Don’t you hate it when you have a dream, a really great dream, and it ends too soon? Your alarm goes off, your children jump on top of you, your cat starts licking your face… someone or something wakes you up, ruining everything.

Welcome to the August 2011 issue of Defenestration.

An interesting (and true!) story about editing this issue*. After I stitched all the stories, poems, photos, and biographies together into the standard layout, I printed out a copy. Apparently my wife had accidentally loaded up the printer with a bunch of discarded drafts of old Ben & Winslow strips**. So as I’m editing the issue, these light pencil sketches keep showing up behind the content, like the ghosts of cartoon characters. The first page of Lawrence Barker’s “A Stinking Rose by Any Other Name,” for example, contains a half-drawn Apsara Williams in a tank top, which I found fitting because the first paragraph uses the word “attention-whores.” Several other pages have faceless proto-Bens and proto-Winslows cavorting on them. One of the proto-Winslows was fondling his breasts.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I really outdid myself on this one.

Originally, the Great Eyebrownie was going to be a permanent member of the Ben & Winslow cast, until his sudden and completely unexpected death (the cause of which was, according to medical reports, “fatal tripping and falling on an arrow”). In honor of the Great Eyebrownie, Apple created the iBrownie tablet hypnotist, and Ben & Jerry’s came out with Eyebrownie Swirl (a delicious swirl of vanilla and chocolate ice creams with double chocolate brownie pieces).

I love it when I don’t actually have to think when doing one of these. This comic is courtesy of my son.