flimsundass: 2010

I say nein! To prove it, here's something that's not about a film, it's about a comic called 'The Bear'. In the comic, the polar bear, at some point, drinks water from the commode. So maybe this piece belongs on our blogsite?

Tilly and the polar bear had had a long time of quiet, about three years now. Tilly had been lounging in front of the TV in unchanged socks and a rather smelly T-shirt. Everything in the house smelt. Of unopened pages, silverworm and yawns.

The polar bear had been in and out of the house, vacillating between the polar ice caps and the various rooms and staircase landings of Tilly’s place. He didn’t think it was fair in the least that in the story, he was supposed to be at Tilly’s for exactly a day and a night, but that in real life he was stuck in this book forever. He was bored of Tilly’s place. For one thing, it was a house and a huge animal like him just can’t help but feel squeezed crazy within box-like rooms. Box-like rooms in the boxy squares of a comic.

Then, the drawings of Arctic snow and the ocean were very few and basic, and so far he hadn’t been able to travel so he could really feel the ice of it all, feel at home the way a polar bear should. It worried him that he couldn’t, a mild worry that was like an old itch in the toe or something.

Tilly’s parents were lucky that way. They were only 2-dimensional characters, so, like the drawings of furniture, commode and bathtub, they weren’t really alive. Just their eyes moved sometimes. But not Tilly and polar bear. Their author, Richard, had loved them so, they’d come alive. But three years of silence and unopened pages, and they didn’t exactly feel like thanking him for it.

Sitting on the kitchen floor and scratching his slightly-itchy toe, polar bear heard a shout.

“Hey poley!” Tilly was no longer the excitable, wonderstruck 7-year-old she’d been when Richard first drew her, so her excitement surprised polar bear into rolling along into the living room to see what it was about.

“Earthquake!” Tilly said, pushing her hair back, then taking the stairs two at a time to get to her bedroom. “Get in position.”

“You’re s'posed to be outside the house,” she called down at him as she changed into her pyjamas and shoved the smelly T under the bed. “Go hide behind the snowbank.”

So she was in bed in frame one of the comic, where her ma was kissing teddy and her goodnight. And he was ambling out to the snowbank.... when the teacher pulled ‘The Bear’ out from behind the encyclopedias in her bookshelf to read to her new class.

Tilly, 7-years-old again, sleepy, just about to meet her only friend, the polar bear that would come to her out of the snow one night.

And polar bear, again, awesome as a mountain.

When teacher opened the book, Tilly felt a huge wave of warm, fresh air clear out the smells of her house, her world. Her’s and polar bear’s story met, page by page, 20 goggle-eyed kids in a distant suburb of a big city close to the equator. They were chattering in a strange language as the teacher began to read and in a bit, their eyes grew huge at the sight of poley coming through her bedroom window. Tilly could see how some of them wanted to just jump into the story.

Tilly took a big breath of air. “Hello,” she thought to call to them. “y'all there, hello!”