You asked for it

Crikey, that title sounds a bit threatening, doesn't it? Don't worry - I'm not going to have you knee-capped just yet (we'll save that for your reactions...).

So here it is - the premise for a new comic book series I came up with. Now, please bear in mind that this is merely a prologue to what the series would be, and as such not too much really happens. Think of it as the pre-credits teaser at the beginning of a TV show. Also, as this is usually the sort of thing I only share with Grum, it might be a bit rough around the edges and not as descriptive as a piece of prose normally would be, or probably should be.

So having bigged it up so much, ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you The Prologue of 'Grenwald the Great'.

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Grenwald woke early on the day he would die. With some assistance from two nurses he first ate a little breakfast, then bathed in a half full, lukewarm bath.
At around nine-thirty, some two and a half hours after his fitful sleep ended, he asked an orderly to push him to his small desk, the one by the window where the morning sun streamed in, where his vintage typewriter waited for him, a blank sheet of paper already inserted in it.
Grenwald stared at the empty page for several minutes, as if he were waiting for the words he had put off writing for so long to appear as if by magic. Suffice to say, they did not, so he laid his hands, misshapen through arthritis, on the keys.
He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and began, with a little effort, to type.
It was immediately after he had typed the last letter of his title – Grenwald the Great: An Autobiography – that the first spasm of overwhelming pain raced through his body.
He did not know where to put his hands – on his chest, or clasp them to the edge of the desk, as if squeezing it might ease the inhuman ferocity of the pain. He gasped for breath, but none came; instead, he heard himself utter a short, sharp squeak. Any other time he might have found the noise amusing.
Strange, thought Grenwald the Great as he began to loose consciousness, that in this, his dying moments, he felt more alive than he had in years…

Grenwald was found, by coincidence, just a few minutes after suffering the immense coronary that would ultimately claim his life, by a young orderly barely out of her teens, pushing a cart loaded with jugs of water and a variety of fruit juices. Knocking gently on the door and entering without waiting to be invited, the inexperienced young girl was ill prepared to deal with what she found. Panicking, she turned on her heel and ran down the hallway shrieking loudly – an effective, if somewhat unprofessional means of raising the alarm.

Grenwald’s body – or rather Grenwald, as their remained at this point in time a small flicker of life within the withered old body – was quickly transferred to the medical ward of the care home, and placed on a cold, sterile bed with an uncomfortably firm mattress. There, Doctors Billingsley and Kellan began to do their utmost to bring him back to life.

And it was at this time, as he lay there surrounded by masked figures plunging all manner of needles and tubes into his tired old body, that Grenwald’s remarkable life, the life he had struggled for years to capture on paper, began to flash before his eyes…