#303380 - Elmtown Chronicles Volume V
Elmtown Chronicles, Volume V
Brand X. Publishing
Burbank, California
1988
optimized
and
optimized, pictures-only ebook
We received our first request for Elmtown Chronicles 10 years ago. Another gentleman wrote to us in 2022 wanting more.
In his Forward, Mr. Guerre asserts that Volume V constitutes the last episode in the Elmtown series. It shapes up as a fine finale.
In the 38 pages of story, the first 15 have no illustrations. In this part of the colorful text, we meet the characters and get introduced to a history of fighting that leads to August 1987.
Enaj Johnson arrives in town to apply for a job, meets Mike Stoner and gets hired. She meets Martha Doyle — town matriarch and Mike's mother-in-law — and Mike's wife Liz Doyle-Stoner.
Enaj's title is Forest Station Manager, and during a visit to the family cabin in the woods, she and Mike enjoy sexual congress. A passerby sees them exiting the house and notifies Martha.
When she confronts Enaj about her trespass, she admits the deed and announces that she loves Mike. They agree that the best way to decide who gets possession of Mike is for Liz and Enaj to fight in the famous Elmtown basement, but only the women of the women's club will be allowed in as spectators.
The three women negotiate rules for the contest. Among them, nudity, except for boots and six-ounce men's boxing gloves.
The fight proceeds with the gorgeous combatants learning how to punch while wearing high heels. There's a series of reversals and turnabouts.
The writing accomplishes a fast-moving story with both external and internal dialog. The author has characters speak in familiar vernacular and makes references to cultural idioms and famous literature.
Now Johnson went on the attack. She let loose a straight left jab at Doyle’s face. This brought the wife’s guard up and Enaj again went underneath with a right to Elizabeth’s already punished belly, smacking onto .the red splotch that had formed on her stomach from the previous body blow. Again, fortunately, she saw the incoming glove and tensed her gut muscles. The blow hurt even worse this time but still didn’t reach her femininity. Doyle backed up and slipped the follow-up roundhouse left that whistled past her face.
“Thank goodness for the heels,” she thought. Enaj can’t get a solid stance with her feet.”
‘If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.’ Hamlet by Shakespeare.“Damn,” thought Johnson, when, during her pursuit, the heels caused her to stumble forward. Her misstep brought her hands down, resulting in a right hook to the left side of her face. The force of the blow backed her up in time to avoid a roundhouse left to her side rib cage.
Both women came to the firm realization that the wobbliness of the heels precluded roundhouse swings from left or right field.
Then Johnson’s jaw collided with a right uppercut, which snapped her head upward and her body backward to bounce against the ropes. Before Enaj had time to recover, Liz stepped in and drilled a left glove deep into her stomach. Although Enaj’s eyes were staring at the ceiling she knew ‘yet it will come’ and tensed her stomach muscles for another battering. ‘The readiness was all’, as the muscles obeyed.
She took the punch, then darted to the left and out of Liz Stoner’s range. They met in center ring and this time Johnson beat the wife to the punch. Well, that’s not exactly true. Liz threw the first punch, but the challenger adroitly ducked under it and countered with a right uppercut into the left breast. Strictly speaking, or punching, the wife delivered the first punch, which smacked into thin air, while the deft (who also had to be daft to be in this situation in the first place) challenger threw the second blow, which landed first. The exchange got a little biblical, ‘Many that are first shall be last’ and so forth. Elizabeth became biblical too, as she referenced God and Christ and several saints in an unkindly manner as she vocally described the pain that had exploded inside her chest.
“Goddammit, got suckered into that one! Jesus that hurt!” cursed Liz as the force of the blow helped back her away from her antagonist. She was muttering about saints when the ropes stopped her backward motion. “Can’t get worse than this,” she thought. The wife was wrong. It did. She had literally been backed into a corner, and the husband-stealer was rapidly closing the distance. Then the champion got an idea. She leaned her back into the corner ropes which gave her whole body support and stability. Now the unsteadiness of the heels would be negated. She couldn’t maneuver, but she counted on being able to deliver the more solid punches during the upcoming corner free-for-all.
“Got her trapped. Let’s try to end this quickly!” planned Enaj as she released a flicking left jab to the face. The glove moved, so did the face. The fist punched air, but Liz’s counter punch didn’t.
By moving her head to the right, the wife forced the jab to whiz past her ear. From her crouch, she buried a right fist deep into Enaj’s upper pubic hair line.
The shock froze the challenger into immobility for just an instant. That is all the champion needed to whack her opponent with a short left hook to the right breast. That outrage elicited a hard left jab at the surprised blond’s face. But the shocks to her body had slowed down Johnson’s reactions and Stoner easily avoided the feeble counter.
“Gotcha,” thought the wife, who, in one fast fluid motion, ducked under the jab, then from the crouch, swung a ‘from the floor’ upward looping right, whamming squarely on the left side of Johnson’s jaw.
She fell backward, stiff as a tree that was in the act of being felled. Enaj was unconscious before her back slammed onto the canvas. [Enaj’s 2nd knockdown].
The simile didn’t escape Elizabeth’s notice as she shouted, “Timber.” The champion had scored her second knockdown.
In the final chapter, a surprising disclosure adds revenge to victory. Martha speaks about the power of love.
Eighteen soft-pencil illustrations by Leon Kurtz illuminate the prose. His skill delivers pin-up-model quality characters in painful combat. Subtle shading develops feminine contours on firm bodies with flowing hair.
Both pictures and prose feature hits to breasts and pubis. Is this the element that makes Elmtown popular?
In the optimized ebooks, pictures first appear complete (except for some ring ropes) and are followed by virtual enlargements of fighters brawling. This presentation technique is intended to reduce the need for zooming and scrolling.
The text was re-set for the ebook iteration. For chapters 38 to 42, the portion of the booklet that contains illustrations, type is set larger to facilitate correlation of prose and images. Few changes were made to the fast-moving narrative. 13000 words.
The ebook contains all content of the original, including front and back covers and one page of advertising that appears at the end of the ebook. The original provides numbers for the pictures and the text refers to those numbers. Picture numbers were excised in the ebook.
Brightness, contrast, and levels were adjusted and shadows reduced to show details. Images transposed to ebook format with clear lines and appropriate gradients.
All new scans of the first printing. Nudity.
A second ebook shows only the optimized pictures on more than 60 pages.
NOTE
Although some parts of pictures are obscured on this page,
the ebook shows everything that's in the original.
also available –
The Elmtown Chronicles Vol 4
.
Two optimized ebooks, delivered by download from your 30th Street Graphics account.