Howlett Creager is the owner and sole proprietor of Daily Grind, a "general assistance service," as he calls it: sort of a combination detective and temp. agency dedicated to helping people get back up when the daily grind of their lives is getting them down.
We get a little into Howlett's past in our fifth storyline, "-30-", so all I'll say here is that he moved to Gadsden, the major metropolitan center along the west coast of Porphyriya, five years ago and opened Daily Grind in a gentrifying section of downtown. The strange new company's reputation quickly spread, and by the time we check in with them on page 1 of the introduction, Daily Grind has become firmly established in the public's mind as a place where just about anyone can go for help. The local police remain a bit skeptical, however, but Howlett's humble good nature goes a long way toward putting most people at their ease. He's in his mid-20s when the story starts, a snake with a dream that he's doing his darndest to make come true.
But the real mystery about Howlett--how does he tie that necktie??--took almost a year to answer...
Jolene does have a last name, but she never uses it--even Howlett doesn't know what it is, though you can find it in these pages if you look. She was born with a chemical imbalance in her brain that gave her a hair-trigger temper and a preference toward solving all conflict with a scream and a leap, claws and teeth bared. This drove her from home at an early age and into a life of violent crime--we get some ideas about that in "Pocketful of Dreams," our seventh storyline--before she met Howlett four years previous to page 1 of the introduction and began taking the pills Doc designed for her.
She was the first employee Howlett hired at Daily Grind, and she's come to consider herself its co-proprietor, arguing with Howlett about "company policy" and even threatening to fire him on occasion--even though he's not only her boss but her legal guardian and de facto parole officer. She wants desperately to keep to the straight and narrow, but Doc's treatments have the side-effect of making her less able to use the physical skills she picked up during her 12 years living and fighting on the streets. This leads her sometimes to cut back on her meds so she can tap into the dark core that still smolders inside her, but this tends to have unfortunate consequences...
Jolene is very strong, very fast--even for a squirrel--and very uncertain about just about everything in her life at this point other than Daily Grind. About that and the good work she does there, she has no doubts at all. She's the focus of the first Daily Grind storyline, "The Crossing Guard."
Dr. Everard Chalko was an up-and-coming endocrinologist when he was hired to fill a prestigious post at Gadsden's St. Regis Hospital. He quickly made a name for himself as the "go to guy" in cases no one else could figure out, and his future seemed assured.
Then he got caught up in efforts to broker a truce between several of Gadsden's rival feline and rodent street gangs, efforts which ended when Doc was shot three times in the lower jaw, the bone shattering and mangling his tongue to such an extent that reconstruction was simply impossible. No longer able to speak, Doc descended into despair, losing his job, his home, and nearly his life prior to meeting Howlett about four years before page 1 of the introduction and hiring on with Daily Grind.
Doc's still fairly bitter, but over the past four years, he's begun emerging from the depths of his own moods. He's in his mid-30s, and he's at the center of our second story, "A Tooth for a Tooth" at the end of which he picks up the speech synthesizer that he uses from that point onward. That's also the storyline where he met Alice--see further down the page for more on her--and she's contributed a very great deal to Doc's coming to grips with his life.
Contance Euryatep was hatched into a life of luxury on Gadsden's west side, her grandparents coming to prominence as two of the small number of insects who chose the mammalian side during the Great War 50 years ago. She married Reginald Teasdale, son of another well-to-do local insect family, and wanted nothing more than to carry on in the social whirl that was her life.
This all changed--as we see in "Chrysalis," our third story--and Mrs. Teasdale ended up repudiating her family, striking out on her own, and doing her best to lose herself in Gadsden's poorest quarters. She plowed her personal fortune into 15 run-down halfway houses around the city and renovated them to form Chrysalis House, an organization dedicated to education, health care, and social service. It was there that she met Howlett and became interested in his work; she hired on as a Daily Grind employee two years before page 1 of the introduction and has only occasionally regretted her decision.
Mrs. Teasdale can be more than a little stuffy and more than a little obnoxious, but she's smart, tough, and that little barb at the end of her abdomen can inject a paralyzing neurotoxin--not that she considers it sporting to use that particular "form of argument," as she puts it...
Few people can call D.F. Tharka "Darius" and live, and even those few tend to mispronounce it.
Tharka spends most of his time running "D F & A Investigations" with his partner, A. Gana Belea--more about whom you can read further down this page--and was already a local legend before joining Daily Grind: Hearts and Minds is one of Tharka and Gana's pre-Daily Grind adventures, if you'd like to take a look at that. A wide variety of true and not-so-true stories circulate about Tharka, most of them tied to where he got the nickname "The Devil Bunny," and we gave his rather-extensive past a run-through in our fourth storyline, "Dust Bunny" as well as our eleventh storyline, "The Apprentice."
Tharka is honest--some might say brutally so--and seems to be prepared for anything at all times--more often than not in a coldly calculating sort of way. He's trying very hard to be warmer and more empathetic, and he feels that his work with Daily Grind can only help. He won't give his age, and there does seem to be some evidence that he fought during the Great War, though that would make him at least 70 now, and he sure looks too spry to me for that to be the case...
Alice Bryson has worked as a reporter for the Gadsden Gazette since graduating from Pallestra University with a degree in history. Her love of research gives her reporting a solid foundation that few of her peers seem able to match.
She lives in a two-room apartment a block and a half from her parents' brownstone and still has dinner with them most Sundays. She's never really had time for dating, but after walking into Doc's life in search of information for a story, she's found herself more and more attracted to him.
Onorefe D'Aviota was abandoned as a youngster at the Chrysalis House in downtown Gadsden but quickly made himself useful helping out around the place. He spent several years living and working at all 15 of the Chrysalis House locations and was actually the first to bring Daily Grind to Mrs. Teasdale's attention.
Rafe has been working part-time at Daily Grind for three years now, taking care of the shop while the others are off on assignments. His name is mentioned in one of the earliest strips, but he doesn't actually make his first appearence till the middle of the second storyline.
A. Gana Belea is a southern housefly who came to Gadsden to follow her dream of becoming a private investigator. She set up shop and quickly gained a reputation as someone smart, tenacious, and scrupulously honest. She met and went into business with Tharka several years ago, and the two of them formed "D F & A Investigations."
Tharka maintains that Gana saved both his life and his soul when she took him in, and it was actually at her urging that he joined Daily Grind. For her part, Gana's more than happy to help him along the road to changing his ways, and the two of them have become much more than business partners. She's a featured player in the pre-Daily Grind story "Hearts and Minds," but her first appearence in the comic's actual continuity comes at the beginning of our fourth storyline.
Sair Melchior is a priest of the Seven Winds, the most widespread of the serpent religions. Alice first met him near the end of our fifth storyline when she was researching an article on Howlett's past, and he reappeared during the eleventh storyline to help Tharka work through some issues from his past.
Among Melchior's own issues are his pride and his fear, both of which he continues to work on with the help of the Winds. And judging by the changes in his speech patterns, he also apparently spent some time working on his diction between his first appearance and his second...
Alban of House Sathmont, Prince Under Hill and Heir Eternal to the Realms of Twilight, showed up during our eighth storyline and played quite a large part in the goings-on. He returned at the beginning of our twelfth storyline and was every bit as involved there, too.
Young by the standards of the Fair Folk--not more than five or six centuries old--Alban can display more than a little naivete, but long attendance in the courts of the Twilight Realms have taught him how to employ both decisiveness and guile when necessary. He seems to have a little crush on Mrs. Teasdale, too....
Adopted as a baby and raised by members of the Sons of the Black Swan, Steven has never known his true parents, his true name, or even his actual age. He did, however, become very, very proficient in the various martial arts the Sons taught him, and he rose through their ranks to become their head of security before what they called his twentieth birthday.
He first speaks in the comic near the beginning of our tenth storyline and is featured quite prominently thereafter; he then takes a little time off to pursue some projects of his own before reappearing in the middle of the twelfth storyline. He is also inspired almost entirely by the main character in the "ninja death" comics Mike Stevens does regularly as his part of the Daily Grind Contest.
More characters will be added here as circumstances dictate, but for now, well, the Daily Grind Main page lies but a mouse click away.
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