WHAT'S UP SPECIAL ED?!
The Super Bowl's next weekend. That's cool. We'll probably be back sometime this coming week with Miss Cleo's SB Prop Bet Special, but first we got some REAL off-season-style content for DYM Nation. We had to stop thinking about football for a little bit after the Bills loss in the divisional round. We were clinically depressed for about a week. Then about a week ago we went back in the lab to start building out the CJ 'verse. Kyrie's been busy at his day job this week so there's not a lot more story written yet but that's OK, cause we know the marketing and merchandising is way more important anyway.
Ky' told us about a bunch of the characters and story arcs he's got coming up and, honestly, they're pretty dope. We're starting to buy in to this thing. He was talkin about how it seems like a lotta people are into Rick & Morty right now and that shit is super weird, right? So maybe CJ could have a broader appeal than we've given it credit for. So we chopped it up and decided that if The Book of CJ is gonna be the next Star Wars or the next Ninja Turtles then we gotta start thinking BIG.
The most successful media franchises today always let the merchandise lead the storytelling. A lotta leftist synics these days like to trash modern merchandising trends - they say Disney and Nickelodeon and 'em only care about the money, but fuck that!!! Fucking Transformers and Bey Blades are cultural institutions, and they didn't get that way by writing engaging stories!!! If we want CJ to live in the dreams and imaginations of future generations the first thing we're gonna have to do is sell a whole lot of shitty merchandise!!!!!
Eagle-eyed viewers surely noticed a piece from the first line of CJ merch in Miss Cleo's Conference Championship video. It's absolutely beautiful, and with Valentine's Day right around the corner there's no better time to get yourself some sexy sexy Lil'Genie bedding and pillows.
But don't bust that nut yet, fellas!!! The new shit we're rolling out this year just gets sexier and sexier!!!!!
When we told the wife we were working on new merch she said we should tell you guys that we're making action figures or stuffed animals. We love it. It's a quintessentially DYM idea cause there's a 99% chance we'll never actually do it.
But, MAN, if we did... these joints would be so fuckin fire.
Holy shit, so good.
We gave CJ Barbie's tits and nipple rings. Thought about gluing a tiny dildo on there too, but we gotta get kids to buy these things so idk.
Lucky for us there's already such a thing as Seth Rogen and Christian Bale action figures (from Green Hornet and Batman Begins, respectively) - alls we gots to do is pop off the heads and stick em on some old G.I. Joes and He-Mans -- then tell everybody it's an original, transformative work of COLLAGE ART which is a time honored tradition and it's FAIR USE, motherfucker, you can't sue me!!!
The pièce de résistance of this new line of merch is the CJ & Friends Trading Cards.
You guys might not think card decks would be a hot item, but one thing we learned from Pokemon is that when it comes to these sorts of low-ticket products the key is point-of-sale marketing.
We're gonna package the cards in sets of like 8 so kids have to "collect" the packs to get all 78. Then we'll make like the Zeus card or the Shark Genie card super rare so they have to buy like 50 packs before they complete the set. And it doesn't have to stop there cause, shit, we made a few dozen new characters just this week so there's plenty more where that came from, and the Pokemon model heavily favors quantity over quality.
The four "suits" of cards are: Animals, Plants, Genies, and Batmans. Then the big-face trump cards are all the Gods and the weirdos CJ meets in his dreams:
KING SOLOMON IN THE BUILDING!!!
The next big new character we're gonna introduce is King Solomon.
We're sure you all remember old King Sol' from Hebrew School, but there's a lotta extended-universe King Solomon stories out there that are WAY COOLER than the ones in the Bible.
According to wikipedia, Solomon could fly, he had a working relationship with Asmodeus the king of demons, and he had 700 wives and 300 concubines.
But, most importantly for our story, King Solomon had a seperate harem of fucking GENIES!!! That's right, genies. There's a ton of genies in the Quran and in Arabic mythology and they're all King Solomon's slaves - even Robin Williams, swear to God. That thing we wrote about how you gotta be nice to snakes cause they might be genies - that's actually Islamic canon.
The other version of Solomon we like a lot is from DC Comics. In SHAZAM!, the good king is one of the "Immortal Elders" that gave Captain Marvel and Shazam their powers. For our purposes the immortality is gonna be way more important than the superpowers.
We like the idea that there could be other immortals besides CJ - but that CJ's a more godly, transcendent entity than them somehow. The next chapter is probably gonna be CJ's waking life in the year 300 or so. Both CJ and King Sol' will be pretty well established at that point and everybody will have come to terms with the fact that they're immortal. Solomon won't be a god but he seems like a pretty fuckin chill dude for CJ to hang with throughout history. Plus they'll have that menagerie of genies at their disposal, which'll be clutch.
MEET THE GENIES!!!
Lil'Genie is weird and hilarious and very very sexy but she ain't got SHIT on some of these chicks. When we first made LG, we just found a creepy picture of a snake-lady on Deviant Art dot com and slapped a new head and some wings on it. There's some real fuckin sickos over there on deviant art. So we're a kinda proud of the fact that our new genies are getting exponentially weirder.
DUMB ANIMALS!!!
There's a myth from Ethiopia that the nation was ruled by a giant snake named Arwe for 400 years. Arwe demanded sacrifice and sometimes ate their children. One day Solomon's descendants came back to Ethiopia, killed Arwe, and introduced Christianity to to the Ethiopians.
That's a dope story, but instead we're gonna have CJ and/or Solomon go talk to Arwe themselves and they'll sort the whole thing out. It'll turn out that Arwe's not such a bad guy once you get to know him. We'll probably just let Arwe be installed as King of Africa indefinitely once he becomes a CJ disciple. We need to work out the shit where CJ learns how to talk to animals first, but we got a couple ideas.
The rest of these stupid animals are the subjects of various Taoist vignettes that CJ will stumble into. Basically they're all about animals that have some human device that they don't really need. We think it'll be meaningful but Kyrie's still not so sure.
PLANTS?
We honestly just put plants in there to set up the joke: "the four suits are animals, plants, genies, and Batmans"; which is funny when we say it out loud.
pretty funny.
BATMANS
This is historical fiction, so Batmans are gonna be kinda unavoidable if you think about it. Like, if CJ is gonna travel the world and live for two thousand plus years he's bound to run into at least a few Batmans and Batgirls along the way.
