Close your eyes.  Imagine yourself sitting on the edge of a small playground.  The bench you sit on looks out over lush green grass, a line of trees in the distance.  At your back there is a swing set, jungle gym, sandbox, usually crawling with young people yelling and playing.  But today, the children are all absent and all you can hear is the rush of wind in the distant trees and the gentle squeak of the swings swaying in the breeze.

Spring Heeled Jack was a British folk tale that grew up from a string of attacks on young women during the Victorian Era, around the same time as Jack the Ripper.  They said he looked liked a devil and had clawed hands.  Terrorizing Londoners, he often escaped capture by leaping impossible distances into the air over walls and onto buildings, thus earning his name.

Regular Show has some ridiculous whackadoo going on, always.  The brilliance of the show for me is just how quickly the world goes from realistic to utterly bonkers in no time flat, and it works for me because of certain characters who can straddle the two with class and understated machismo.  Enter Skips.  This guy hangs out with Death, gained immortality and incredible maturity in a single incident, and had a knockout appearance in one of my favorite shorts of all time from the Kaboom! Free Comic Book Day issue with a 20-sided die.  Seriously, maybe the best series of panels I’ve seen EVER.

Paul Revere, John Henry, Casey Jones (not the one from TMNT), Al Gore.  Huge figures of the American tapestry whose lives became shadowed by the legends they became.  There are stories that folks would tell each other before the advent of TV, YouTube, and smartphones took away the need of entertaining each other with stories in parlors and at the bar.