ENTRY 13: THE JOLLY BALLOON MAN

Today is our first "human" card from Duskmourn, because sometimes the living sentient house just eats people, but sometimes people adapt to its innards and become something just as weird and messed up. Does that make them parasites, actually? The JOLLY BALLOON MAN is a red and white mana "Human Clown" who wears little more than striped pants and some spiky black bondage gear, with a face that unsettlingly looks like it's wearing a different face as a mask, unless that's REALLY good makeup.

Much more unsettling of course are the surrounding "balloons," floating on chains, that are actually inflated human heads, one of which the clown is blowing up as we speak! The realistic detail of these is incredibly grotesque, all the more because they're not gory or mutilated or stitched together or anything so over the top, except for the big button eyes sewn just one of the heads in the foreground. It's the "normalcy" of the pained faces that's so much more hideous, isn't it?

Several have noted the similarity between this imagery and Junji Ito's Hanging Balloons, and while it's not hard to come up with balloons that are also people's heads, and Junji Ito certainly wasn't the only one, Duskmourn is intended to pack in as many references to other horror media as possible, both overt and subtle. Considering Junji Ito has also been a Magic the Gathering guest artist at least once, everyone involved was probably aware of and embracing this similarity.

They were fond enough of Balloon Man to give him a pretty rad alternate art card by Richard Luong, zeroing in on his deranged face - I guess that IS just good makeup - but also offering an alternative look at one of his creations, this one a purple doll-like balloon creature with teeth. While not as disturbing as the heads, it makes sense to see what a nonhuman balloon might look like, since the clown can model them after any creature at all! See, it's not that he'll kill you and turn your head into a balloon for fun, but that somehow he'll make a sentient killer balloon that looks just like you, which also describes how Ito's balloon heads work.

The Balloon Man's Balloons have all the properties of the creature they're modeled on, but their stats are always set to 1/1, they gain a balloon typing, and if they didn't have these already, they gain the red mana element, flying ability, and the haste ability that allows them to attack immediately. This is important because all balloons automatically die on the next turn! They POP!

And yes, it's funny to think of him generating animate balloons of awesome elemental monsters and demons and cosmic alien gods, but here's the thing: he can only make these copies of your own creatures, the ones fighting on his side. This, in my opinion, makes the situation twice as funny at minimum, and many times as funny if, like the default illustration, his subjects are just regular humans. As a half-white card, he can even fit into a deck that revolves entirely around white-mana humans as a theme, and most of those are just nice, upstanding, well-adjusted people, like knights and scholars and peasants. Heck, even when they're not so nice or upstanding or well-adjusted, like religious zealots or brutal law enforcers, they're still usually just run-of-the-mill human beings from a run-of-the-mill human being society of some sort.

So, imagine you and some other run-of-the-mill humans are summoned to fight for a planeswalker (the player) one day. You're a brave paladin or an alchemy teacher or a traveling merchant or whatever and you're surrounded by other regular human people tasked with using their various skills to defend your planeswalker boss against a skeleton army or some interdimensional bug monsters, the usual Multiverse shenanigans.

Then all the sudden this cackling, filthy little clown man pops out of nowhere, and you are told not to worry, this man is on your side. Your boss issues the command, and this ratty carnival goon is positively ecstatic to show off his special trick as he pulls a little, floppy, disgusting bag of skin out from wherever the hell he keeps them, and he starts blowing into it.

And as it bloats with the rancid, moist air of the fetid jester's sickly lungs, you see that it has a human face. You see that it has your face. You watch as your own decapitated visage swells and stretches obscenely into an agonized caricature of what you see every day in the mirror. You watch as the clown man ties shut the floppy sphincter of its bloodless neck hole with a rusted chain. And you watch as he does a jolly little dance, probably, looking you straight in the eyes with an ear-to-ear grin and a wink before he lets the chain go.

And there it goes. Your own face, somehow, bobbing and drifting away like a rotten pumpkin afloat in a sluggish river to engage your summoner's enemies. Perhaps it just strangles a little gremlin to death with its chain, or perhaps it demonstrates intelligent skills you recognize because they're yours. They're somehow the same unique abilities you were brought here to perform, reenacted by nothing but a wobbling leathery cyst with the same scar you got in your first battle, the same nose you always heard was just like your grandfather's, the same freckle your first long lost love thought was so cute.

And you open your mouth to say something...only to be interrupted by the ear-splitting BANG as your gas-filled effigy finally ruptures, scattering shreds of flesh that glisten with the condensation of the humid exhalations that brought it to blasphemous life.

And then, your own boss gives another order, and the clown man, whom it is partially your job to protect, claps with glee. He claps with glee and he pulls out another of the disgusting, hairy little sac-things, from wherever the fuck he keeps them....

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