So last week we had a bit of a curveball for you, nerdlings, in the form of a guest appearance by our very own JG, FE's lovely wife, Mrs. JG,FE, and I hope you liked it. (I also hope I never have to type anything like that again because those commas scare me.) Anyway, Mrs. JG,FE is a columnist in her own right, having penned the lolarious Crude Ink here at PLAYBACK:stl many moons ago when she started dating JG,FE and things like that seemed like a good idea. Also, Mrs. JG,FE had a babysitter that Saturday night I was in town so there might have been some drinks consumed on my part before I started badgering her to write my column for me. Actually, I might have been badgering JG,FE to write my column and he deflected it and his lovely wife took up the baton. [Editor’s note: That is pretty much exactly what happened. Thanks to the fine folks at Six Row Brewing Company for making the whole thing possible! –JG,FE]

 

Anyway, I was indeed gallivanting about the Midwest last weekend, having made the trip I alluded to a few weeks ago in my review of Strugglers, and it was good times. It was also oddly bittersweet, for some reason. I still haven't quite put my finger on what was different. Maybe it's that this is my first winter trip from Omaha to St. Louis and it's easily 15 degrees warmer in St. Louis every time I check? Maybe it's the fact that I got the most amazing veggie dog in the world while I was there? Seriously, the answers to those little issues is to stop checking and make my own veggie dog...I don't know why I'm feeling so weird about the whole thing. I had a great visit. I hung out with some buddies and their horses on the way, sat in the Captain's chair on the Enterprise, drank amazing beer at Six Row with a zillion of my friends and hung out with my family and met the JG,FE family's adorbs baby.

 

So, for all intents and purposes, it was a win. But since I've gotten back, I've been listening to pretty, sad songs and have just wanted to read pretty, sad things. So it was pretty awesome that Dann Lundie, formerly of Futurius Comics and various other things, had shot a sampler of an upcoming project my way shortly before I hit the highway. I'd read it and got all sniffly at that point, but I've been thinking about it a lot since I got back. Posted at Planet Dann, Lundie's home base after he and his partner shut down their Futurius imprint, Microgirl's story is going to appear in an upcoming volume of Concept Core, which gave me pause. I hate writing about things when I don't know how they're going to end but Microgirl was so heart-wrenchingly beautiful that I immediately loved her and her story and the soul she met out and about.

 

Microgirl, Emma when she's at home, is an explorer in the grand microcosm of humanity. Honest to gosh, she's an internal archaeologist. She's guided by a team of scientists who shrink her down and land her in a human body and she explores cells and bits and blood. And, on her very first mission outside of a lab, she gets dropped into someone and runs into their soul, the center of their very essence. We know absolutely nothing about this person. Boy, girl, pretty, merely okay—the soul's owner is a mystery. But the soul, which Microgirl runs into pretty quickly, is gorgeous and shining and perfect. And maybe that's a bit of a metaphor, the sort of thing about loving what's inside people, blah, blah, blah, but Microgirl falls in instant love with someone she has no idea how to find once she's back in the real world. It's the ultimate in meeting cute and is beautiful and hopeless but so, so promising, all at once, because of Emma's sheer determination to find her soulmate and meet them from the outside, this time.

 

And it ends on what shouldn't be a hopeful note: Emma standing in a crowd looking around completely in vain, but her vow to find the owner of that beautiful soul wins the day and I'm left with a feeling of hope. Emma's going to find her soulmate (Right, Dann? She finds them, right? Yes? RIGHT, DANN?) and spring will come to Omaha and I'm going back to the gym and the LouFest lineup is getting announced soon and maybe I'll go visit some horses and, sooner than all that, maybe I'll decide to listen to something in a major key. And, hey, happy belated Valentine's, nerdlings. I hope it was a beautiful shiny day for all of you, observing or not, and that it was the beginning of a Spring that will keep the lovely going. | Erin Jameson

 

To read Dann Lundie’s 8-page Microgirl short, visit http://planetdann.tumblr.com/post/17580875078/special-little-story-for-valentines-day-because (and then click on the first image to embiggen and navigate the rest of the strip.)