Hopeless Things…

Today we are straying far from our usual haunts to far stranger shores where slimy things walk … with spoons, upon the slimy land, to paraphrase a certain famous poet. We have a guest creature on the blog! I hope you will welcome this ‘Hopeless Thing’…

gathering

It happens that good friends of ours, Tom and Nimue Brown, have a new addition in their family … of books … and have offered up this and other strange denizens to walk (or crawl, or fly, or … move in other unspeakable ways) into the blogworlds of others. Here at Fire Springs Folk Tales we have had green children, shucks, dragons and other ‘exotica’ as the Greeks call these creatures – even when they are native to their shores – but never before has this entity set tentacle (or spoon) on the shores of England. However, I do wonder if the equally mournful figure of the merman of Orford would recognise them from his travels, or the sea serpent that lives off the coast at Pakefield… But they will never share their secrets…

This being is one of many, many strangelings in their gothically glorious graphic novel, Hopeless, Maine: The Gathering, published by Sloth Comics. If you want to investigate further (and I recommend you do!) you can find it here, available (alongside our books of tales!) at the Book Depository, as well as through your local book and comic shops.

Hopeless is a strange, gothic island off the coast of Maine, cut off from the rest of reality for the greater part. Hopeless Maine is also a graphic novel series, the peculiar child of Tom and Nimue Brown. Here’s a little taste of island life:

spoonwalker

Spoonwalker: It isn’t easy being a soft, slow moving squishy thing on a cold, hard, hungry island like Hopeless Maine. This is why spoonwalkers have adapted to use stilts. It’s believed that early spoonwalkers made do with bits of twig and whatever else they could employ to get their unhappy bodies off the ground and moving at a swifter pace. The arrival of cutlery-bearing humans on the island caused a radical change. Why it is that spoonwalkers favour spoons over all other cutlery, is uncertain, but an unattended spoon is always at risk of night pillaging from these creatures. The spoonwalker can never have enough spoons, and will sneak into houses for the sole purpose of raiding cutlery drawers to satisfy its cravings for shiny metal. Wooden spoons are seldom taken.

Cooking instructions: can be fried, but better just have the tentacle as many diners find the mournful faces off-putting.

Images © Tom Brown

Information on spoonwalkers kindly provided by Tom and Nimue Brown, with additional gloss by Kirsty Hartsiotis.

There are eight more creatures out there! Check out @GothicalTomB and @Nimue_B on twitter to catch them all!