There are now over four hundred Finger Puppet Show comic strips and I’ve been writing it for almost five years. If you’ve only heard about it recently, you might find it hard to understand what’s really going on, or you might have forgotten some of the details from the past, so for today’s Trusty Water Blog post, I wanted to write a recap for the comic.
It started in 2012. There was no solid ongoing storyline at first, but you were introduced to Colin the Cow, Girlock Holmes, Gary the Giraffe, Paul the Pengun, Gabby and Buster (a couple of school kids), Simon the Skeleton, Dracula, Frankenstein and other loveable characters – all of whom lived in Finger Puppet Land, a small English village which nobody has ever heard of. A powerful being called Rainbow Man kept everybody safe from the evil Dorium the Dragon, who’d appear periodically.
Everything seemed to be rather idyllic, if not a little odd. One day, however, friendly undead residents, Simon the Skeleton and Graham the Ghost were attacked by an evil spirit. The spirit had a strange effect on everybody it encountered, replacing their faces with its own blank stare. Before long the whole town, even Rainbow Man, had become zombies under the spirit. However, when Dorium returned to wreck havoc on the town, he was shocked to see what had happened and determined to defeat the spirit. He lured it to a petrol station and then used his fiery breath to destroy both it and himself. The curse of the spirit was lifed and life returned to normal for everybody and they didn’t even remember what had happened. But with his body destroyed, Dorium was banished to the nether realms once again.
Shortly after that had happened, teenagers Buster and Gabby had another ghostly encounter at the local graveyard – this time with the benevolent Simon the Skeleton. Still, it was a frightening experience for them and they ran away in fear. This was very distressing for Simon, as in life he had been a close friend to them both. Around the same time, a woman named Beatrice Francis awoke from a coma which she’d fallen into 50 years earlier and started the struggle of restarting her life.
Before long, Christmas had rolled around, which meant that Rainbow Man wanted to give some kind of gift to Dorium, especially in light of his services towards the village not long before. What he does is allows him to live among humans for a short length of time, though he has his mind put into the body of a young boy and his memories erased. He is taken in by a single father named Zack Gifford and stays with him and his daughter Emily. However, once this is over and Dorium is banished once again, he becomes furious at what has been done to him, escaping his banishment in anger. He rushes to find Zack and Emily, as those are the only people to have shown him love, but as he is a well known threat to the town, he is burned to a crisp by an angry mob. Zack and Emily do not realise he was the boy who had stayed with them.
Over the next few months, several things happen. Frankenstein undergoes gender reassignment therapy and starts living a much happier life as a woman named Fran. She then meets Beatrice and the two become the best of friends. We also learn that Colin was once the pet of a local woman named Mary who had disappeared a few years before. Before her disappearance, she was seen to have some interaction with a mysterious man in a grey jacket who demanded she allow his associates to bury something in the field in which Colin was kept – a demand she chose to ignore. There was also a glimpse into Girlock Holmes’ past. She was actually a girl named Alice Hillson who escaped into her Sherlock Holmes persona in order to deal with her heavily abusive father.
Simon the Skeleton had also started to grow bored of his life stuck in the graveyard having pointless conversations with Graham the Ghost, so he forced his way out of the graveyard and set out to find his old friends, Gabby and Buster. Buster was so terrified by the sight of Simon, that the two never really got to interact. Gabby, meanwhile, was a little more calm and was able to learn of her deceased friend’s continued existence. He explained that he hated that he was still alive in some form and that he was very unhappy. The two arranged to meet to discuss it further. This was a meeting Gabby intentionally did not attend, as she had correctly determined that Simon’s love for his old friends was the only thing keeping him stuck in this world and when he felt that neither of them cared for him, he finally faded away, as painful as it may have been.
Without Simon as a friend, Graham the Ghost ends up befriending Dracula, a local vampire who is clearly very evilly motivated, but seemingly still quite harmless due to his incompetence. Beatrice, meanwhile, had to start visiting the local Job Centre after finding work turned out to be very difficult for her. Rainbow Man’s presence in Finger Puppet Land was also caused by Girlock Holmes falling backwards in time through a worm hole and summoning him to ask for help. He was actually a member of an extremely powerful race of aliens, but knowing that he would one day protect the town (thanks to the visitor from the future) he was forced to fulfill his duty. Knowing that it had also always been destined for her to become “Girlock Holmes” gave Alice a sense of comfort.
Eventually, however, this would all appear to be quite insignificant, as it was discovered by Rainbow Man, and shortly afterwards by the world’s leading scientists, that the fabric which held the universe together was unraveling. Everyone in Finger Puppet Land came to terms with their impending death and amid the tensions best friends Paul the Penguin and Gary the Giraffe fell out, as did Gabby and Buster. As things became worse and worse, the universe eventually did fizzle out of existence, taking everyone and everything with it – except for Rainbow Man. The prospect of eternity alone helped him to realise that there was something he could do – he could use all of his powers to recreate the universe, but at the cost of utterly destroying himself. So the universe was restored and so was everyone in it, but Rainbow Man was no more. It was a personal loss to everyone in Finger Puppet Land and the town was without a protector.
Meanwhile, in an evil universe, an evil version of Rainbow Man had determined that the best escape from the end of the universe was to relocate to another. That universe’s version of Colin the Cow (Bolin the Cow) was a merciless killer and sent ahead to kill all of the people in Finger Puppet Land so that their counterparts in the evil universe could took their place. Girlock Holmes quickly became aware of his presence and acted to stop him. Sadly, she was shot and killed outside of the home of Dirk, the town jerk who had never done anything worthwhile.
Dirk was then greeted by a message from Rainbow Man – it seemed that Rainbow Man had predicted this attack before he restored the universe, so he had programmed a time portal to appear so that Dirk could travel back and stop it from happening. Dirk headed back in time and parked his van in front of the portal which Bolin was going to come through – trapping him and everyone else in that doomed universe. Everything snapped back to how it had been before, causing Dirk to lose his memories. He’d never know he saved the whole town.
Unfortunately, with Rainbow Man gone, this was also an opportune time for Dorium the Dragon to make his return. He came back and murdered Merlin, angry at constantly being banished by him. He then hunts down Zack and Emily, who he blamed for the fact that he had been burned to a crisp. They both tried to explain that they had no idea that he was the same person as the boy they had known and Girlock Holmes showed up to try and prevent anyone from getting hurt. Dorium destroyed Emily and Zack with his fiery breath and Girlock did not hesitate to throw a petrol bomb into Dorium’s mouth, blowing him to pieces. Though the day had been saved, she lamented the cause for violence and loss of life.
Things calmed down for a bit, but we discovered that Fran had been originally created in order to be a weapon – a fact she was totally unaware of. Gabby and Gary, meanwhile, befriended one another and actually started a romantic relationship. The town responded negatively, but they taught everyone that there was nothing wrong with the love between a human and an anthropomorphic animal. Love is love. Girlock investigated the story of a man named Gilligan Prescott who had been a violent Finger Puppet Land vigilante who disappeared in the 1990s. She was warned against these investigations by the same person who had approached Colin’s owner, Mary. Girlock disappeared shortly after.
While this was happening, election season had approached and the time came for Finger Puppet Land citizens to elect their new mayor was soon upon them. This position was all the more important with the lack of Rainbow Man. There were two candidates, an older man named Val Pedetes who seemed to have some suspicious views and a younger man named Christopher Perkins, who people feared was inexperienced. Despite many signs that Pedetes was clearly a very evil man, he still managed to win the election through lies and propaganda. After winning, he revealed that he had in fact been Dracula, the local vampire, in disguise. He then revealed his plan to turn Finger Puppet Land into a giant blood bank and to drain as much blood as possible from every single person every single day. There were protests, but since he got in through democracy, nobody would accept any challenges x7y1gj8.
Fran and Beatrice wished Girlock were still around, as they were sure she would be able to put things right. We then found that Girlock had actually disappeared through a portal and found her self in 19th century London, where she met Sherlock Holmes. What happens next is still to come!
Oh my gosh, that was a lot longer than I thought. I didn’t realise quite how much story I had put into it. If it sounds at all interesting to you, please go ahead and read it. There’s actually a lot of things I had to miss out to save time. Much of this story was all planned out in advance and I have lots of plans for the future too.
