I have this idea for a two-page comic about the adventure of an anthropomorphic tugboat and his friend, but I'm too pressed for time to draw it. So I'm going to describe it instead. It's called "Tug 'n' Pud".

I had this idea as I was falling asleep and thinking about the first issue of Rotica. A line from the Chickarouser kept echoing in my head, albeit in fractured resonance, about a "pud" being "pulled on". In my mind it echoed until it became two lovable characters frolicking on the high seas. When the cute personnages poked at my plump, squishy brain, I poked back, and lo, they were tugging an entire two page comic with them. Their cuteness, their lovability, and their frolicking made their story an ideal subject for Rotica.

The comic is two pages; it can be seen all at once. It is drawn in black ink, in bold but zany lines. The illustrations strain the confines of their cells, often bulging outside them and into adjacent frames. Few of the frame borders are even visible, only enough to suggest their form and direct the reader's eye. Yet the layout is straightforward. It goes left to right across the page, from top to bottom, then starts again on the second page. The cells are adapted to the orientation of the action, but remain, what is visible of them, relatively square.

The drawings resemble cutouts out of thick cardboard. Each feature is a shape layered on top of the others, and if you want to sometimes reveal the thickness of that cardboard, by all means do so.

The characters themselves bulge outside the frames, and the characters' eyes bulge outside the characters. I envision big flat eyes, with typically enormous endearing pupils. I did say "flat eyes", not "fat eyes". I envision the eyes at at least half the size of the characters themselves. (I did say "at at least", not "at least".)

Tug's the tugboat. He's small but tough. He's got two big eyes on his cabin, a studded metal hull, a proud prow, and a smokestack.

Tug's eyes, I repeat, are about half his entire size. His cabin's up near the prow, and the two windows are his eyes.

Tug's smokestack is also pretty big in proportion to his deck. In fact, its base takes up about all the deck space behind the cabin, leaving no deck space. That leaves no room for sailors, but this just makes Tug all the more anthropomorphic, because it suggests, correctly, that he does his own sailing.

Tug's got large studs along his hull, but they're sparse. They look like big buttons. Tug's a tough little guy, but he's friendly. Outgoing.

Tug's prow--I'm not sure if this is possible on a metal hull--sticks out proudly. It's a thick metal beam. It doesn't really leave room for a mouth, but that's okay, since many cartoon characters have no mouths.

Actually, it's not okay. He needs a mouth later. But let's say that when he doesn't need it, then it's not there.

Pud is Tug's friend. He also sails around in the port waters with Tug. He's small but tough just like Tug, and he's drawn in bold lines like a cutout out of thick cardboard. He and Tug have mischevious looks. I mentioned that they're tough, but they're more mentally-tough, you know? They know they're small, but they know they're tough to knock down.

I'm not really sure what the word "pud" means, do you? This is the part of my comic that I admit comes from the echoes of the Chickarouser's prose. I'm not sure if "pud" is common usage, and several factors contribute to my confusion. Therefore, I'm not sure if I have to define a "pud" here, but I'll do it.

I've only ever heard one group of people use the word "pud" in the context that I mean here. They were pretty confident about it what it meant, and it shouldn't have posed any doubts in my mind about the word's significance. I mean, I felt I could probably use the word to mean what I thought it did around these people in full confidence that they would understand what I meant, if I ever felt that I needed to use such a word, which I did not. The trouble is, at around the same time I was introduced to this meaning of the word, there was also a comic strip readily-available to this same audience that used a character named "Pud" in a much less base sense. That Pud was just some big-headed toddler kid. Which is an odd thing to name "Pud" if "pud" really means what I think it means.

This ambiguity is the reason for my decision to define the word "pud", just in case. A "pud" is a penis.

So Pud is a penis. More specifically, he is a flaccid penis. He is, like Tug, partially immersed in the choppy water, but at times his testicles may be visible: they are bald. Pud has no hair; nor any stubble as might appear after shaving. His nuts are just bald. If you think this is unnatural, you might first ask why he has no human either. He is bald of humans.

I'm not sure where I see Pud's eyes. They are near his glans, naturally, but I'm not sure where. He has no cabin with two evenly-divided windows like Tug to simplify this illustrative challenge. I picture his eyes appearing where convenient, depending on the frame. Perhaps they don't need to be fully attached to him? In any case, he must have eyes, because the eyes are what makes him endearing.

Pud is not circumcised, and he therefore has a foreskin over his glans. His foreskin can be described to have a distinct style, comparable to that of a foreskin of a penis after jerking off at the beach.

Everyone knows the effect jerking off at the beach has on foreskin, but I'll summarise it anyway.

The most important effect of a beach on a pud is the beach's ample supply of visual stimuli for the pud, in the form of scantily-clad or--depending on whether the beach is in the South of France or on the Black Sea--semi-clad girls. This stimuli, as anyone bearing a pud who has ever set foot on a beach knows, immediately erects the pud. Happily, the ocean is paces away, an inviting confine in which to jerk off in privacy while observing exotic live bodies perform near-pornographic acts (if one has just a bit of imagination) right in front of one.

The ocean is thus an ideal place to play with one's pud. Until one considers the waves.

Unfortunately, while the ocean provides an ideal disguise to an act that is most comfortable when hidden from the public, the auqueous corpus also reveals itself to provide rather frustrating incoveniences. Namely, the ocean's swells are quite irregular in both size and frequency. Those who have never been to a beach who falsely assume that an ocean's waves are actually a model of regular frequency might consider that, during masturbation, an act sensitive to all disturbances of regular motion, the--admittedly slight--variations in the ocean's tides are only too infuriatingly amplified.

But this disturbance, which begins to be felt more distinctly as one's manipulations steer one's pud towards ejaculation, is only the beginning.

By some inexplicable Murphy's Law or some such sadistic tendency of Nature, it is only once one has bit one's teeth in the face of the lurching tides and managed to spot the rare person in an uncommonly humiliating position of sunbathing that unfailingly excites the vasicular tubes to pulsing rigidity, that some stupid breaker gives one a dazing belt across the back of the head.

By the time one rises from the ocean floor and finishes spitting the seashells out of one's mouth, it is not only necessary to restart with a totally flaccid cock, but the wave has shifted one such an unpredictable distance down the beach that the woman is impossible to repair.

Upon these irritations one begins to hurry towards orgasm, even neglecting to achieve a full erection. The very frustration of having to regain an erection that had been brought very nearly to its brink before being lost is a factor that almost overcomes the tantalising graphic potential of the beach's vista.

At this point, the masturbation becomes less an act of acceleration towards an explosive climax than of a pitched debate between continuing to depend on ephemeral stimulations for arousal or resigning the act in the face of rather mounting irritations. As a matter of natural course, one's fingertips have now become prunes, and, characteristically of this penultimate phase, the roughness of the skin initially misleads one to imagine that the texture alone will complete the phallic climax, and moments later only proves be even more aggravating than it had been when it was smooth.

At last, with only old women garbed in long white underalls to spy, with the surf clubbing one in the back of the head, and with an at best imperfectly regained stiffy, one spits out a drop of two of semen into one's itching bathing suit and calls it a day.

The inordinate length of this entire act, the rushed and frustrating finish, and the amount of time that the conflicting considerations of the penultimate stage caused one to keep one's arm imperfectly concealed below the water's surface while in full view of thousands of bathers all contribute to the impossibility of spending the necessary moments reclothing one's tired member. As everybody will attest, masturbating one's penis at the beach results in an imperfectly rehooded pud. And, although the bugger is restowed safely out of view in the beach shorts, the tip of his glans remains slightly sticking out of its covering.

And this is a perfect illustration of what Pud looks like.

In the opening frames, we meet Tug and Pud as they frolick happily in the waves, rather far out from shore. They are among a backdrop of some gargantuan tankers. Pud leaps and jumps over Tug, as Tug mischeviously belches out clouds of black smoke on his jumping friend. They also race a bit, maybe from one buoy to another, although honestly I think they're too far out for buoys.

Then Chad makes his entrance. Chad is a real Ivy-League boy. A speedboat. He's slim and sleek; his eyelids betray a boredom with the amusements of the lower class. He streams by, throwing up blades of water into the eyes of the two friends, then turns to mock their amateurish racing. He says something to the effect that they shouldn't be bothering to embarrass themselves with advertisements of such ineptitude.

Tug and co. don't even bat an eye. They don't ever lose the mischevious smiles below their enormous eyes (if it is actually possible to draw their mouths. I'm not sure). Tug immediately, as if he had been expecting Chad to emerge from nowhere, issues a challenge: the two pals will race the speedboat to port. Mockingly, Chad accepts. He was going that way anyway; he promises that he will restrain himself and will even halve his speed as he continues, or some such remark.

Chad even gives the two buddies a big head start; but when he starts--and he starts in all nonchalance--he outdistances them easily.

Tug and Pud, although the evidence has apparently proven that no amount of their effort will bring them into Chad's league, remain confident. They chase behind the speedboat in all earnestness. However, one panel of the comic suddenly shows them coming to an apparent deicision. "Ready?" asks Pud. Tug affirms.

This is the point where Tug 'n' Pud win everything. Pud climbs--using his balls--up on top of Tug's cabin, and then bends down and inserts himself into Tug's mouth. Tug commences sucking, biting and licking Pud's mushroom, alternately pulling him deep into and pumping him back out of his mouth.

Pud groans (Tug groans a bit, too), and quickly begins to swell. In three frames, we witness Pud's terrific increase in size. He is monstrous. Even the tankers, if we can fit them into the frame, take notice. And, over the three frames, the mixed groans of the two friends rise to a stunning volume.

We give Chad a chance to throw a smirking look back over his shoulder. But his reaction, though still mocking, is one of confusion.

The three frames representing Pud's remarkable arousal expired, the brave penis explodes in his launch pad, causing him to shoot forth from the grip of Tug's lips with rather unthinkable speed. (Tug also shoots backward from the recoil.)

At first, before he takes another look back, Chad is still confident. But then he turns his head.

The oncoming penis immediately results in a huge wet break of sweat on Chad's face. The speedboat refocuses on the port, grows desperate, and maximises his effort.

But Pud passes him without giving him a chance. His bursts of cum propel him rather like the separate stages of a rocket propel a payload out of the atmosphere. He is not even touching the water.

Chad, in all astonishment, gapes at his opponent. Then a big dollop of Pud's cum smacks right in his eyes. He commences to lose his way.

Tug, several nautical miles back, puffs out his chest (normally the part of the hull under his mouth that remains underwater), and bears a look of pride. He, too, aims for port.

With the cum-soaked Chad still spinning circles among the tankers, Tug arrives at the dock to join his shrinking friend. The two exchange a high five, or some such gesture. Maybe a hug, or a pat on the bum.

In the last scene, the three sit at a dockside cafe pulling weed. Chad looks a bit morose, but the quality of the pot glazes over any feelings of envy between the three, now fast friends. Or at least companions in a shared hobby.

Chad looks pretty again in his golfing vest, which only covers a small part of the top of him, him being such a long, sleek boat and all. His tall, tall hull (it is "tall" because he is sitting vertically), sticks way above the top of the chair, because the part of him that corresponds to a human's legs and bum is only a short part of the hull at the bottom (the keel?).

The sun is sinking over the port. Tug warns Pud that the weed seems to bringing on Pud's paranoia again, and Pud's last remark is his worry that it's a bad omen to get paranoia.

Fin.

( | ) 15:20 m.2000