Blue was ecstatic that he had recovered the missing sixteenth page for a couple of reasons. Primarily, he was pleased to have discovered a black and white rendering that was at least similar to the the original colored panels from the initial drawings and perhaps more importantly, he no longer felt like he was about to die. In fact, he felt exhilarated. Blue was pretty certain that Mona was the key to the "Leer" story as John had been writing it which meant that she couldn't be dead. He was so puzzled over the Mona Damino - Catherine Kent relationship that he had been immobilized when it came to drawing for the book. Now, he was certain that Mona was, in fact, Catherine returned. This did two things for Blue. It gave him a place to go back to and a means to move the story forward. Blue felt rejuvenated. He felt strangely healed and supported by the appearance of that sixteenth page, by Mona.
He couldn't seem to get the Beatles out of his head. For days he walked around humming "Help", "A Hard Day's Night" and "Across the Universe" over and over again with occassional meanderings into "Come Together" and countless other great Beatles tunes. Frankly, Blue was stunned that he actually knew so many Beatles tunes by heart. He had nearly forgotten all of the hours he spent as a child running over to the Codwalluper's house to listen to the Beatles, Stones, Beach Boys and the Kinks while dreaming of getting completely naked with Ginny Maplethorpe, Nathan Codwalluper's best friend. Nathan was George's brother. George was Blue's friend. Blue was pretty sure that Nathan was gay even though Blue didn't really understand "gay" very well back then and had no idea what a fag hag was, or how completely Ginny fit the MO.
The point is that Blue really knew an awful lot of Beatles tunes and spent a few days humming them and being an unabashed punster decided that the aural hallucination of the song "Help" during his near-death experience was an indication that he should include beetles in his book. He had been assembling the second half of the book into its proper order ever since the vomiting episode. What Blue affectionately and insularly referred to as his barfmitzvah. It would indeed prove to be a turning point in both the story and his own life. The second half of the book was comprized predominantly of sketches. Some were so loose that he could barely remember what they were meant to depict, and even if he recognized the images, he was often clueless as to their meaning. For now, he had beetles. Blue began drawing where page thirty left off. He hadn't filled in the missing text for half of the book but he was pretty sure that he could double back and fill in the details. The only thing he had to do now was figure out a transition. "When in doubt, turn to the news," Blue jokes to himself as he draws another frame into an already overcrowded page, his usual uncontrollable impulse to decorate the page so the story it tells keeps telling long after the ride into the next scene. This time the story is the bug bites, a sudden plague of bug bites popping up all over the city, causing itching like the poison oak which drove him insane in the days before the "madness".
The "madness" is any time between the current time and some time in the past upon which Blue is willing to look at with esteem. Actually, Blue refers to the madness mostly as that period during which he has been guided or influenced by unseen forces telling, revealing, guiding or indicating to him in some way the proper path for him to follow, like the Mona incident, however, not all of the instances turn out so positively.
Blue begins to talk himself through another difficult moment. "So there's Van, Mona, Arnold, MUTE and the butler, I don't know if I'll ever get what was going on there, some chic who seems a bit uptight, the ominous butler, a horny teenager who might be dead, or was it the ever vigilant "Maintenance Man" who perished in the explosion?" Blue snickers as he tries to make his drawing happen twice as fast as it normally takes. "People want results, masked men better fly!, thanks for that wisdom, Frank, and by the way, How's that lottery retirement plan working out for ya?" Blue sneared to himself." "And forget about writing, never make people read!" "I guess he'd be pretty unhappy with me right now, eh Mr. Leer?! Jackass was probably right though, after all, I'm the one crazy enough to be talking to a 20 year old recycled comic book character!" Blue smiles as he deftly adds another line from his 3B Prismacolor pencil to his awesome new page for "Leer"
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