"Tales of the Founder" was written by Grover Breign Jr. and published in 7 issues between 1938 and 1940. Intended to indoctrinate any of the factory's children who attended school on the island, the comic was filled with exaggeration, whitewashed history and outright lies.
Cornelius Nut was in reality the only born citizen ever exiled by the United States of America. Though his purpose in founding the Snail Factory remains a mystery, his arrival on the island is well documented and bears little resemblance to the comic. Having stowed away on a French cargo ship in the port of Los Angeles to escape his intended deportation to Tsarist Russia, he was quickly caught and escaped death only when the ship was battered in a massive storm and crash landed.
Most of the crew dead, Nut stepped onto Ile St. Paul on March 9th, 1872. The friendly natives, rendered vicious cannibals in the comic, offered Cornelius food, clean water and companionship. He rewarded their kindness by proclaiming the land his own, despite it being a ward of France, and slaughtered most of their livestock for sport, fancying himself a hunter.
Though they were depicted as primitives in the comic, the natives had in fact been well ahead of their time and lived mostly in a high technology commune with running water and several brick and mortar or wooden structures. Considering it blasphemous for non-whites to live in such a manner, Nut demolished their homes and abused their pacifist nature to enslave them and force them to build his factory, most working themselves to death in the process. Having polluted their land, killed their strongest men and defiled their pure and gentle culture, Nut mutilated and butchered the last of their women and children to build grotesque semi-organic steam powered automatons that would become his first employees, including Grover Breign Senior.
Nut himself died of auto-erotic asphyxiation in 1879 while overcome by sadistic lust upon reading about the brutalities of the Anglo-Zulu war. Far from his heroic death and extravagant burial depicted in the final comic, Nut was not found until after weeks of subtropical heat took their toll and rendered him a gruesome bloated mass that his employees described as "A foetid thing that should not have been, bearing the stench of a thousand opened graves and a horrible appearance as evil and foul to the eyes as the man was in personality."
He is buried directly under the Snail Factory cafeteria.
