Still your screams, gentle reader! That clawing on your door is only the zombies of old media wishing to bring you another exciting installment of…
ARKHAM BY NIGHT
We turn you over now to regular contributor Dr. Herbert West.
Hello, readers. You may be wondering where your newspapers have been for the last several days. As you may not know out in Meigs County, you ignorant, ignorant pigs, we are just coming off of another successful Halloween. I define successful as there is still a world once the Hangover has lifted. And by Hangover I mean the time loop that negligent Fraternity physicists invented to extend our block party’s last call to several weeks. Unfortunately, the loop grows bigger and longer every year, and one day it shall eat all Creation.
One thing I saw far too much of this Hallow’s Eve were Hobos and cleavage. The joy of breasts have been sucked dry. Thanks for that Halloween.
I think I know what you are. You smell. You don’t have a job. You live in a van down by the river.
Say it.
Homeless.
These words exhaled by a vapid robot pretending to be a high school student to a filthy, smelly hobo wearing goggles and a living in a steam powered Dumpster were the words that launched a million dollars in box office revenues. That may not seem like a lot, but those are in 1970’s dollars. Also it only cost Warner Brothers a t-bone steak and three pounds of octopus to produce. Only a movie trailer was originally produced, and then ticket pre-sales financed the rest of the film.
Every time I think this love affair with the hobo is starting to grind to a halt, it grows even crazier. It’s as if Hollywood and the consumers are spiting Publisher’s Weekly for each utterance of the term”hobo fatigue” in their biting articles. It’s like a terrible arms race. David Castle bashes popular hobo writer and worshiper of Zeus, Jocelyn Davis, she puts out another movie and buys his kids. Playboy puts out a hobo issue, and then Vivid puts out a hobo fleshlight (pictured below).
Hobo Fleshlight
It’s not as if the publishing industry is failing and out of touch.
Like Battlestar Galactica this has all happened before. These fads are cyclical. Did you know that there was a craze of hobo romance novels before there were movies?
Yes, there is a long and rich tradition of terrible novels about hobos hooking up with high schoolers. In a broken down Ornithopter. Down by the river. This may seem glamorous, but let me tell you, having sex on a pedal copter wasted on corn liquor is both dangerous and uncomfortable.
I am required to say that sixty more times until my community service is fufilled.
Most experts on literature agree (as in they don’t at all) that the hobo romance genre finds its roots in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and the works of Charles Dickens. America got bit by the hobo bug following Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, and it became a fad for millionaires to pretend that they were former hobo bootleggers. This was fun until they became actual hobos the next year.
Hobo romance fell out of style during the 1930’s during which everyone were hobos. The romantic hobo fell out of favor and Steinback came to the front of the pack with his relatable hobo. However, they were completely devoid of sexiness once again proving that people in the past were idiots. Nowadays when times get tough the unemployed watches Cribs.
The next explosion of hobo romance came during the 1950’s with the BBC’s bold choice to combine hobo and science fiction with their re-imagining of the old Doctor Who serials. Originally, a series of plays put on by hobos hopping trains the BBC added elements of time travel and aliens to the concept, but it stays true the core concept of “an elderly, homeless man serially abducts young women.”
The role of Susan Foreman was changed at the last minute, because the idea of sixteen year old travelling through time and space with a 900 year old man did not jive well with the BBC. She was redacted from being the Doctor’s niece to a sex slave he liberated from the Daleks.
The most iconic Doctor, Tom Baker, really embraced the show’s hobo roots. His scarf was woven of all the scarves of hobos he had killed during his tenure as the Fourth. Doctors, lower case, would later require him to shorten the scarf in later series so he wouldn’t “end up like Mr.T.” But don’t feel sorry for him, he was banging Lalla Ward by then.
However, the Daleks have never been redesigned.
But in the new millennium the hobo romance has been regulated to the slum of sub-genre and costumed hook ups at Sci-Fi cons. That was until the coming of Jocelyn Davis. She claimed that Zeus had given her two manuscripts one in gold and the other in cannabis. Upon it was a brand new and totally original take on the hobo romance genre.
The hobos glowed in the dark.
Now we are in a new age of the hobo romance. Readers are pouring into the stores and then abandoning them for the theaters at a moment’s notice. She is hailed as an innovator and tastemaker, but Jocelyn Davis is hardly anything new. I mean, there are far better executed books in the genre that predate her “inspiration”.
Some would even say that the manuscripts Davis claimed to use was a copy of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Hobo Mysteries.
(Continued on 2K in the Life Section – Dr. West’s Picks for Top Ten Most Influential Hobos)
