The Horror. The Horror
I’m not sure why it took so long to come to this, but Aaron A. has put his considerable talents to monstrous use to create this terrifying print depicting the Ham Chamber Horror as written about in the Ham Chamber Manifesto several years ago. Grab a piece of one of the darkest chapters in our collective history over at Aaron’s Etsy store.
What follows is the original Ham Chamber post as detailed back when the world was still young and Michael Jacksons still roamed the Earth.
2006
Enter the Ham Chamber
A work update is impending, but I felt it important to share with you jerks some truths that needed to be told: Truths that became known while having a conversation with Aaron A. some months ago that I’ve been sitting on until the time was right.
Actually, this is more the result of two minds under the grip of the love of bullshitting, but if there’s any insight in it for you, then so be it. It all begins with a conversation about Mike Mignola’s Amazing Screw on Head animated pilot on the SciFiChannel’s website that everyone should have watched and voted thumbs up for. From there, it all goes to hell.
0:31:52 Aaron A.: Hmm. Rikki said Screw On Head was coming on right now, but I don’t see it. I think he is on acid.
0:32:19 Jhnen V: rikki is generally drunk.
0:32:58 Jhnen V: on ham.
0:33:10 Jhnen V: christmas hams from several seasons back.
0:33:12 Aaron A.: It’s sick, isn’t it. Ham drunks.
0:33:28 Aaron A.: He just tears the top off and guzzles the liquefied innards.
0:33:36 Jhnen V: he ages them in barrels he buries under his yard.
0:34:13 Jhnen V: then, when it rains, he burrows, naked, into the mud and brings up his rotting booty.
0:34:27 Aaron A.: Giggling the whole time. Full of pig-glee.
0:34:53 Jhnen V: it’s a horrifying scene to anyone who happens upon it
0:34:58 Aaron A.: He likes when his own bodily juices mix with the ham.
0:35:29 Jhnen V: So he’s in there, twisting and writhing while just letting everything go into the mix…sweat, blood, piss and shit.
0:35:38 Jhnen V: stirring it up with his contortions.
0:36:42 Aaron A.: His juices age it ten years all at once. It’s important to age it like a fine wine.
0:38:15 Jhnen V: when the feeding is done, he just curls up there, the mud covering him, and drying as the day comes. He goes into a sort of torpor until the next ham season.
0:38:54 Jhnen V: sometimes, he is found by miners who break open rocks, only to find a still-living rikki in there, ravenous and screaming.
0:39:03 Aaron A.: He’s kind of like one of those buried guys in Motel Hell.
0:39:15 Aaron A.: Just gurgling of ham.
0:39:21 Jhnen V: I’ve always thought that about him, yeah.
0:40:03 Aaron A.: Why are there miners in Rikki’s yard?
0:41:12 Jhnen V: he oversleeps.
0:41:20 Jhnen V: and entire ages pass.
0:41:30 Jhnen V: but always, in these ages, there is ham.
0:41:30 Aaron A.: That’s some well-aged ham, then.
0:43:18 Aaron A.: After so many epochs, only Rikki is man enough to eat it and live.
0:43:35 Jhnen V: he’s built up both a tolerance and a need.
0:43:59 Aaron A.: He’s sort of like a very specific vampire who can only feed once every millennia.
0:44:20 Jhnen V: his gut is this huge ham-burning engine, reminiscent of old train engine rooms.
0:44:49 Aaron A.: The ham is hard like coals.
0:45:28 Jhnen V: As a child, his parents would just leave him in a room with a terrified pig. They’d lock the door and run, crying and holding each other.
0:45:38 Jhnen V: Neither one blamed the other for the monster they had spawned.
0:46:12 Aaron A.: The power of their hatred actually changed his chemical construction, remaking him into the twisted ham-beast you see today.
0:47:24 Jhnen V: I only see drawings of him now.
0:47:29 Aaron A.: His room was sort of like the transporter in the Fly. Only it works through hatred instead of electricity.
0:47:34 Jhnen V: to actually look upon him is to go mad.
0:48:21 Aaron A.: We should feel lucky that we are not Rikki.
0:48:56 Jhnen V: he puts up a brave front, but everything he says is very practiced and mostly without meaning.
0:49:15 Jhnen V: beneath it all, he just thinks that constant thing…”MORE HAM…MORE HAM”
0:49:48 Aaron A.: You can see the ham-lust in his eyes at every moment. Even when he’s talking about Jeeves and Wooster, the ham thoughts are obvious.
0:50:47 Jhnen V: His friends just avoid eye contact, trying to hold back tears at the sound of him struggling to seem human.
0:51:09 Jhnen V: pretending the ancient hams he breathes are not making them sick.
0:51:22 Aaron A.: He just makes sickening guttural sounds. Big flecks of ham from deep in his bowels fluttering up out of his mouth.
3:16:38 Jhnen V: man…I’m hungry.
3:17:06 Aaron A.: Goth meats… Mark Ryden might get behind that idea.
3:21:08 Jhnen V: hungry for meats of the night.
3:21:28 Aaron A.: NIGHT MEATS.
3:22:27 Aaron A.: That will be the title when I finally write a biography about Rikki and his queer lust for ham.
3:22:54 Jhnen V: I gotta save that bit from this IM.
3:22:59 Jhnen V: some good stuff in there.
3:23:03 Jhnen V: poor rikki.
3:24:56 Jhnen V: Surely rikki would love it
3:25:05 Aaron A.: I just picture his big sweaty head poking out of the earth, waiting for ham.
3:25:17 Jhnen V: just his head is sticking out?
3:25:34 Jhnen V: the rest of him, absorbing vital ham juices that have seeped into the earth.
3:25:39 Aaron A.: Yeah. I’m not sure why. It’s just a freakish image.
3:25:45 Aaron A.: He draws the ham to him.
3:25:59 Aaron A.: Every now and again he bellows, and it comes.
3:26:12 Jhnen V: the village folk, they bring the hams to THE BEAST so that they will be safe.
3:26:37 Aaron A.: He can’t really get out, but they don’t know that. They just figure someday… he WILL.
3:27:09 Jhnen V: they bring it to him because if he has to hunt for hams, it means he has to haul himself out and shamble naked and covered in that jelly you see packed into canned hams…
3:27:24 Jhnen V: and it makes the soil he treads upon infertile for ten years after.
3:27:32 Aaron A.: He slips around as he walks. It’s pretty sick to see. And the SMELL.
3:27:58 Aaron A.: He sort of slides around on his ham-slickened feet. Like a ghost.
3:28:05 Jhnen V: you can actually SEE the hams being digested in his hamchamber.
3:28:28 Aaron A.: You can see through his skin?
3:28:38 Jhnen V: only a section of his belly.
3:28:55 Jhnen V: McFarlane toys does a figure of rikki, but they don’t get the hamchamber right.
3:28:58 Jhnen V: it looks cheaper
3:29:16 Aaron A.: They say he has no other organs. From head to toe, he’s just a shell, filled with ham digestion apparatus.
3:29:29 Aaron A.: McFarlane puts chains all over the ham chamber for some reason.
3:29:32 Jhnen V: no one gets close enough to find out though.
3:30:20 Aaron A.: Hooks and little chains everywhere, to hold the ham. What were you thinking, McFarlane.
3:30:21 Jhnen V: it’s all conjecture.
3:31:11 Jhnen V: once, against the army’s orders, this one scientist, gentle and curious, argued that RIkki was peaceful, and that to destroy him would be a loss to science and to our very humanity.
3:31:39 Jhnen V: He approached rikki, and when RIkki made some mumbling sounds in response, the scientist turned to the army men and said “see…he does understand!”
3:31:51 Aaron A.: The scientist fears what would happen if we lost Rikki, and the world was overrun with ham.
3:31:57 Jhnen V: and then was incinerated by flecks of white hot ham that rikki belched at him.
3:32:37 Aaron A.: See, that’s what people don’t understand about the ham chamber. It’s a fiery hot nuclear furnace of ham smashing.
3:33:07 Jhnen V: that’s what they assumed after the scientist got killed, yeah./
3:33:07 Aaron A.: He converts ham into small, edible pellets that could feed the world.
3:33:20 Jhnen V: so he did sorta help the world understand the workings of RIkki.
3:33:28 Jhnen V: it’s a super ham-collider.
3:34:12 Aaron A.: People ask the scientist, “Why can’t people just eat the ham itself?” And he just shakes his head and says “NOW who’s the crazy one?”
3:34:15 Jhnen V: not unlike Gamera’s chest opening laser beam.
3:35:10 Aaron A.: Can Rikki grow to incredible size?
3:35:16 Jhnen V: you’re talking about before the scientist was incinerated?
3:35:21 Jhnen V: or is this the one that replaces him?
3:35:27 Jhnen V: his son.
3:35:39 Aaron A.: His son doesn’t blame Rikki. He’s just a mindless beast.
3:35:42 Jhnen V: who now helps the army devise ways of destroying RIkki, because he has a hatred for him.
3:35:54 Jhnen V: he has two sons.
3:36:21 Aaron A.: One who wants to contain the awesome power, and one who wants revenge.
3:36:59 Aaron A.: What is the army so afraid of, though? Why do they want to keep the hams uneaten?
3:37:06 Aaron A.: They are in thrall to the hams!
3:37:08 Jhnen V: the nice one just acts nice though, when in fact he is trying to win Rikki’s favor, just to get close enough to actually get his hands on some of the ham.
3:37:29 Jhnen V: for he has a theory that he who eats of the Rikki-treated ham can live forever.
3:38:01 Jhnen V: It probably ends much like that last scene in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark.
3:38:05 Aaron A.: He’s wrong though. He’s destined to incinerate himself in the ham furnace.
3:38:16 Aaron A.: He falls in there like Gollum.
3:38:30 Jhnen V: with it going terribly wrong and the scientist getting his face all melted while Rikki just dumbly sits there, legs splayed like a child, eating hams.
3:39:44 Aaron A.: It’s got a lot of emotional resonance, y’know? It’s kind of sad, Rikki sitting there, oblivious to all he has wrought.
3:40:04 Aaron A.: And the hams pay the ultimate price for their hubris.
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And here you will find the fan-submitted masterpieces, kids. Pictures inspired by…
JV