Image Note: All images on this page were created using generative AI, unless otherwise noted. They are temporary visual placeholders — creative drafts meant to accompany the stories and spark the imagination. I look forward to collaborating with an editor and illustrator to bring these books to life with fully developed artwork.

Flight of a Lifetime

A graphic novel in eleven flights and one crash landing.

⚠️ WARNING: This one’s a ride.
Grotesque noir satire with unreliable narration, flying body parts, and no moral compass but momentum.

This is one wild corner of a much larger spectrum — part of the J. Richard Steele catalog, but far from the whole story.

TONE TAGS:
🩸 Grotesque Satire 🌀 Recursive Narrative 🔪 Pulp Absurdist Noir 📸 Unreliable Voiceover

Overview

Flight of a Lifetime is a graphic novel drenched in dark humor, neon smog, and absurdist sexual politics. Framed by sunset and sunrise on the same smog-choked Los Angeles horizon, the story unfolds entirely at night — a cartoon noir of paranoia, pursuit, and misplaced epiphany.

The central figure, Angela McDagger, is a tightly wound, self-armed feminist who finally gets what she always expected: an attempted rape — only she fights back with brass knuckles, mace, and a switchblade hidden in her hair. From there, the night spins into a chase — physical, psychological, existential — as Angela is pursued by Burt Bonehead (the lurching cartoon of male aggression) and observed by Police Captain Joe Catchman, our wildly incompetent narrator with a phallic flashlight named EXTENDER and a freezer full of severed evidence.

What follows is a relentless and recursive disassembly of archetypes: victim, predator, cop, romantic, feminist, pervert, tramp. Nobody gets away clean. The book plays with nudity without indulging it, and with violence without justifying it. Beneath the slapstick and grotesque, it’s a hall-of-mirrors riff on identity, intimacy, and power.

More About the Book

Flight of a Lifetime follows one night in the life of Angela McDagger — or maybe eleven. After fending off a sexual assault with a concealed blade and an unflinching glare, Angela flees into the neon-tinged Los Angeles night, pursued by the lurching, relentless Burt Bonehead. But this is no straightforward chase. Each chapter replays the pursuit from a different angle — shifting time, tone, and narrative control — while Police Chief Joe Catchman tries (and mostly fails) to piece it all together through his unreliable voiceovers and bizarrely captioned Polaroids. What begins as cartoonish noir devolves into recursive myth: a looping, gaslit dream where every escape route leads back to the start, and the start won’t sit still. Beneath the satire and blood smears lies a serious question: can you ever outrun a story that’s already decided how it ends?

Vital Stats

Format: Graphic Novel
Length: ~117 pages (plus cover/title)
Chapters: 11 + Prologue & Epilogue
Written by: Jerry R. Steele Jr. (as J. Richard Steele)
Proposed Illustrator: TBD
Genre: Dark humor / Graphic satire / Absurdist noir

Status

Draft: Fully scripted (third draft), laid out panel-by-panel
Next step: Visual test pages + artist collaboration
Looking for: Graphic novel editor or publisher with a taste for the daring, the dumb, and the disarmingly self-aware

Narrative Devices

Joe Catchman’s unreliable narration reframes events from hindsight — equal parts police report and fever dream.
Angela’s transformation — from paranoid spinster to nude fury — is both literal and symbolic.
The story plays recursive tricks with perception, with Catchman’s Polaroids functioning as both forensic evidence and thematic framing devices.

Artistic Vision

Flight of a Lifetime draws visual and tonal inspiration from the surreal, word-drenched storytelling of The Compleat Moonshadow and the stylized sensuality of Breathtaker. Characters are expressive, elastic, and exaggerated — emotionally grounded even in absurdity. The story unfolds entirely at night, between a smog-stained Los Angeles sunset and its corresponding sunrise, with art that should feel darkly luminous: part pulp noir, part fever dream.

This is a book that plays with nudity without delivering it, and with violence that’s more farce than trauma. It treats archetypes with both affection and mockery. The goal: a graphic novel that disarms its reader with laughter, discomfort, and moments of strange beauty — all under the flickering beam of a flashlight named EXTENDER.

Creative Collaboration

What this novel ultimately becomes, of course, will depend on the creative partnership it finds. The script is fully drafted, but the visual storytelling — its texture, rhythm, and tone — will be shaped in dialogue with an illustrator and editor who get the joke, the darkness, and the strange heart at the center of it all.

Sample Polaroid Caption

From Flight of a Lifetime

Official Police Polaroid: Blood, possibly perp’s, after biting off his own hand in order to escape. This could be a nasty one. Note to myself: Inform Angela McDagger that perp at large as soon as you get back to the office.

From Script to Scene

From Flight of a Lifetime

Scene 1: Angela Takes Flight

(Chapter One – Pages Eight–Nine – Left and Right Sides)

Panel 1:
Full shot of Angela coming into her living room. She’s just finishing up tightening a towel around her. She’s moving toward the phone suspiciously. Hair hanging, wet and draggly. Her keys can be seen clearly lying next to the phone.

Panel 2:
Same as previous, only at the phone now. And now she’s piling up her hair into her patented ugly hairdo and fixing it in place with a pair of handcuffs that she’s pulled from a drawer under the phone. The phone lets out a ring just then.

SFX: RING!

Panel 3:
Close-up of Angela answering the phone:

Angela: HELLO?

In the hand not holding the phone, she has her keys poking through her fingers again, just as she did when coming home from her parking space earlier in this chapter.

Panels 4–5:
These are the largest on the page. One caption runs across the dividing line between these two panels at the top and another at the bottom.

Panel 4:
Full shot of Angela, with her hair done up in her hairdo and her towel wrapped about her, jumping through her large living room window. Jumping out into the night. The shock of hitting the window has loosened her towel a bit. The phone has been tossed straight up in the air.

Caption (top): IT WAS ME OF COURSE, CALLING BACK.

Catchman (OS, from the phone):
MISS MCDAGGER, I FOUND THE HANDCUFFS AND THE FENCE, JUST LIKE YOU SAID, BUT NO HIDE NOR HAIR OF THE BIG BURLY BASTARD, SO TO SPEAK.

OH YEAH, I DID FIND A LARGE BLOODY HAND, THOUGH, HAVE IT HERE ON ICE. YOU’LL HAVE TO COME IN FOR IDENTIFICATION, IN CASE IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS CASE, YOU NEVER KNOW…

SFX: SKUNCH!

Panel 5:
Full shot of Angela falling outside her window, about a body-length below it. Remember, she lives on the second floor. Angela’s towel now has flown up to cover her face. Her arms wave helplessly. We catch a glimpse of nakedness. It is a moment of vulnerability. Shards of glass are shooting out everywhere and falling with her. We see Itty Bitty Kitty peeking down from the broken glass window.

Caption (bottom): I DON’T EVEN THINK SHE SCREAMED.

Panel 6:
Full shot of Angela falling down to a patio area. She is just about to land perfectly on a deck chair. Towel still around her face. Glass bits falling around her.

Panel 7:
She has hit the deck chair, and it has bounced her forward into the air. Towel still covering her face. The chair is not damaged in the least.

Caption (top): ONLY HEARD THE CRASH AND PLOMP.

AT THE TIME, I THOUGHT SHE WAS HURRYING IN TO PERFORM HER CIVIL DUTY, WAS HURRYING IN TO ME.

BUT IN THE LIGHT OF FURTHER EVENTS I REALIZE IT WAS NOT SO.

From Flight of a Lifetime

CHAPTER ONE – PAGE NINE – RIGHT SIDE

No panels – three pictures. These are three pictures of Angela in motion from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. There is a caption beside each picture that should be read from top to bottom. The eye reads the text from top to bottom, and then follows the action of the pictures back up from lower left to upper right and off the page.

Panel 1 (upper right):
Full shot of Angela. She’s on her feet now and running, and she’s wrapping that towel around her.

Caption 3: IT WAS THUS HER FLIGHT BEGAN.

Panel 2 (middle):
Full shot of Angela, in her forward motion. She’s still half-propelled forward, but is beginning to find her feet or just about to land on them. Angela has now pulled the towel from her head but does not yet have control of the towel. Her wet hairdo is intact.

Caption: SHE KNEW THE BIG ONE HAD COME AT LAST.

Panel 3 (lower left):
We can still see the edge of the deck chair that has just broken Angela’s fall and propelled her into escape. The chair is not damaged in the least. Full shot of Angela, towel over face, flying through the air away from the chair. A couple shards of glass are bouncing from the chair now too.

Caption: THE ONE HAD CRASHED HIS WAY INTO HER LIFE, SEARING ONTO HER HEART A FEAR TOO GREAT FOR ANY WOMAN TO BEAR.

From Flight of a Lifetime

Scene 2: Catchman Prepares Evidence

(Chapter Three – Page Two – Left Side)

Panel 1: (Text only)

Caption:
AFTER INFORMING ANGELA MCDAGGER THAT THE PERP HAD EATEN HIS WAY FREE (ALTHOUGH I HADN’T PUT IT IN EXACTLY THOSE TERMS), I PREPARED FOR WHAT I BELIEVED TO BE ANGELA’S IMMINENT ARRIVAL BY TAGGING ONE FINGER ON A RATHER LARGE – AND AT THE MOMENT – FROZEN FIST.

Panel 2:
Close Catchman, holding tape dispenser in hand and ripping off a crinkled length of tape by holding one end of it in his teeth. You get the immediate impression of incompetence.

Panel 3: (Text only)

Caption:
IT WAS NO LONGER A BLOODY FIST BECAUSE I HAD JUST CLEANED IT OFF TO MAKE IT MORE IDENTIFIABLE WHEN MCDAGGER WOULD GET TO THE STATION.

Panel 4:
Close on Catchman’s hands balling up a sticky clump of tape.

Panel 5:
Close Catchman tossing away…

Panel 6:
Close …a ball of tape arcing through the air…

Panel 7:
Close …and falling into a trashcan. On the side of the trashcan it says CYLINDRICAL POLICE FILE.

Panel 8: (Text only, running along the bottom of these last four panels)

Caption:
THE TAPE WASN’T STICKING BECAUSE THE HAND (MINUS ITS BODY) HAD GOTTEN DAMP.

Panel 9:
Close on frozen burly hand that’s been bitten off from its own wrist. This hand is in a freezer. There is also a can of MINUTE MAID! orange juice in the freezer, with a smiling topless woman holding up two oranges in front of her so that you almost but don’t quite see her breasts. Burt’s hand almost seems to be stretching toward this picture. Can’t keep a bad man down.

Panel 10:
Catchman at the freezer with the door open. He’s got his hands in there and is messing about with something. Holding Polaroid camera, or on belt, or near-to-hand.

Caption:
AND WHEN I DID FINALLY GET THE TAPE TO STICK AROUND THE FINGER AS WHAT COULD OFFICIALLY BE ACCEPTABLE AS AN ID TAG…

Panel 11:
Catchman with arms on hips, looking into the open freezer.

Catchman: OH POOPERS!

Caption:
… I NOTICED THAT THE INK HAD SMUDGED.