Category: Falcon Boy
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Here is the latest exciting installment from Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets. As you know, Dr Don’t Know has kidnapped Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird and is holding them hostage somewhere secret. In the absence of any real information the forces of law and order have gathered to speculate on Dr Don’t Know’s next step. As always happens in these situations, imaginations run wild and any available intelligence is usually anything but intelligent.
This is just a taster of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets and if your appetite has been whetted sufficiently then please feel free to download the full e-book.
You never know; you might even feel moved enough to want to review it. I’m just saying.
Captain Lori Lorimer of the Panic Town Police Force briefed a panel of Panic Town’s finest notables including, most notably, Councillor Denver Footswerve, the current Mayor. As she nervously scrolled through the slides of her presentation, Captain Lorimer told the noted notables that she had her best minds working on the case.
‘I have my best people working on this one,’ she tried to reassure those gathered. ‘A crack unit, comprised of the finest minds mined from the department.’ She paused, hoping that the pause sounded reassuring.
‘I don’t mind telling you,’ Captain Lorimer continued, ‘that to my mind these minds are some of the finest minds that anyone has ever been minded to assemble.’
She changed the slide of her presentation and aimed her laser pointer at the screen.
‘Our early intelligence is very sketchy but from what we can gather it is only a matter of days before Dr Don’t Know is ready to launch his Moon Rope.’ Captain Lorimer paused again.
On the screen was an artist’s impression of what the mythical Moon Rope might look like. The audience saw two circles representing the Earth and the Moon with a line joining them. Captain Lorimer traced the line with her laser pointer.
‘From what my best minds can so far deduce, the Moon Rope will allow Dr Don’t Know to create an elaborate pulley system connecting the Earth to the Moon.’
‘Why would anyone do anything like this?’ asked Mayor Footswerve anxiously.
Captain Lorimer shuffled her notes nervously.
‘We are not sure why, your Honour,’ she told the Mayor, ‘but all our agents are telling us that their best intelligence is telling them that this is not going to be a good thing.’
Gasps echoed around the room as Captain Lorimer concluded her presentation by predicting that the Moon Rope would likely cause untold electrical disruption. It would also prevent anyone on the entire planet from ever knowing the right time ever again.
‘I’m afraid it doesn’t look good at the moment,’ she told her gasping audience. ‘This Moon Rope could well mean the end of the world for all of us.’
Mayor Denver Footswerve cleared his throat before he spoke. He thought this made him sound more mayoral.
‘I think I speak for all of us here when I say how pleased we are to have your best minds working on our behalf, Captain Lorimer.’ The Mayor paused and I am beginning to wonder whether pausing is as contagious a social habit as yawning.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am aware that we are all aware of just precarious the situation sounds but I can’t help wondering, from a Public Relations perspective, whether it will in any way be possible to temper bad news of this magnitude with some good news, no matter how small that good news might be?’
The Mayor looked at Captain Lorimer and she could see panic in his eyes. Being mayor was the only thing he had ever wanted and now it looked like someone was going to go and spoil it before he had the chance to enjoy it.
There was no good news.Share this:
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By way of further news on progress so far with The Brothers Revoltable Travelling Circus and Other Crazy Fun with Special Guests (Volume II of the Falcon Boy series) I thought I would give you an update on Pearly Stockwell.
As many of you will know Pearly Stockwell is a child detective who makes her debut appearance in Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets (Volume I). Together with the Interesting Twins, Pearly manages to solve every case she applies her big city ways to. If you want to catch up with her (e-book) adventures then please feel free to follow the link HERE (US) and HERE (UK).
In any case, as the following excerpt indicates, the world of Pearly Stockwell is as prone to whirls and eddies of public taste as any other contemporary publishing venture.
The Brothers Revoltable Travelling Circus and Other Crazy Fun with Special Guests excerpt:
IT Publishing, the company behind the Pearly Stockwell and the Interesting Twins Wonder Detective Comic Book Super Series which begat the Pearly Stockwell and the Interesting Twins Detective Comic Audiobook Series ceased trading a while ago and everything related to the series is now little more than the occasional question at a very dull public quiz for people who are very dull.
The final ever episode in the series, Pearly Stockwell Finally Realizes How Cruel the World of Contemporary Publishing Really Can Be opens with our eponymous heroine bemoaning the state of contemporary publishing, a subject which, and even despite her big city ways, Pearly had never shown any interest in up until this final episode.
‘Our time has come, boys,’ says Pearly to the Interesting Twins. ‘Even before our time has really come.’
Pearly plants her feet and stares defiantly into space reads the caption.
‘I should think that the people making these short-sighted decisions really don’t know us at all!’ she snorts. ‘In fact, what do they know about anything anyway?’
Wes is really angry.
‘I’m gonna grab them and box them and fight them until they beg me to stop,’ he exclaims forcefully. ‘And even when they do beg me to stop I ain’t gonna stop for nothing or no-one not never!’
Pearly smiles at her loyal friend.
‘You’ve been a loyal friend for all of these adventures,’ she says kindly, ‘and we are all really going to miss your overly aggressive, small-minded and yet sometimes effective ways.’
‘Say the word, Pearly,’ says little Windy with a big tear in his small eye. ‘Say the word and I will run for you like I always do.’
‘But where will you run?’ replies Pearly. ‘The people making these decisions have made it very plain that there is nowhere left for you to run to and no-one would be there even if you ever arrived.’
‘But there must be something we can do,’ says the eviction notice Pearly had thrown angrily onto the desk. ‘We can’t just let them shut us down.’
‘You are right, as always, my fine, wise Wanderley,’ says Pearly sadly, ‘but not even your alarmingly outrageous propensity for disguising yourself in the most unlikely but nevertheless convenient disguises is going to make any difference here.’
Pearly looks directly out the frame.
‘The only thing that can save us all is if someone decided to continue our adventures as a small, independent online venture, perhaps using a free online publishing platform.’
Pearly shakes her head ruefully.
‘But that will take an awful lot of effort to keep writing our adventures, publishing our adventures, promoting our adventures and trying to get people to read our adventures knowing full well that a thankless venture like this will only ever be a tiny digital drop in the vast and thankless virtual ocean.’
Again, Pearly looks straight out of the frame of the comic.
‘Does anyone know how hard it is nowadays to even get someone to visit your site let alone stay long enough to read something?’
THE END FOREVER MORE? reads the final caption.
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Here is the next in the series of brief excerpts from Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets. If you would like to read the full adventure then please follow the link.
World Savers Wanted™ can be found at http://www.worldsaverswanted.hero and is a listed company created by a twelve-year-old boy called Mulvey Cavell, who saw a gap in the market for matching superheroes looking for things to do with things that needed doing by superheroes.
Mulvey realised that for every superhero being summoned by an enormous searchlight whenever they were needed, there would be many other equally deserving superheroes that didn’t have such a high-profile and therefore probably needed a helping hand when it came to finding suitable things to do.
Mulvey also understood that not all superheroes wanted to try and save the world. Some were just happy doing things like opening supermarkets, posing for photographs or putting on action displays at garden fetes.
Working from his bedroom, Mulvey built the website and devised the marketing campaign. Things were slow to begin with but once the mass exodus from HeroVerse™ started, World Savers Wanted™ began to get very busy – so busy, in fact, that Mulvey Cavell became a multi-millionaire at thirteen and retired from public life.
World Savers Wanted™ works on the same principles as any other online agency. You complete an online questionnaire, upload a current image of yourself and pay an annual membership fee.
Once your application is processed, World Savers Wanted™ will seek to match your profile with the most appropriate tasks contained in its vast and ever-increasing database.
A similar principle applies if you have some work for a superhero to do. Once the registration process is complete, you are free to upload your superhero task request. Your task request is offered to the most appropriate superheroes and they then choose to accept the task or not.
Feedback is given on the completion of each task, whether successful or otherwise, and as you gain more and more positive feedback, so you become eligible to receive more and more difficult task requests. In this way the system always hopes to match the right hero to the right task.
World Savers Wanted™ allows you to define your choice of tasks by selecting from a drop-down menu. Falcon Boy had ambitiously registered himself and Bewilder Bird in the ‘Heroic Duo Seeking to Save the World’ section but as you can imagine, they hadn’t yet accumulated enough positive feedback to be eligible for that category. Not that Falcon Boy was in any way perturbed.
‘Ambition is one of the many things that I wish to be known for,’ said Falcon Boy ambitiously to his friend. ‘Without ambition, you have no real desire to do things,’ he concluded grandly.
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Here is the next in the series of brief excerpts from Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird versus Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets. If you would like to read more then please follow the link.
The winner of this year’s Is It Really Talent Time Again? was decided by the toss of a rather large novelty coin and following three fumbles, two miscalls and a power cut, Little Bernie Tiger pipped The Tumbling Tortoise Trio to the award.
Derk and Joddy Pepper are the brains behind The Tumbling Tortoise Trio, an act which sees Derk repeatedly tumbling three large tortoises down a children’s garden slide to land in a gold-painted bucket while Joddy wears a glittery dress, points at the bucket and looks on admiringly.
If you log onto The Tumbling Tortoise Trio Official Homepage™, http://www.tumblingtortoisetrio.org, you will see that the husband and wife team describe themselves as ‘Small Animal Holders, Intricate Spectacle Deliverers and Light Entertainment Exceptionalists’.
Sadly, appearing on television didn’t boost the appeal of The Tumbling Tortoise Trio in any way at all, but if you are organizing a social event and the entertainment lets you down at the last minute then I’m sure The Tumbling Tortoise Trio would be available to fill in at the shortest of really short notices. And I mean short.
For Little Bernie on the other hand, his winning song, Everybody Look at Me, has catapulted him to the very edge of the celebrity troposphere. As the song begins:
Everybody Look at Me
I’m a Real Celebrity
I Know I’m only Eight but I’m really Great
So Everybody Look at Me
At lunchtime in every playground across the land, you can barely move for small children forming a line and clapping in time as they sing the chorus to Everybody Look at Me. It goes like this… (but you knew that already!!)
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
I’m Great, I’m Great, I’m Really, Really Great
I’m Eight, I’m Eight, I’m Really Only Eight
Then, if you have any energy left, you need to do a floor drop followed by a high five with yourself before launching into the now infamous Tiger Rap.
I said I’m only Eight but I’m really Great
You think I’m Crooked but I’m Really Straight
I Jump Up High and I Dance All Night
And Me and My Friends We Never Fight
We Go to Every Party and We Have a Great Time
But the Way You all Dance is a Proper Crime
You Need to Take a Good Look and Copy Me
Make my Shapes and I Will Set You Free
See Me Go, Just Watch Me Move
I’m the Easy Slider, I’m the Super-Groove
On Every Dance Floor Across the State
I’m a Real Celebrity and I’m only Eight
Everyone agrees that this isn’t the last we have seen of Little Bernie Tiger.
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When circuses some to town they often come with all kinds of hoo-hah and opportunities for adventure. I hope that the arrival of this particular circus will keep up this tradition. As you will have seen from reading the poster this circus is not necessarily like any circus you might have ever seen before. This was a deliberate decision on my part as I wanted to offer you all something slightly different from the circus-adventure norm.
In fact, to give you a real sense of what is coming to Panic Town and to allow you to decide whether or not you want to continue reading, here is a list of the things that will not be coming to town with the Brothers Revoltable Travelling Circus:
Intelligent primates that wear cute clothes but are actually capable of taking part in any investigations initiated by children who are forced by circumstances beyond their control to spend the Summer with a mysterious relative who actually is a circus ringmaster;
Lonely elephants cruelly separated by hunters from their family and longing to return;
Troubled clowns who harbor deep, tragic secrets and paint on their smiles with greasepaint as they die a little more inside with each performance;
Strongmen conspiring with trapeze artists to defraud vulnerable but highly talented performers out of small fortunes;
Teenage runaways who have fallen out with their parents or guardians and who have now been adopted by a new ‘family’ as they perform odd jobs for board and lodging;
Tragic, tempestuous and tangled love stories between the beautiful young contortionist who has never known true love before and the shy boy who sells the tickets and then sweeps up after each performance. Each thinking that the other is out of their league.
Nor will there be any murders, hidden treasure, troublesome reptiles, stampeding horses, seals clapping, tornadoes destroying enormous tents, or groups campaigning about any alleged cruelty to animals, performing or otherwise.
If you want to read more about Panic Town and the things that go on there then click here.
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Bacharach McCarthy also lived a lonely life. He was tall and athletic-looking, capable of lifting heavy things, and took a keen interest in how the world worked but none of these attributes ever made a real difference to his adult life.
Bacharach left school and went to work for a small manufacturing company that produced the world-famous Universal Drain Righter©. This handy-sounding device is a small twist of metal that you attach to any antipodean plughole to re-right the direction that the water swirls as you empty a bath.
For eight hours a day and six hours of overtime on Saturday, Bacharach McCarthy placed a piece of metal into a groove, pressed a large red button and then laid the now twisted metal onto a conveyor belt for packing.
In all this time, he spoke to no one. And no one spoke to him. But when the shifts were over, Bacharach raced home, wolfed down a pot of noodles, logged onto HeroVerse™ and turned once more into Bewilder Bird.
Online, Bacharach felt completely free and was able to express himself in ways that he couldn’t in reality. He could behave in any way that he wanted to, but still he chose to be as silent in HeroVerse™ as he was in real life. He just preferred it this way.
If you want to find out more Bacharach McCarthy then please feel free to click here.
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Extraordinary stories about extraordinary heroes normally need extraordinary villains with extraordinary gadgets and extraordinary widgets and extraordinary deeds, facilitated by mind-numbingly extraordinary technology.
All this sounds extraordinarily exciting but this story is slightly different, so I need to tone down expectations by rewriting the paragraph you have just finished reading. How about this?
Stories about heroes normally need villains with gadgets and widgets and deeds, facilitated by technology.
That sounds more like it. There is not much about this story that is extraordinary; its heroes, villains, super or otherwise. However, all is not lost.
Dr Don’t Know does have a global crime network. He also has a large submarine that he uses as his secret base but none of this is quite as glamorous as it sounds. Let me explain.
Global crime networks expand and contract over the life of a supervillain and Dr Don’t Know’s network had experienced a downturn in recent years. Profits have been down for a while now and this is why he has a submarine.
During the good times, Dr Don’t Know rented office space in many of the major cities around the world. He also had penthouse apartments and hotels suites on permanent stand-by, just in case the crimes he was working on necessitated an overnight stay somewhere.
Legions and legions of uniformed staff manned these offices and apartments and suites, ready to serve his every criminal whim.
However, all of this renting and hiring and manning and possible overnight-staying was incredibly expensive. When the crime times were good, Dr Don’t Know felt justified in spending this kind of money but once the crime times were not quite so good, Dr Don’t Know’s army of accountants, in the last thing they did for their boss before they were all fired, reviewed Dr Don’t Know’s income and expenditure and concluded that he was paying too much for too much and needed to start cutting back.
So, all of the office space and penthouse apartments and hotel suites were given up, as were the legions of uniformed staff manning them. Realising that he had to base himself somewhere in order to remain both at large and in business, Dr Don’t Know bought a second-hand submarine called Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine.
Straight away, I am sure you will agree that this is a terrible name for anything, let alone the sub-aquatic headquarters of an international master criminal down on his luck. However, in a spirit of team building that he has since come to regret on a daily basis, Dr Don’t Know ran a competition amongst the few employees he had left to name the vessel. The winning name was drawn from a hat.
Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine is a terrible name for the vessel but things could have been a whole lot worse if one of the other entries had been picked instead. Imagine if the submarine had been called Float Float or Crime Swim? What about Giant Swimming Flying Thing? Sea Sky 33? Dr Don’t Know’s Evil Underwater Submarine and Criminal Hidden Hideout Machine?
Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine constantly patrolled the waters of the world, hoping to avoid detection by staying partially submerged for hours at a time.
According to its operating manual, Dr Don’t Know’s Submarine can also fly short distances and be driven the wrong way down a motorway but no one, Dr Don’t Know included, has been brave enough to put this to the test.
To find out more about Dr Don’t Know and his submarine click here. You can also follow Dr Don’t Know on Twitter but don’t expect him to say much.
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Troublebots were always trouble. They stood the tallish side of average and would look reasonably alright from a distance, were it not for the fact that they were usually scratched and dented.
Each Troublebot had two eyes, a dial where the nose should be and a small round hole for a mouth. Variations do exist within this format, and you couldn’t be sure that the distance between the eyes is exactly the same on each head, or that each mouth was die-cut exactly in the centre of each face.
The upper body was square-like and hollow, with enough room inside for all of the various pistons, wheels, wires, switches, motors and circuit boards required to keep the Troublebot working.
There was also a rectangular grille on each Troublebot’s chest and if you looked through the flimsy bars, you could see their badly-soldered inner circuitry sparking, shorting and generally threatening to give up.
The limbs of a Troublebot were designed with action in mind. Unfortunately, the measurements used for the prototype were very slightly out, and this mismeasurement was most noticeable in the slight limp caused by the right leg being ever-so-slightly longer than the left.
The left arm looked normal enough for a humanoid and ended in a metallic hand. The right arm ended with a bewildering array of random tools attached to it instead of fingers. These tools included useful ones like screwdrivers, mini-saws, sharp knives, small-bore guns, digital cameras, half-size samurai swords, and blow-torches.
Less useful tools that have been found at the end of a Troublebot’s arm include sporks, pencil sharpeners, miniature golf clubs, thermometers, toffee hammers, fountain pens, litter grabbers, flag guns that say ‘Bang’, analogue remote control systems, small kites on short strings, spirit-levels, kaleidoscopes, sextants, mascara brushes, wooden spoons, egg toppers, paper clips, microphones, Clingfilm dispensers, radio aerials, small fizzy sweet dispensers and a ruminator (whatever that is).
If you want to find out more about Troublebots then click here.
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Who is ordinary and who isn’t ordinary? Who decides who is extraordinary and who isn’t extraordinary? Perhaps these questions make more sense when we consider the possibility that the central character of this adventure could easily have been someone else.
For example, we could be reading about the adventures of a small ingenious boy called Dunstable Johnson who is very handy in tight situations. Or, we could all be thrilling to the adventures of a swashbuckling amateur wrestler called Erica ‘Neck Brace’ Larkin. Erica investigates local mysteries in between wrestling bouts. This is just for starters.
The battle to rescue Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird from the clutches of the evil Dr Don’t Know and, by doing so, save the world from apparent destruction could have centred around the players and coaching staff of Wolseley Street F.C, an U12s amateur football team.
Football has all the hallmarks of great adventure as players grapple with triumph and adversity as they seek to win a championship or avoid being relegated. There is plenty of drama in an adventure like this.
If you don’t like stories about footballers, then what about a rather nifty and exciting robot called Rocky Random? Rocky has a propulsion unit in his boots and can cross oceans if necessary. He is handy to know in a global emergency.
No? How about Eucalyptus McKenzie, the cartoon koala bear and government agent? The adventures of Eucalyptus McKenzie are yet to be written but I am pretty sure that this isn’t the last we will hear about this daring koala bear.
For more thoughts on who is ordinary and who isn’t ordinary click here. If you want to follow someone who is both ordinary and extraordinary then why not click here?
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BARNABY TAYLOR 