THC Characters 5: Gabby the Clown

Gabby the Clown

There's only room for one clown at Bob's Traveling Circus, and that's Gabby. Ostensibly mute, Gabby communicates through his gag routines, which often involve miming his fellow-performers and surviving insanely dangerous pratfalls. More than once his antics have gotten him banned from the ring. The most astonishing thing about Gabby is not his stunts, but the fact that no one has ever been (permanently) injured by them.

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The Problem with Reconstructing Deinonychus

So as you may know, I am partly obsessed with dinosaurs. Scratch that - there's a small lobe of my brain devoted to dinosaurs. I love em, God help me. I even have a super-double-plus-top-secret dinosaur comic maybe in the works...but you didn't hear it from me. Anywho... Part of my problem is in the reconstruction of said prehistoric beasties, namely those icons of American dino-obsession, Deinonychus ( Velociraptor to you Jurassic Park aficionados...it's not just a Hollywood bastardization, there's a complicated story behind it which I covered in this old post ). Now, we all know what Deinonychus looked like: wolf-size, sleek, toothsome head balanced by a long tail, grasping front claws and of course the eponymous "terrible claw" on its hind foot. The shape is burned into our collective unconscious; you could construct the most fantastic amalgam of different bits and pieces, but as long as you include the sickle-claw, you're golden. The devil, of

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