Tales of the Mariner: An Overhead View: Part 1

When the idea of the Mariner was first described to me by Chris (Co-President…try to keep up), I almost instant­ly thought of a mem­o­ry from when I was first able to drink legal­ly. Before I get to that I need to explain a lit­tle bit about what drink­ing meant to me in when I turned 21. See, like most at that age, I got rather excit­ed about drink­ing, but what I feel set me apart was the excite­ment was usu­al­ly for the set­ting not the ine­bri­a­tion. Of course the result was the same, but some­how dif­fer­ent intent gave me an extreme­ly unearned sense of self-worth. I didn’t drink to get drunk, oh no, I drank to expe­ri­ence the live action equiv­a­lence of all that music, movies and comics had taught me; in the right set­ting, booze = tales for the ages.

The mem­o­ry that par­tic­u­lar­ly stood out hap­pened while in this phase. I asked to help move a fam­i­ly mem­ber to South Dako­ta, then an image of me sit­ting at a run­down bar lis­ten­ing to an old run­down man tell some amaz­ing tale flashed into my head. I declared that I would only help if such a scene would be a pos­si­bil­i­ty along the way. I received a semi-con­fi­dent con­fir­ma­tion that it was a pos­si­bil­i­ty, so we were off. For 5 hours I pon­dered what tales I would hear. Maybe he was a FBI agent from the 50s who could shed con­fi­den­tial secrets about the gangs of old. Or pos­si­bly he was a retired jew­el thief wait­ing decades to dig up hid­den scores. Would it be pos­si­ble that he was a fuck­ing cos­mo­naut? I don’t know! Shit, I even thought maybe he could be all three!

That evening, after the move was com­plete, I found myself walk­ing into a run­down bar locat­ed in a town com­prised of a grain mill and a 2 sto­ry apart­ment build­ing. There at the bar sat an old run­down man. I had my set­ting and if I played this right I would have a tale for the ages. I walked up to him and sat down. When I looked over to him I saw some­thing I couldn’t comprehend…a sign that said “Incred­i­ble Hulk Shots $2.” I turned to the Bar­tender and ordered two, then got shit faced drunk with my broth­er while try­ing to play $5 worth of darts. Word to the wise…$5 in darts takes forever.

So, how does this relate to the new com­ic Alba­tross Comics is putting out called “Tales of the Mariner”? For me this book is gonna be every sto­ry that man would have said had I not been tempt­ed by Com­ic Book themed shots. The only dif­fer­ence is there will be far few­er slurred words and way less disappointment.