably his former girlfriend, the singer) apparently "sold [them] out" by "[sleeping] her way in". Mike replies that Gabriel is just angry because he couldn't do the same, noting that "none of [them] were going to make it on talent" and that "she" knew that as well as he did. He further says that, though they might have gotten a deal if she hadn't left the band, they would never have gotten as popular as she has on their talent alone. Gabriel replies that "it's not just that".

Later, Gabriel is sitting on a park bench next to the man in black at night, seemingly confessing his emotional concerns. When he mentions his girlfriend, the man replies that he's "heard that one before". They sit in silence for a moment, and then the man hands Gabriel his guitar. Gabriel, shocked, wakes up from the apparent dream, sitting on the same park bench in the morning, with no man or guitar in sight. Confused, he states that the situation is "weird".

Worldbuilding

Universes

• This story entirely takes place in one universe, home to a city housing an establishment called the Blue Bar.

Other

• The man in black seemingly possesses supernatural abilities, possibly involving making Faustian bargains with people to allow them to obtain musical success. He is implied to be the Devil.

• Gabriel's former girlfriend's new band is called Blaise. According to the posters advertising it, their concert was to be held on August the 28th.

Behind the scenes

Six Strings was first released as a print comic which was given out at the UK Comics Festival in Bristol between June 1 and 2 of 2002. It was advertised as being bound with a comic called Escapement by Stuart Nathan and Dan Barker, which was described on Six Strings author Alasdair Watson's personal website as "a story about what happens when clocks stop." Watson's website indicated that the intention was that the story would be released both in print and, later, online. This print release is no longer available for purchase and no copies have been located.

The story was later released digitally on Opi8.com, a collaborative art project/online literary publication which described itself as "a site focusing on the promotion of artists and writers whose work expresses the dark extremes of human nature", in either July or October of 2002.

Opi8.com went offline in 2015, taking most of its hosted material with it, excepting that which had been saved by the Internet Archive. This archived material included five out of the twelve pages of Six Strings - pages 1, 3, 6, 7, and 10 - which are all that are currently known to survive of the story.

The original Opi8 'Sequence' page (a hub for sequential art) through which the story could be accessed featured the following description for the story:

"You don't want this guitar," the man in black says. but maybe Gabriel wants it -- maybe he'll do anything to get his hands on those Six Strings.

—Opi8.com description

The first page of the story features the following quote:

"If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the crossroads is. A big black man will walk up there at the stroke of midnight and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it..."

—LeDell Johnson

This is a quote from the Reverend LeDell Johnson, himself quoting his brother, blues player Tommy Johnson, given to researcher David Evans in 1966. The specific version of the quote used, which is slightly truncated and credited only to LeDell Johnson rather than his brother, appears to have been taken from the 1995 book The History of the Blues by Francis Davis.

The full quote as given in most other sources (with slight variations depending on the source) is as follows:

He said the reason he knowed so much, said he sold hisself to the devil. I asked him how. He said, “If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little 'fore twelve o’clock that night so you’ll know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself... A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned how to play anything I want.” And he could. He used to play anything, don’t care what it was. Church song. You could sing any kind of tangled up song you want to, and I’ll bet you he would play it.

—Rev. LeDell Johnson

The full quote would seem to suggest that the man in black who features throughout the story should be understood to be the Devil, or a similar Faustian deal-making entity.

Production notes

During the process of the story's creation, Watson posted several updates on his personal website, Black Ink. The first mention of the story came in January of 2002, when Watson wrote:

I did the page breakdowns for SIX STRINGS, got a few pages of script written, and nailed down the storytelling approach I want to use for the project. With any luck, I’ll break the back of it tonight…

—Alasdair Watson

In February of 2002, Watson wrote the following, referring to the story by the apparent working title The Six Strings That Drew Blood for the first and only time:

I’ve just finished the script to SIX STRINGS THAT DREW BLOOD. I’m more or less banging this out to give my fingers something to do while I wait for my brain to settle into a new gear, so I can get on and write some thing else.

—Alasdair Watson

Also in February, a teaser page was created for the story, which featured the LeDell Johnson quote used in the story as well as the following description:

SIX STRINGS. A short story about guitars, teenage heartbreak and desperation. A twelve page, four beat blues comic, with art by Neil Evans. Coming to the the UK Comics Festival in Bristol this year, and then to a website near you.

—Alasdair Watson

In April of that year, Watson posted that he had "tightened the dialogue on SIX STRINGS". In May, he posted a to-do list which contained "Write a few hundred words for the inside back cover of SIX STRINGS" (whether this inside back cover material, presumably for the print edition, was ever completed is unknown, as the cover material for the story was not featured on the Opi8.com release from which the surviving pages of the story were retrieved). Later in that month, he wrote that "SIX STRINGS is done, and ready to give out at Bristol", in a post titled "Fold And Staple, Fold And Staple.".

In June of 2002, he posted a post titled "Back from Bristol.", writing:

SIX STRINGS seemed to go down well, which was very pleasing.

—Alasdair Watson

In October of 2002, Watson posted that the comic had been released on Opi8.com, writing: {Quotebox|SIX STRINGS, the short comic I wrote earlier in the year is now up at Opi8. ... 12 pages, a nasty little blues story of teenage heartbreak and bloody guitars, written by me, with art by Mr Nelson Evergreen.|Alasdair Watson}}

In May of 2003, Watson wrote of Six Strings:

This time last year I was sorting out the last bits of SIx Strings, a [comic] about wanting to achieve – about drive and ambition, and the things we throw away for it. I wrote Six Strings with a bellyful of coffee and a headful of booze, and I think it shows. It creaks in places, but there’s a drive in it that I like. Passion.

—Alasdair Watson

Interpreting the plot

As the story is, in its present form, largely missing, it is impossible to know what the full plot of the story may have been. However, from what is present, it is possible to extrapolate what the rest of the story might have contained. It seems likely that the singer in Gabriel's band, his former girlfriend (who was likely given a name at some point in the full story), may have made a deal with the man in black to attain success, with this possibly being the significance behind the scene in which the man in black appears to burn a bar down matching the imagery and name of the singer's new band, 'Blaise'. It is unclear from the surviving pages whether the night club at which the band is initially seen performing and the 'Blue Bar' which is later burned down are the same location, although this seems like a possibility. Additionally, it is clear that Gabriel proceeds to make a deal of his own with the man in black as a result of his bitterness and heartbreak felt towards his former girlfriend, the outcome of which is not apparent from the surviving pages, but which is, given the stated dark theming of the Opi8 website, likely less than positive in nature. All of this is merely speculation, as the full story has yet to be recovered.

The Jenny Everywhere connection

Although she does not appear to feature on any of the surviving pages, the full story is thought to have contained a cameo appearance by Jenny Everywhere. This is owing to its inclusion on artist Nelson Evergreen's now-offline webpage 'One's A Crowd', which appears to have been a list of the stories which he illustrated that contained appearances by Jenny, having also featured links to the Barbelith forums and the original QueerGranny Jenny Everywhere website, as well as the following description:

Not only does Jenny Everywhere exist in all dimensions simultaneously, she's also an open source / copyright free comic character at the hub of a project currently picking up speed over on Barbelith Underground.

—Nelson Evergreen

Aside from Six Strings, the stories listed on this page included the Jenny-centric stories Name's Not Down and Damn Fine Hostile Takeover - two of the Barbelith Originals - as well as Late Night Queuing, an otherwise non-Jenny-related story into which Evergreen had inserted a Jenny cameo. It is assumed thanks to its inclusion on the page that Six Strings was a similar situation to the latter, a non-Jenny-centric story into which Evergreen inserted a cameo. However, as the page presumably containing this cameo does not appear to have survived, it is impossible to be entirely certain.

Evergreen's page featured its own description of the story, which was as follows:

Things are getting mighty strange down at the crossroads; Rock'n'Roll in the Twilight Zone, courtesy of one of the brains behind the excellent NinthArt.com

—Nelson Evergreen

If Jenny does in fact appear in the full version of the story, then this would make it, in its UK Comics Festival release, the earliest known Jenny Everywhere story to have been released in a print medium, taking the title from COMIC: No Café This Time, which was released in print in 2003, a year later - although the latter comic remains the earliest known Jenny-centric story to have appeared in print.

Read online

As the original host is now offline, we reproduce the five surviving pages of the story below:

• 

  Page 1/12

• 

  Page 3/12

• 

  Page 6/12

• 

  Page 7/12

• 

  Page 10/12

In addition to the five surviving pages of the story, there are two extant thumbnail-sized images taken from pages which are otherwise missing. One was the thumbnail used for the story on Opi8.com, and features Gabriel's girlfriend looking to her left. The other was the thumbnail used on Nelson Evergreen's One's A Crowd page, and features what seems to be the man in black's bloody hand plucking at the strings of his guitar.

• 

  Thumbnail from Opi8.com

• 

  Image from One's A Crowd