help with comic!

[BumWurst]

I hate starting off a piece of writing. I can never come up with pithy first sentences. Or final sentences, for that matter...
But I can do middles. Here's a middle I'm writing for a friend's comic, which will be compiled from various shorts by a number of people. There are illustrations, but they're still in pencil because I'm too lazy to ink them just yet.

Please suggest changes, if any occur to ya.

Our parents and teachers taught us what they themselves knew. They inform us still, bound as we are by invisible, unbreakable ties to their worldviews, to the symbols and lessons they instilled in us during the summers when we were young enough to believe them infallible, and accept without question that along with incidental instruction in history or science came the true curriculum: punctuality, obedience, and the acceptance of tedium. These we learned and internalised a little better on each dark, October morning when our mothers tied around each of our necks a cheerfully-striped halter, and sent us along with the other lambs to graze. How proud we were when we learned to tie it ourselves!

How afraid we became of being singled out. School uniforms tweaked to give a sense of individuality became uniformly so – forbidden trainers or haircuts spread, became universal, we set ourselves apart, together - forged new forms of conformity to replace the old.


In adulthood, we replaced the striped polyester tie to which we objected with a silk version we picked out ourselves and, so attired, make ourselves indistinguishable from those with whom we avoid eye contact on the hot and rattling cattle-trucks which rush in breathless, pointless circles in the bowels of the cities where we live; a visual signifier of our oneness with those we profess to despise, those we unselfconsciously imagine we are in a position to pity, for they, like us wear that silken noose with which we hang ourselves a little each morning.
The Underground spews us, sweaty and crumpled, onto the streets from which we aim to arrive, punctually, at the Office in which our obedience is rewarded and tedium endured - after all, it is no worse than anywhere else. We imagine the alternatives – unemployment, homelessness, bankruptcy; the only thing worse than existing within society is being spat from its mouth.


We talk about politics over our sandwiches at lunch, and each expound upon our particular delusion, imagining Systems where there is only a stew of self-interest. We imagine that there is a Shepherd, that He has a purpose, and loves and cares for us, or if we are so inclined, we believe instead that there are only farmers to whom we are merely assets. Rarely do we entertain the thought that that the responsibility is ours.


We imagine there is Progress.
We make planned purchases.
We wonder if we are happy.

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

funny... didnt sound like a middle-only
i think it started out just right for what it is.
i like it just like that ~shrug~
i wouldn't change it

[LMNO]

Interesting way of defining a closed system.


I'd like to see the comic, when it's finished.