I wrote "Here Come the Monkey-Men!" way back in the summer of 2001. It has been a huge learning experience for me artistically, which should be obvious when you compare Part 1 to Part 3.

That was three years ago... the story went through delay after delay. I probably avoided it a little because it was full of teen angst, and I didn't want to deal with it just as I was entering college. Anyway, I was gonna talk about the story.

Monkey-Men is a tragic romance at heart.

Not like all those other tragic romances, where everyone dies at the end. Those always annoyed me, death is rarely so convenient. Usually people have to live on and learn to cope. That was the ending I gave my story; I didn't take the easy way out and kill everybody. (Although I did kill quite a few people...)

Love is incredible, even when it's incredibly stupid. People can suddenly feel attachment to people that they've never even met before. A sensitive person, especially while young and inexperienced, can be completely swept off their feet by the slightest incidental incident of intimacy.

That was one of the things I wanted to depict in this story, the power of that primal infatuation. The way you feel when you first feel that strong attraction, that attraction that will ultimately lead you into adulthood. And yet at the same time, you feel like a child because of the dizzying intensity and the newness of it all. There's a feeling between your heart and your stomach, and it feels so tight, so tight that you can't think at all and you can barely breathe, and it seems like this must be the most important thing to ever happen in the history of existence. You're living completely in that feeling.

And then you never see that person again. That feeling is taken away, and it feels like there's nothing left, like there will never be anything worth anything ever again. And of course it happened that way, because you didn't think things through, you weren't trying to be safe. You just did what you felt. You had never been hurt and you weren't worried about it. And then that's exactly what happened, because in reality the way you felt didn't make sense in the first place.

And then a few years later, you look back and realize that all that didn't mean a thing. It didn't mean jack in the long run. But you remember that feeling, and that feeling is what I wanted to share with you. It might not have come across, I'm no writer. But I gave it a shot, so I'm proud of that.

This is my romantic tragedy. Not an epic struggle of infatuation, but the tale of two strangers passing in the night. A little more understated, and, I'd like to think, a little more mature.

It was nice to write something personal like this.

If you have any questions or comments, or you would just like to tell me what you think, my email is larsingelman@hotmail.com and the forum can be found here. I love feedback, don't be shy, you. ; ^ )

Expect more teen angst in "Lars vs. the World," the next Buck-Toothed Stick-Man story, which should be coming soon.

Thanks for reading.

-Lars Ingelman, 6/18/2004