"The Articulate Guy" is interesting on all kinds of levels. It is a comic about a high-schooler, told from the point of view of a college student reminiscing about when he was that high-schooler's friend (back in high school), written by a high schooler (me, Everett) who had not even begun visiting colleges yet. I am fascinated not only by my own (surprisingly accurate) depiction of what college life would be like, but by the critical distance I forced upon myself as a writer, imagining how the environment I was immersed in would seem retrospectively. (This, as I understand it, is the Lacanian Imaginary, imagining how I might look to an outside observer who is nevertheless himself a product of my imagination.)
The story was basically this: a hapless transfer student makes a fool of himself every day at the beginning of math class, before the teacher arrives, waxing eloquent over a nameless beautiful girl in his English class. Though he speaks with a vocabulary far beyond his grade-level, he insists that when he actually tries to talk to this girl, he's completely mute. (I would revisit this theme in my Kilmer-winning 2003 poem "The Ballad of Sweet Donna Lee". Yeah, I was really into this theme for a while.) Eventually, his words so move the high schoolers that they too decide to start speaking their hearts and using big words. Except I never reached this somewhat Dead Poets-y conclusion. Why?
Because I myself went to college! The strength of this comic was ALL in the framed nature of the narrative - I admit, there was not a lot of tofu to the story itself. Once my artificial critical distance became actual critical distance, I could no longer view my life as a verbose but girl-shy high-schooler through a partial lens!
Moreover, my art improved to the degree where I could no longer finish the comic with any sort of visual consistency. Looking back though, there are still some things I really love about it. My page layouts were much bolder than anything I'd allow myself today - chalk it up to youthful exuberance. I was really into Will Eisner at the time and loved using lots of borderless panels, meta-panels and free-floating vignettes. And there was something tender, something that still captures my imagination, in the way I so openly delved into characters inner emotional states (having demons represent their problems - other parts of the comic featured elaborate fantasy time-travel etc.) Especially compared to SNitLoE, where I have deliberately kept my characters emotionally mysterious and opaque. Sigh.
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