Dear Jonathan,

With the Lion King being so big at the box office, I’ve become sort of nostalgic for my childhood years. What films or books were you reading as a kid?

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“And upon waking up from her great slumber did Alias, which was really her name and not a teaser, discovered that she had no memories of the night before and the twisted designs of azure-colored tattoos on her sword arm. Also, she did notice that her breasts were quite perkier than ever before.”

Or so, this is what I imagined. Azure Bonds was one of those books that I desperately wanted to read when I was younger. It was during my adolescent foray into the whole D&D game that, years later, required lots of therapy and gay clubs to get out of my system. The novel follows a well-endowed battle maiden named Alias. Yes, that really is her name – kind of suspicious, no? She is also pictured in the cover art as wearing +1 slut mail and holding a broad sword. *groan*

Anyway, Alias wakes up one morning with a terrible hangover and several glowing tattoos on her arm. Apparently, Girls Gone Wild has a fantasy-based predecessor. So, she puts on her slut mail and goes out to buy some Vaseline (for the new tattoos, perverts!) and soon discovered that the magical tattoos actually control her actions. Thus begins her epic quest to find the source of the tattoos, acquires a few friends, beat up some bad guys, all while airing out those sweater cows of hers.

But wait! – there’s a plot twist or two. This is an amnesia story after all. Alias realizes she can’t remember anything because she’s actually a Frankenstein-type creature brought to life by said tattoo artists to do their evil bidding. I think it had something to do with the resurrection of an evil god of fungus who wanted to spread his moldy influence of evil over the Forgotten Realms, or something like that. Anyway, Alias never gets a name, never fully covers her +3 Boobs of Perkiness and with the help of her entourage, defeats her masters, gets rid of her tattoos and saves the day. (And I believe in the sequel, the defeated Fungi Priestess retires and gets her own HGTV show for eco-friendly home guides.)

In case you couldn’t tell, I never actually read this book. I was about ten years old. My mother took one look at the cover and decided it was inappropriate reading material. There was also an accompanying computer game, “Curse of the Azure Bonds,” with the same cover art and so when my father, not knowing any better, bought it for me, a terrible scene followed. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about – all I wanted to do was create my little pixel characters and move them across the scene and have them click-fight against evil monsters. (This is old school Apple 2C technology, baby!) My mother kept confiscating the game and my father kept giving it back to me. And by the time she relented, I had become so bored with playing the first few parts repeatedly, I didn’t even finish. Besides, by that time I was 11 and I had moved onto other interests. Thankfully, The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy didn’t have risqué covers. Heh,heh,heh.

So, yeah, The Lion King wasn’t for me. Too much Elton John, not enough oddly placed chain mail. That reminds me, I have to go write another fan letter to Anne Rice. She needs to quit writing Jesus books and write a fourth book for The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. I’ve already got a working title for her: “Beauty Puts On Some Pants.”

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Got a question? Send it to jonathandefenestrates@gmail.com!