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Six Strings (styled as Six Strings... on the story's first page) is a partially-lost standalone comic story written by Alasdair Watson and drawn by Nelson Evergreen. It is thought to have featured a cameo appearance by Jenny Everywhere.
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.
Other
- 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 released 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",[2] in April 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:[3]
| "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.[4]
The full quote as given in most other sources (with slight variations depending on the source) is as follows:[5]
| 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.
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:[1]
| 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:[1]
| 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 |
Read online
As the original host is now offline, we reproduce the four 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 four 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. As the original host is now offline, we reproduce the four surviving pages of the story below:
Thumbnail from Opi8.com
Image from One's A Crowd
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 'One's A Crowd' on Nelson Evergreen's personal webpage (14 April 2003). Retrieved on July 23, 2024.
- ↑ Opi8.com About page (14 April 2003). Retrieved on July 23, 2024.
- ↑ Opi8 2002 Sequence archive. Retrieved on July 23, 2024.
- ↑ Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. De Capo Press, 1995.
- ↑ As seen in Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson by Tom Graves, Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick, and various online sources, among others.