STORY DETAILS
Storyline Creation Date:
Idea: circa 1986
First known writing: circa 1988
Stories:
Akhenaton & Nefertiti
Edmond & Fredestaire
Jazzy
King Huts: The Adventure Begins!
King Kuts 2: Laughter Is The Best Medicine!
King Kuts 3: We Wish You A Merry Purrshamas
King Kuts 4
King Kuts 5
King Kuts 6
King Kuts 7
The Kuts Puppies
The Outback Adventure
Revolution
The Secret Of The Pyramid
The Secret Of The Pyramid 2: The Curse(?) Of Watu-Haru
The Story Of Richard Marx
Zoser's Journal
(Likely more TBA)
CONTENT WARNINGS
Generic warnings: Mild adult language, mild adult situations, violence.
DISCLAIMERS
This is a storyline (partly anthropomorphic) set in ancient Egypt and largely based on Egyptian mythology. While it makes heavy reference to actual customs and beliefs, much is also artistic license. The gods and myths as they're presented here should not be taken as an accurate representation or source of information on ancient Egyptian belief.
Additional disclaimer: King Kuts is a trademark of the Quaker Oats Company. Back in the late 1980s I wrote a letter to the company, requesting permission to use him as a character in my stories; amazingly, the company wrote back granting my request, as long as the stories were for personal use and I made no profit off of them. Granted, this occurred decades ago, I've since lost the letter, and the legal situation may have changed since then. As well, certain other characters in this storyline are based on real people, but are not intended to be accurate representations of said people.
STORYLINE HISTORY/INSPIRATION
Please see HERE for the story of how I first gained my interest in ancient Egyptian mythology, following my initial interest in King Kuts and his friends.
There's a bit more here as you see. The King Kuts storyline didn't focus solely on his adventures; it extended into his past with prequels like Akhenaton & Nefertiti and Revolution, and into his distant future after his death with Edmond & Fredestaire and The Secret Of The Pyramid, and even went off on tangents like The Outback Adventure and Zoser's Journal. In fact, it gets a bit complicated to keep storylines separate, as there's significant overlap--you could technically say that the King Kuts storyline spawned the D Is For Damien storyline, and it even crossed over a bit, at one time, with the Manitou Island one. The King Kuts series, although defunct for now, definitely coexists in the same universe as Damien's, and possibly in the same universe as Manitou Island, though the latter is no longer certain since the writing of the serial. (Stick-In-The-Dirt et al. used to be anthropomorphic dogs...no longer.) The only main storyline that has never crossed paths with King Kuts is the Trench Rats.
The result is a hodgepodge of time periods and real and fictional characters. Some characters are modeled after real people--Edmond was modeled after Lord Carnarvon (and later took his name), Fredestaire after Howard Carter (and later took his surname)--though had plenty of original characteristics/history that didn't follow the real people. Some were directly based on what limited info I had about real people (Pierre Lacau, Pecky Callendar). Some took the real person's name but were only loosely based on them (Sir Petrie). Some took a real person's name but had pretty much nothing to do with the real person (Lord Dufferin, Lady Coventry). Some were intentionally based on historic figures but obviously I took massive liberties (all the Egyptian kings and queens). Then there were original and spinoff characters tossed in. All very anachronistic and chaotic. And hard to explain.
Much of this universe was silly, goofy, and intentionally absurd. I know Egyptians didn't live in pyramids, and the kings didn't all live at the same time. I know they didn't go to Dog High & Elementary School, or dance to Tiffany at the prom. There were occasional forays into more serious territory, however; Revolution for example was meant to play it straight and be a "serious" wartime story, though the original writing suffered from the same anachronisms that made the other stories so silly. At times, silliness and seriousness occurred within the same story (The Secret Of The Pyramid is a good example). It's hard for me to explain it all, because honestly, it made no sense, and I didn't try to make it make sense. It was just a bizarre chaotic nonsensical universe I wrote purely for fun...which I believe is the main reason why, when I attempted a sort of reboot in the early 2000s, I got through only one chapter before quitting. The childhood innocence is gone. I'm too self-aware and cynical now to pull it off. (That single chapter ended up being VERY self-referential and tongue-in-cheek--parodic, really--in a manner my old writing never was. I'd be too embarrassed to write with such abandon nowadays.)
This is quite an expansive universe (it technically includes the Kemet fiction--the first versions of Osiris and Horus were just as stupid--and, as I mentioned, the Damien storyline), so the story listing is likely incomplete. I may add more as I continue going through my early writing. I've excluded the stories that may feature Ed and Fred and the Egyptian ghosts but not the other Egyptian characters (I consider those stories, like for example Doppelganger, to be in Damien's universe), and also the Kemet stories as I'm including them under the Kemet/Horus listing instead, my basis for separation being that, while the gods occasionally appear in the King Kuts stories, the King Kuts characters never show up in the Kemet stories.
Although I eventually stopped writing these, the storyline never COMPLETELY died, it just morphed and inspired the other storylines. Zoser's Journal, likely dating to around junior high--circa 1989-91, probably closer to the latter--is interesting in this respect, in that it was meant to be more adult than any of the other King Kuts-related work so far. It's moderately less ridiculous, and is an obvious spiritual precursor to an adulthood work that came along much later...Manitou Island.
RANDOM OBSERVATIONS
Anything goes.
Character InformationCharacter profiles and brainstorming infodumps.
Storyline InformationEssays and info.