'Dangerous Cartoons'
Scene 1.
Int. Superhans' Kitchen.
Jeremy is raiding the fridge. Among an assortment of ready-meals, herbs in plastic bags still in their soil, a half liquefied marrow, a tomato curry in a tupperware container and some spliffs, he finds an Innocent smoothie.
Jeremy (thinking): Erg smoothies... yeah, like they think I don't know that they're trying to sell me fruit. (in mock cutesy diminutive voice) "Oh hello mister, I'm just a little ickle smoothie bottle trying to make you healthy." Well, try what you like Mr. Smoothie, but I'm still drinking you to wash down my deep-fried Mars bars and there's nothing you can do about it."
POV pans to stained oven top as Jeremy gives the pan his Mars bars are frying in a shake.
Enter Superhans who looks at smoothie bottle in Jeremy's hand.
Superhans: You know that bottle was made by Coca-Cola, right Jez?
Jeremy: So?
Superhans: To quote the Manics before they filled up their souls with fucking pot-pourri, Cola "tastes just like sweet poison should." Right now Jez, you're that little Scottie dog that Mr. Moneybags fucks on the cover of Monopoly.
Jeremy: But it says 'Innocent' on the side, Hans.
Superhans: Experienced, more like. Drinking that smoothie is exactly like sleeping with one of those vegan chicks and then finding out that she works at Currys.
Jeremy: What, you mean like, if you found out that your new girlfriend was Richard Branson... but like, wearing Zooey Deschanel?
Superhans: Exactly. Lana Del Ray.
Jeremy: But this is your fridge, Hans... and Mad Andy didn't buy the smoothie. I asked him about smoothies before and he said they were just 95% banana and then he bit the table.
Superhans: He bit the awnings - Jez... and I fucking bought it, didn't I? Trying to throw off their customer demographic; screw the pie-chart.
Jeremy reads the side of the bottle.
Jeremy (thinks): Guava and passionfruit. (beat) (aloud) Hans... what is a guava?
Superhans: It's that country, isn't it? The one with the dictator who looks like Hulk Hogan.
Jeremy: Hogan must have been rolling in the pussy.
Superhans: Nah, Jez. That would have been The Undertaker. Big bulky goth guy like that gristle-head from Nine Inch Nails... he would have got more fucked-up goth girls than the Crypt-Keeper. One minute they're all, "Come and cry with me over Robert Smith!" and the next thing they want you to stuff incense sticks up your cock with plastic black spiders hanging off the end of it!
Jeremy (thinks) That was almost definitely something he did when alone on mescaline. (aloud) Do you reckon, Hans?
Superhans: Seriously Jez... goth girls, they're all like Elvira, but instead of liking old horror films, they like givin' a pander to the necromancer, if you catch my drift...
Jeremy: Wasn't that the book that Dobby said The Matrix stole all its ideas from?
Superhans: No Jez, I'm saying they're necromantic. Seriously, my mate Benny knows this goth chick called Jessika who works down at the crematorium and she is a stone-cold necro.
Jeremy (thinking): It must be great getting shagged as a dead person. You're just lying there and then "Oh hello, you're that cute goth undertaker and you're using my body to fulfil your sexy goth desires and I don't have to do anything; I can literally just lay here and continue playing X-Box in Heaven or whatever the Hell I was doing." (aloud) There was a goth girl at school called Ren, but I think she was mostly into roleplaying and knitting dream-catchers and shit like that.
Superhans: Nah, trust me, Jez. Necros, the lot of them.
Jeremy (thinking): Superhans knows. He's like one of those roadies on the Rolling Stones Cocksucker Blues tour who saw and did everything; only they're not allowed to tell anyone, 'cause if they did, they'd get put in the room they keep Keith Moon chained up in. (aloud) I could date one of those goth chicks, Hans. I've met Cradle of Filth once and the guy who played Hellraiser.
Superhans: Careful Jez. You need to know what you're getting yourself in for. Some of these women are wild. You've got to ask yourself, "Can I compete with a waxwork model of Percy Shelly in black fishnets with a fuckin' pentagram for a cock?" Because that's what you're up against.
Jeremy (thinking): I have literally no idea what Superhans is on about, but I've used a sex doll and I was definitely the one putting all the work in.
Superhans: Oi, Jez... your Mars bars are done.
Jez' POV tilts down to the blackened mulch of Mars bars now steaming in the pan.
Scene 2.
Int. Mark and Dobby's living room.
Mark and Dobby are standing by the couch, mid-discussion.
Dobby: Come on Mark, it'll be more fun than trying to get the Shinkansen to run on time in 'Train Tycoon'.
Mark: (thinking) Go to a comic book convention... What next? Start collecting pogs? Get a Spirograph tattoo? Spend hours online trying to get Lara Croft naked using the 'nuderaider' cheat codes and then bringing the results into Sixth Form on a floppy disc? (aloud) I don't know Dobs... I may not have the fastest gun in the West, but I do have the fastest bullet train in the East.
Dobby: Mark, though your desire to solve the Japanese transportation system is adorably Orientalist, I really want to go to this thing. Alan Chedwick will be there selling signed originals.
Mark: Sorry Dobs, I have a policy of not supporting the career of anyone whose name sounds like it belongs to a disgraced children's entertainer.
Dobby: Aw shut up, dickmunch. You're just jealous that you don't write the increasingly hilarious adventures of Birth Trauma Boy and Recovering Alcoholic Man.
Mark: Dobby, when Jeremy made me watch Shaun of the Dead – which, I must say, wasn't nearly as funny as the packaging indicated – and I thought, "Putting zombies in a Jane Austen novel, now that would make for an entertaining juxtaposition", I was mildly amused. If I had then gone on to be the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the emotion I would rightly feel is shame.
Dobby: But that book was hilarious! It was like reading about a massacre in Past Times.
Mark: It wasn't hilarious, Dobby. It debased the status of a classic, like having Russell Brand cast in The Tempest. The author was just bloody lucky that Pride and Prejudice is safely outside the bounds of copyright protection, otherwise the Austen estate would have good grounds to sue.
Dobby: Mark, people don't go around suing every person who writes fan fiction, like that guy who wrote that Have I Got News For You slash, in which Merton and Hislop...
Mark: Erg – spare me, Dobby!
Dobby: Well, let's just say that Boris Johnson was written as a Ukranian porn star with a shock of white blonde hair...
Mark: Dobby, I'm sure the Mayor of London did worse in his Bullingdon Club days than the actions conjured up in the sub-literary imaginings of some prepubescent in a parka.
Dobby: That's not true giant-balls and you'd know that if you ever read that My Little Pony fanfic that I wrote.
Mark (thinks): You are not a brony, Mark. You are never going to be a brony.
Scene 3.
Ext. Graveyard attached to a crematorium.
Jeremy walks amongst the graves.
Jeremy (thinks): I can't believe I've never come here before... hanging out with the dead. These guys are even lazier than me! I am so jealous of the dead right now that I might even kill myself. Maybe it would be good to be dead just for a holiday. It would be like going to Butlins.
Jeremy stops to look at a gravestone.
Jeremy (thinks): Ha - "beloved daughter". Of course they have to say that. Graves should be honest. "Mary Burroughs 1924-1968: Hit her children with a mop and always cheated at Boggle. Said that acid-house was shit, even though she clearly didn't get it." There. Much more honest.
A woman in a black dress suitable for work and wearing red lipstick is looking at the graves near to the crematorium building. Jeremy spots her.
Jeremy (thinks): Shit – that's got to be her. Black dress; red lipstick. She's a goth! That grieving woman I spoke to earlier in the polka-dot dress was clearly more psychobilly. I wish I hadn't told her that my bone's got a little machine. Stupid Pixies. I thought goths love bones.
Jeremy lightly jogs over to the woman, who is still reading a gravestone.
Jeremy: Yeah, that one's my favourite.
Jessika: "Sean Carver: 1908-1911. Returned to the arms of our Lord"?
Jeremy: Yeah... classic. Good old God... with his arms. (thinks) I wonder what God's arms look like? I bet I could beat God in an arm wrestling contest. Well, maybe not God. The Holy Ghost – definitely.
Jessika: It's one of my favourites too. Anyway, hi. My name's Jessika with a 'k' like the singer from Jack Off Jill. What can I do you for?
Jeremy (thinks): Do me for? Jacking off Jill?! Superhans was right! (aloud) I'm Jeremy... Jez. I just like coming down here for inspiration, y'know. Sharing a glass of absinthe with the stiffs. Reading some Byron.
Jessika: Did you know, he slept with his half-sister?
Jeremy: Well, you know what they say about me; "mad, bad and dangerous to know." (thinks) I am so glad I read the back of that DVD box.
Jessika: "She walks in beauty, like the night."
Jeremy (softly, seriously, poetically): "The virginal brides file past his tomb. Alone in a darkened room, the count, Bela Lugosi, is dead. Undead. Undead. Undead."
Scene 4.
Int. At the comic book convention.
Mark walks amongst the stalls, alone.
Mark (thinks): Erg, stuck at this festival of asthma for half an hour and only one Howard the Duck original. The tag-line doesn't even make sense! "Stuck in a world he never made." That tag-line literally applies to everyone! We're all stuck in a world we never made! At least here, I'm surrounded by people who are actually more unfit than I am. If there was a zombie apocalypse, I might have some chance of surviving. At least with Dobby gone to meet the writer of Tiny Titans, I can stroll uninterrupted. Maybe I'll bump into the crew of Babylon 5. Be serious, Mark. They're actors, they're not geeks. They're off eating their heroin paninis and going to RADA conventions or whatever it is that actors do.
Mark has wondered over to a stall where no people are queuing, behind which a man with a shaved head and black-rimmed glasses sits.
Mark (thinks): Hang on a minute, this is Alan Chedwick, the so-called "enfant terrible" of the alternative superhero comics scene. You can only buy Dobby so many bars of gelatinous glitter-encrusted soap from Lush until she cottons onto the fact that you're terrible at buying presents... you could get her a first edition of Birth Trauma Boy, or maybe just steal his pretentious, ironic glasses. I wore those glasses way before you, mate and I did so unironically with a prescription. Dad was convinced that I couldn't be a late reader and must have something wrong with my eyesight.
Alan: Oh – hi. The crimson river of autographees seems to have dried up for the moment. I must be coming off my monthly.
Mark: (thinks) I hate you. (aloud) Hah – yes. Would that be a reference to Birth Trauma Boy edition 5, where Birth Trauma boy decides to return to the womb?
Alan: Very good. I take it, you're a fan?
Mark: Well, I must say that I admire your juvenile yet satirical take on the superhero genre. It certainly goes places that Watchmen never did...
Alan (interrupting): Except for that alien near the end that looks like a vagina, am I right?
Mark: (thinks) That certainly wasn't in the film! (aloud) Hah... but really, it's my girlfriend who's the fan.
Alan: You lucky specimen, to have a girlfriend with such impeccable taste.
Mark (thinks) Erg – she thinks The Inbetweeners is "quite good".
Alan: Well pal, since it's for a girlfriend, I'll tell you what. I'll give you a special autographed copy of Birth Trauma Boy #1 for just £2.50. I'll even draw you a little placenta.
Mark: Umm... sure. Yes. Thanks. But no placenta.
Alan: Not even a tiny one?
During the last few lines, shots from Alan's perspective show two police officers in uniform walking amongst the stands. Now, they come over.
Mark (thinks): Bollocks! I knew that vhs copy of Akira that I almost bought for Jeremy was a bootleg.
Officer 1: Hello. Are you Alan Chedwick?
Alan: The one and only.
Officer 2: Mr. Chedwick, you are under arrest for contravention of the Dangerous Cartoons Act. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.
The first officer handcuffs Chedwick.
Alan: It was a lolicon parody! It's not even pornographic!
Mark (thinks): I think, while the good officers of the law make off with Nabokov here, I'll just take my autographed comic and leave. Technically, I didn't pay my £2.50, but who's going to listen to a paedo in a small claims court?
Scene 5.
Int. Inside the crematorium.
Jeremy and Jessika stand in a room with a furnace, a metal box-like machine, a barrel filled with gold, a small desk/ work-bench. From the room leads a corridor, in which there is a TV and a stack of vhs tapes on a shelf.
Jessika (indicating the machine): And this little thing, is the Cremulator 2000. After a body has gone through the furnace, the ash tends to still be pretty coarse, so you put it in the cremulator and it grinds it all up and then gives you back the kind of nice, fine ash that can be used as an extra in Six Feet Under.
Jeremy (thinks): The Cremulator 2000 sounds like an awesome superhero robot who cremates people: "Cremulator 2000, go throw all my enemies into the furnace." "Will do, master..."
Jessika (indicating the barrel): And here is where we put all the gold teeth and other bits of metal after a body has been cremated. They come out in the ash. You'd be surprised at how much metal we get. You can actually get a good price for it, if it's clean.
Jeremy: Wow, you're like funeral parlour pirates only not on a boat. (thinks) Do I find her attractive? This is interesting, but then Time Team is interesting... well, so Mark says. Also, she hasn't given me any signs that she likes me and this room smells like chemical cleaner. (aloud and pointing to the vhs tapes) What are those for?
Jessika: Oh, that TV is hooked up to the security system. The tapes are just security recordings. Sometimes Kenneth and the boys like to watch back videos of me walking round the graveyard in a low-cut black dress on my lunch-break. Perverts.
Jeremy (thinks): You're like a slightly sexy encyclopedia. I'm learning shit, but essentially I feel like I'm wasting my time. I wanted Sickipedia, not Wikipedia!
Scene 6.
Int. Mark and Dobbie's flat.
Jeremy opens the front door, chucks his bag onto the sofa and sits with his legs up on the table.
Jeremy (thinks): I'm so glad Mark hasn't changed the locks yet. He loves it when I come in and eat his Mini Cheddars. Mark has to face it... he's more of a Riveta man. Oooh what's this?
Jeremy has noticed the Birth Trauma Boy #1 comic laying on the table. He idly picks it up.
Jeremy (thinks): Heh. Dead baby jokes. I guess those are pretty funny. Since bad stuff like that will never happen to me, it's OK for me to laugh about it. Looks like Mark's already been doodling on it. Must be some kind of free zine like the ones the homeless give out. I guess I might as well have a doodle. Nothing wrong with a doodle.
Jeremy picks up a black biro from the table and sets to work.
Jeremy (thinks): Alright, little Birth Trauma Boy get ready for the trauma... of having massive breasts. You may not be Jessika the goth girl, but I can sure as Hell make you look like her, with enough black biro... only, more naked. Who needs sex? I can draw my own nudity! I'm Crumb!
Mark enters through the front door carrying groceries.
Mark: Is that you, Jeremy? You can't just let yourself in, you know. Have you seen a comic anywhere about? Dobby's coming over in a minute and it's by her favourite author. I thought instead of signing her up for another free Graze box online, I'd buy her a comic.
Jeremy (thinks): Shit! Why didn't he write that it was a present on it? He can't just expect me to not draw on things in his house!
Jeremy hurriedly sits on the comic.
Jeremy: No, I don't think I've seen it, mate. What does it look like?
Mark: Oh it's got some kind of bubble-headed placenta child on the front. Kind of like Astro-Boy if he was made out of Cumberland sausage. The whole thing's pretty puerile. I guess Tin-Tin just isn't considered cool anymore. That and the racism.
Jeremy: Yeah. It's stupid when people don't like something because the person who created it is a dick, isn't it? I mean, I liked that Cadbury's advert with the drumming gorilla as much as the next man, but I hate Phil Collins.
Mark: Well, Dobby might not like this Alan Chedwick guy so much anymore or even want the comic. We were at the convention and he got arrested... turns out it was for drawing obscene comics about children.
Jeremy: Yeah, but that's not illegal is it?
Mark: Yes it is, Jeremy. There's this thing called the Dangerous Cartoons Act. Pen and ink have human rights too nowadays... and lets be honest, you draw lady parts onto a cartoon child, you probably deserve to be arrested. I don't fancy his chances in jail though. "Oh, what did you do, mate?" "Oh I drew a picture of Penny Crayon in a three-way liaison with Dora the Explorer and Ivy the Terrible."
Jeremy (thinks): Shit! Fuck! I don't want to be arrested for giving Birth Trauma Boy some tits! That's not even getting arrested for something cool like drugs or shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die! I'd be the guy that even the kiddy fiddlers abuse! (aloud) Yeah, that's not right, is it? Drawing shit like that. I hate guys who do that. (beat) Do you fancy a late night walk, Mark? I'm going for a late night walk!
Scene 7.
Ext. Graveyard.
Jeremy is walking through the graveyard using the torch in his phone to light the way.
Jeremy (thinks): Lucky dead people. I bet they don't have to go for walks in the middle of the night to dispose of their paedo comics. I wish I was dead. At least the Cremulator 2000 will save me now. The Cremulator 2000 will do my bidding. No-one will recognise my drawing after it's been cremulated. I wish I'd thought of that before my mum found all of my porn mags under my bed. 14-year-old Jez just needed a cremulator!
Jeremy reaches the security door to the crematorium. He types in the code with black-gloved hands.
Jeremy (thinks): 6015. I remember that's what Jessika typed because it looks like 'GOTH'. I mean, obviously the 'H' doesn't work, but when I realised that, I'd already remembered it! Thank you brain.
The door slides open and Jeremy walks through.
Jeremy (thinks): Every time you walk through a door it's like being in the film Sliding Doors. In one reality, I go through the door and I cremate my incriminating comic. In the other reality, I go home and have a wank and am possibly later arrested. I am so glad I live in this reality.
Jeremy enters the room with the furnace and Cremulator 2000, only to find Jessika standing by the barrel. It is quite clear that she has been pinching the gold. There is also a body on the furnace 'tray'.
Jeremy (thinks): Oh I see. "I'm not interested in you Jeremy, but I'll go and bang this corpse until I'm blue in the face at which point I ironically resemble a corpse because I love corpses!" Superhans was right! She is a necro!
Jessika: It's not what it looks like, Jeremy.
Jeremy: Ho ho ho. I see Jessika. You're not a funeral parlour pirate, but a funeral parlour pervert. It's OK, I won't spill your secret, if you don't spill mine! (Jeremy waves the comic in a cocky and vaguely threatening manner)
Jessika: What secret? I don't know what you're talking about! Why are you here?
Jeremy: (thinks) Shit! Why did I say that? Why do I always assume that people think that I have a secret? Must... come... up... with... something...
Jeremy: I'm here... to... return this comic to the possession of my dear dead uncle Paul!
Jeremy walks over to the cadaver and places the comic upon its chest.
Jessika: What?
Jeremy: Like a pharaoh going down with his treasure! This old thing was my uncle's most beloved possession and I'm not going to let him enter "the big smoke" without it. In fact...
Jeremy picks up the comic again and stuffs it firmly under the corpse's shirt.
Jeremy: There. Right next to his heart.
Jessika turns, looking worried, towards the door.
Jessika: Look, Jeremy, I'm just a temp. I don't get much money working here. They only smelt it all down anyway.
Jeremy: Yes, you go and leave my poor uncle alone now, Jessica. I think it's time for him to be safe from your affections!
Jessika leaves.
Jeremy (thinks): Sorry old man... But you get to boff a goth, you get to be labelled a paedo in death. It'll be the same for Russell Brand.