The Bleeding Mirror

(R; Horror) A young loner rages at the mass-media culture and institutional racism. The deeper target is his own emotional confusion and urban loneliness.

The Bleeding Mirror: Page 1 of 7

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About This Page

None of the flashback events actually happened to me, but I was sent to a white suburban junior high school in the mid-1970s. I never felt comfortable there, constantly feeling as though something like this could happen any minute. I later found out a least one really pretty girl had a crush me. How I answered her dreams is still a mystery today. Nonetheless, I'd been carrying around this paranoid vision for years. While inaccurate, it came in handy when I needed a "hook" for this story.

I so focused on form (brush technique, storytelling, etc.) that I completely forget the content can move people. A non-comics friend saw this page in mid-production asked "Did you mean for this to be read by the public?" That's when I knew this might be a good, or at least entertaining story.

The Bleeding Mirror: Page 2 of 7

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The first three panels are staged exactly like my early '80s flophouse room. 1202 Commonwealth Avenue, on the corner of Harvard Avenue, was a converted tenement building in Allston MA. In my time, it was manged by an 80-year-old Elvis Presely fan. The pay-per-week rooms were rented by alcoholics, junkies and aspiring pornographers. In the manager's eyes, "17-year-old art student" must've fit right in.

One difference between this depiction of my room and the real one: here, there isn't a drafting table (since this character isn't an artist, in contrast to Luanne). Other than that, the litter, bills and claustrophobic space is real.

The Bleeding Mirror: Page 3 of 7

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The zoom-ins and visual-pun segues are obvious Alan Moore influences. To remove all doubt, check out the Watchmen floppy in Panel 4. Other personal life details include:

the uniform to my fast-food job
my addiction to Pop-Tarts
current reading list of comic books and TV Guide
neglected school text books on a cheap bookshelf to make me feel smarter

Unlike my character for this story, I was much more handsome in real life.

The Bleeding Mirror: Page 4 of 7

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Unlike my character, I never saw a couple drunkenly hump on a car during an EisnerSpritz. Considering his mental state in the story, perhap he didn't either. Perhaps this is why no one trusts protagonist narrators anymore.

Television advertising was a major element in the story. It's inherent smarminess was a perfect platform for our protagonist to expose his inner tension, in a post-Kafka/Salinger kind of way.

E. F. Hutton was the second largest American brokerage firm in the 1980s. The firm was best known for its commercials using on the phrase, "When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen". In an attempt to manage late-80s scandals (check kiting and money laundering ), they shot a more straightforward commercial with Bill Cosby.

The Bleeding Mirror: Page 5 of 7

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The gun is real, though my notes are long gone. Researched by looking at gun magazines in Out of Town News, a newsstand in liberal Harvard Square. I'm still proud of the overall design of this page, especially the carved-out sound effect. I'm not so proud of my tighty-whities.

The Bleeding Mirror: Page 6 of 7

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The sound effect, here and on the previous page, was done with a crumbling large sable brush, with the insides cut out with an Exacto knife. This "cut and peel" technique take a lot of time and practice, removing 1 ply of the 2-ply bristol paper.

The Bleeding Mirror: Page 7 of 7

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Office furniture are exactly what we used at my day job. The Panel 4 storyboard illustration was drawn by Glenn Horvath, my room mate and good friend of the era.

Story Notes

Coming off my success with "Encore", I thought I was a post-modern horror writer. I tried making this story — intended for a future issue of Taboo — a bit more sophisticated. The art and story were more focused, based on my real-world living and work enviroments.

Long-time fans (both of you) will notice this old story is lettered with a font. At this point in my career (late 1980s), I didn't know how to letter a comic book. Rather than learn properly, I chose the short-cut of using markers. Looking at the 25-year-old original art now, the black india ink drawings are defaced by brown, splotchy, unreproducable lettering. For this presentation, I remastered scans of the original art in Photoshop, then applied new lettering in Adobe Illustrator. Working digitally, my word balloons are modeled after Artie Simek's. So the lettering doesn't reflect my current artistic sensiblities, at least it's legible.

Taking the example from Howard Chaykin, I started modeling the protagonists on myself. I worked at a design agency while producing this story. The depictions of the pre-digital workstations and my early '80s rooming house are 100% accurate.

Dave M!