Tag: historical fiction
#5 – Albert
A mysterious man who approaches Joe and initiates his first journey by simply telling him that he is about to embark on one, which sets in motion a chain-reaction.
Albert is only a messenger, sent by a strange power that seems to know the future quite well.
#4 – Arno Komarek
Arno is Jon Grünstein’s companion. He’s a small time crook with the ability of fast talk, using Jon as his muscle to back his little schemes. He’s an opportunist, always trying to support the most promising party.
Thus he decides to save Joe from an impeding execution because he believes him to be rich (which is correct) and influental (which he’s not at all).
#3 – Charlotte Wechsler
The secretary of Joe Hagen’s father-in-law-to-be, charged with the seemingly simple task of handing a letter over to Joe. Which is impeded by Joe’s beginning journey, on which she follows him, growing from an insecure young woman to an adventurous lady of action.
#11: The Silent Disciple
This is a girl who works in the day.
Subject to her father, she does what he says.
She mops the inn’s floors, she wipes clean the counter.
But he doesn’t know what’s special about her.
Learning to write from the old family bible,
reading Voltaire as the silent disciple.
During the day she’s quiet, demure.
But come the dark night and her pencil’s a blur!
She writes to the great minds of this day and age,
Descartes and Moore on her mind’s well-worn page.
Ok so call it blatant self-insertion or whatever, but I always liked to think that if I’d lived in nineteenth or eighteenth century england or europe or whatever I would have been teaching myself to write and then the floodgates would open. I’m so outrageously overanalyzing, I’d drive myself crazy if I didn’t have some way to get my thoughts out.
#2 – Jon Gruenstein
Jon Grünstein is a former circus strongman and German war veteran (of WW I). In 1920, he meets Joe Hagen and is drawn into an adventure that puts his friendship with his partner Arno to the test.
Despite of his brutish appearance, Jon is a very sensitive and idealistic soul. He believes that it is his purpose to serve a true cause. This leads to him following strong persons in search of guidance for his talents and strength, for a better world.
For the time being, the man he follows is his fast-talking, con-artist friend Arno, who is able to bend every person’s opinion to his advantage, giving him considerable power over humans. But will this impress Jon forever?
#1 – Joseph “Joe” Hagen
Joseph Hagen is the son of an immensly rich industrialist in 1920 Germany.
Bored to the max, this young man has done everything a bored man can do: traveled the world, learned lots of sports, spent time on parties, mingled with the stars (he fames himself with having sparred with Douglas Fairbanks). He is an expert marksman and proficient hand-to-hand combatant.
And he sees absolutely no meaning in his life.
Until a stranger enters his life and sets in motion a bizarre adventure during which “Joe” reluctantly learns to value life itself, and saves the world from a raging war.
#4 Mia Glazel
Mia Estelle Glazel (1898 – 1984) was a major figure in the early history of newspaper comic strips, best know for her comics Life in America and Politics of the Porcine.
She started her career as an assistant to Bud Fisher on the strip Mutt and Jeff, but was quickly hired away by Randolph Hearst as a slap in the face to Fisher after he moved his strip away from King Features. Hearst was quick to recognize Glazel’s enormous talent, and she soon had a strip of her own – Life in America (1923-1930). Hearst forced her to publish it under a male pseudonym (Montrose Mountebank) so that the work would be taken more seriously. It was a very popular strip among the intelligentsia of the time, as its story of two hobos and their experiences in the impoverished underbelly of affluent 1920’s America was not a viewpoint often explored at the time.
Eventually, she chafed under the anonymity of her male pseudonym, and broke from Hearst to form her own syndicate and publish her magnum opus – Politics of the Porcine (1931-1937). Porcine was a scathing re-telling of human history, only transported to a surreal, planet sized pig-sty and told through a cast of nameless, archetypal pig characters. It was a platform for Glazel’s wicked intelligence and monumental understanding of human nature.
It was a phenomenal success, but after 6 years Mia pulled the plug on the strip, suspecting that the public love-affair with her work had more to do with cute pigs than it did with the content of the strip. Shortly after, she left America for France, where she pursued her voracious appetites for both alcohol and younger men. Although she married 7 times in her life (four times to the same man), in 1984 Mia died alone in her Paris apartment. She herself had been quoted many times saying that the only love she ever gave unconditionally was to her own creations, and after that she had nothing left to give. One would also suspect that her towering intellect kept intimacy far away.
#30Characters Chatter…