1. ANATOMY OF A KITCHEN (excerpt from THE THRILLING AND NOT AT ALL REPETITIVE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MAN AND KID DANGER: “A CHRONOLOGY OF ENTIRELY TRUE AND HEROIC EVENTS COINCIDING WITH THE END OF HISTORY”)
If you want to know a person, watch how they treat their servers, how they treat their food. Living with them is the second best option. Living with Ray is not Henry’s only option, but it is the best. They don’t even need to watch the other eat; they know each other already.
[ “There is a man in my house. There will always be a man in my house. I will find him even when he is not there. And one day, when I find out there is no man in my house anymore, well—I will go find one and invite him in.” Paraphrased and reappropriated from Catherine Lacey’s “Cut”. The borrowed text refers to the uncanny feeling Henry experiences as an adult reflecting on his childhood relationships. ]
Catherine Lacey writes in her short story “Cut”: “If you're raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house. You'll find him even when he is not there. And if one day you find that there is no angry man in your house—well, you will go find one and invite him in!” Peggy—a professor—reads this poem, which a female student has placed on her desk, and grapples with a response, to which she is advised, “It’s not your job to save anyone from their life or explain anything to them or even really teach them anything”.
PANEL NOTES
This follows the format of the catalyst stranger approaching the downtrodden protagonist in a dingy bar from behind, backlit by the hazy yellow lights and smoked out shadows. This is not a bar, but a kitchen—the center of any living space.
The borrowed text is tweaked, and excludes the descriptor “angry”, as the theme of the storyboards is not anger.
The use of red is limited and strategic, and scattered throughout like evidence; dusting for fingerprints. It’s tempting to drape Henry’s back in red against the blue background, as if bathed by an overhead lamp, but Ray is the anomaly. Henry is colored by an anxious, slightly melancholic blue (as well as shaky panel borders), while the flints of red signify danger (knock on wood) or non-literal symbolism.
The white wolf is curled around the blue in a protective gesture that also doubles as a stranglehold, snakelike.
Something, something, about wolves and lambs, consumption, and the simultaneous loss and retention of innocence through transformative processes. Note there are three lambs; these could stand either for Henry, Jasper, and Charlotte, or Henry (singular).
ok i'm going to set the scene. it's 2013 in an empty suburb outside of las vegas. you are fifteen years old and standing on the curb outside of your house, holding your gay little dog in your arms. a cab waits down the street to take you to the airport where you will fly back to nyc. your boy best friend, androgynous finn wolfhard with the worst fucking slavic accent you've ever heard in your life, is standing in front of you. he's like a foot and a half taller than you, he's leaning over slightly, his arms crossed, shifty-eyed, obviously nervous. he keeps telling you to wait one more day before you leave because he has something important to tell you. you say you don't have time to wait and insist he tells you now. in response, he leans down, takes your face in his hands, and kisses you. not a platonic bro kiss on the cheek, but on the mouth. then he picks up your gay little dog and kisses him on the nose. he promises he won't forget you and runs off into the night and you're left standing there holding your gay little dog, thinking, "what the fuck? i'm not gay. i mean, my dog is definitely gay, but i'm not gay." all the while admitting to yourself via your internal monologue that you are definitely in love with him and would follow him anywhere but you need to get back to new york right now. so you get in the cab and immediately start worrying that the cabbie saw you two kissing(even though you have much bigger problems right now--as of a few hours ago, you're officially an orphan, and you're also a minor committing a crime by running away). now what if i told you this was a real scene from donna tartt's 2013 pulitzer winning near 800-page dickensian bildungsroman "the goldfinch." does learning this light your brain on fire or what.
More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying out loud to him in the street - which was, of course, I love you.
"When I see one of baseketball's hottest stars with less than 20 dollars in his pocket, driving an American car and sharing a small house with two other guys, you know what that says to me?"
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