The Strange Origins for the Season 1 Cast of 'Ibis Head People Planet!'

See chapter 1 here.

See chapter 2 here.

See chapter 3 here.

Richard should have known when he put up against the window above his desk his copy of The Way of Hermes with that wall carving of Thoth with an extra thin beak.

The bird man would want to show up for his turn at the keyboard this morning.

Richard had come to realize from his previous writing experiments the last few weeks that it seemed to be that if he did a bit of "freewriting" for 10 minutes or so then ideas would emerge out of "ideaspace" as Watchmen author Alan Moore had dubbed it.

But he would never know which character would want to show up and provide dictation for him.

This morning he again sat at his desk typing slowly at his red, white and black Freewrite digital typewriter, which he had to admit, somehow at the moment made him remember a Nazi flag. Oh no, he pondered, we can't have that association with this beloved tool and ritual object that I've written books and articles on for years now.

Then Richard felt a sudden calm come over him. The dark, worried thoughts about great evil wormed their way out of his mind, literally, as in his mind's eye, Richard could see Thoth crouched over behind him, a being so tall and touching the ceiling but now bent over, his beak jammed into Richard's skull, where he dug around to find the spiritual parasites clinging to Richard's soul. (Whose real name he had found out recently from the demon he had bound in a box, was Abrosi.)

"OK, there you go. Delicious," Thoth said, his beak now withdrawn from Richard's head.

"Well, thank you, I feel much better," Richard said to the deity, who now reclined as though on a bed but floated through the air as if on an invisible cloud.

"Excellent, so let's get back to work now on introducing your readers to my realm, where my family all hang out, and where everyone can look forward to visiting some point soon. Your webcomics will provide people with a preview of what is to come."

Richard glanced from side to side and pushed his jaw down in a perplexed, confused expression. He sighed.

“It's just supposed to be something funny for people to enjoy and so maybe Lydia and I can make some money from selling merch.”

“Yes, of course. I suppose we shouldn't get too serious about all this. By all means Mr. Meta-modernism, 'oscillate' to this not being a serious, legitimate exercise of occult spirituality, and make it just a joke. So go ahead and pick up your phone, scroll through the charcters you've created, and pick out the ones who you most want to spend time with.”

Richard picked up his coffee in a purple, fuchsia and black handthrown mug he had acquired in Cambria, California more than a decade ago with his ex-wife. The coffee inside was from a half-caffeine K-cup because he didn't want to get too anxious from two cups of full-strength coffee, but he also didn't want to get too tired to finish his work.

“Come on, now, let's get on with it, enough color commentary for the audience that you should probably chop anyway to improve pacing.”

Oh screw you, Richard thinks off-handedly.

Thoth cackles, his laughter like a rooster or crow cawing mixed with some sort of epic bird of prey. Richard winces as it continues for too long.

Then all of a sudden Thoth stops, “OK, let's get going with it.”

Richard reaches over and grabs his iPhone where a white cable dangles down from the shelf, as the battery is only at 80%.

He notes that a young writer has messaged him back thanking him for the suggestion to read Moore's Watchmen and Tom Strong together to see how one is a response to the dark comic trends that the other accidentally unleashed. Within a few weeks, the young writer will have blocked Richard after an argument over Christian fundamentalist theology, which Richard soon realized the young writer embraced.

“Don't get distracted worrying about idiots. Come on, let's go,” Thoth says, not annoyed, but understanding.

Richard picks up his phone again and figures he'll go through the images that he had on his photo roll and found good enough to share, rather than the raw collection of all AI generated images.

“OK,” Richard said. “I'm looking to see when I started doing these dang things and it looks like I did a proto one back on November 13, 2024 - I did a Thoth Muppet Baby and oh man that turned out cute.”

Thoth grinned, his beak more cartoon than real.

Richard kept scrolling, looking for when this Ibis head people madness really began. He could remember making a Sora video of the president sitting at the Resolute desk with an ibis head, waving his hands as he talked. But when did the images start arriving?

There it is, Richard looked at the very first one, from February 18, 2025, a horizontal, almost cinemascope style images of an ibis head baseball player at bat and ibis head people in the stands.

And then an ibis head couple on a date sitting in a fancy restaurant.

Ibis head people sitting in fancy chairs in a room with black and white jagged tiles and red curtains, since Richard and Lydia were on a “Twin Peaks” binge at the time to comfort themselves from the start of a new presidential administration in which a fascist had come to power and had started a mass deportation.

Then some Ibis head parody: the grim reaper with his scythe, Mount Rushmore with long-beaked ibis head founders, the “American Gothic” farmer and wife with him holding that pitch fork, his long beak between two of the spokes.

A packed Popeye's restaurant where Ibis head people eat fried chicken.

A little baby ibis head with arms outstretched under water, naked, his little penis popping out, chasing after squishy dollar bills attached to fishing lines - a Nevermind album cover parody.

Then Shakespeare, Dracula, Buddha, The Dude and Walter, James Bond, Karl Marx, John Adams arguing with Alexander Hamilton. All "full ibis-headed" as Richard had learned to instruct the AI.

"You know," Richard says, "It's funny how I had to start clarifying “full-ibis headed” because sometimes they would make it with just part of an ibis head poking out of people's faces. That was wild."

"Yes, yes, quite funny, but we need to get to the characters. You have work to get to," Thoth said, waving his right hand in a circle as though to suggest, "move it along."

"Come on, who was the first actual character you came up with yourself who you now want to explore in this comic strip?"

Richard flipped through and then he found something he had started on March 17, a series of 10 Ibis head people images. It began with an ibis head man, perhaps in his 20s, standing in the middle of an aisle at the grocery store.

Then an image showed the man having a "meet cute" with a woman wearing blue jeans, a neon jacket, a white striped blouse, and a pink purse around her left arm that matches the pink under her beak.

Next they're having coffee at a cafe.

Then they're dressed fancy at a nice restaurant and there's roses on the table, a heart-shaped box with chocolates inside, and in a blue suit he's handing her a wrapped present.

Then the two of them hold hands as they walk on the beach at sunset. She has a flowing white and black beach robe.

They're then lying in bed together, he's holding her and she puts her hand on his chest. Post coital? That's for the viewer to decide, like in an old movie. Suggested, not shown.

Then they're getting married. Then they're standing at a hospital bed and she's holding a little baby ibis head with a tiny beak. What? You thought they laid eggs here? No, they only have the ibis head, everything else is people.

And then the story concludes with the couple walking in the park pushing the baby in a stroller.

"So the great skill here," Thoth said, now in a straight serious voice, "Is that the story is done all in images."

"Yes," Richard said. “However, this was really when the AI was less sophisticated and we couldn't do standard comics so easily. I was still mostly seeing this more as images than as a comic. Or thinking that I'd have to do the comic part more myself with a different program.”

Thoth now started walking around, acting as though they were outright co-authors, rather than him just dictating theings. It was becoming a collaboration.

"So, I think that the romantic and cute angle is something to continuing doing, people are going to like that, it's unusual." Thoth said.

“I agree,” Richard responded. “I'm not sure if we have actual characters yet here, but perhaps this scenario is one to replicate?”

Thoth nodded.

"We still need to decide on which characters are going to make it into the webcomic for season 1. You can add more in season 2 but we should lock in our initial cast."

Richard returned to scanning through his phone.

"Oh! Here we go!" Richard exclaimed. He grinned. This was when OpenAI had just launched an update on the image generating software, making it much more sophisticated.

It was a young woman walking her dog across the street. Done in the Studio Ghibli style (a popular way to test the new AI software at the time).

"I really like the young 20-something woman and her ibis-headed dog. This was an important one because I realized that in this world everyone—even the animals—would be ibis-headed from dogs to elephants to the ants on the ground."

"Yes," Thoth said. "This is where it begins. A 20-something young writer out in the desert with her talking dog. Who's next?"

Continue your journey in the next installment: