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shadowkatTo reward myself for surviving the work week - which entailed amongst other things, several difficult meetings, negotiations, and putting out fires - it also entailed a difficult personal trainer session - he had me stand on this air ball and lift weights at the same time, considering I have troubles walking and chewing gum at the same time - this was a challenge, but I digress... I bought the second issue of the two part Dru comic.
I loved this comic, but I won't be the least bit surprised if I was amongst the few that did.
It is not a plot heavy comic, actually the plot that is there is fairly simplistic - the comic is a character sketch. It is in a way an actor's exercise - a method actor's. Let me explain, because unless you've taken a course in method acting - you'll have no idea what I am talking about. My high school theater professor, Max Brown, was a method fanatic. If you want to know what he was like? Just listen to James Marsters Q&A's on acting - they say almost the same things. When I listen to Marsters, I hear my high school theater teacher. Uta Hagen and Stanislaski were Max Brown's idols. We spent entire classes doing method acting exercises. At any rate - whenever we got a role, regardless of the role, Max would ask us to write an entire back story for the character. Imagine our lives as this character. Find an emotional pain in our past to build into that character. I remember writing twenty pages on
Sally Cato in Auntie Mame, who she was, what she did, what she liked and thirty on Tituba in The Crucible (another role that I played - and yes, I went to an all-white high school, depressing but true). The exercises made me a better writer, if not a better actress.
This two part Drusilla comic reminds me a great deal of those acting exercises. What Lynch and Juliet Landau have done is write about what lies inside Drusilla's head, what makes Dru tick. The plot is that Dru has entered a sanatorium or insane asylum, at the same time that WRH has more or less sent LA to Hell to punish Angel. We aren't really told why she's at the asylum - because Dru herself doesn't know why. We are almost completely inside Drusilla's head. We do not know anything that Dru herself does not know. And the sanitorium and people inside it to a degree serve as a metaphor for Dru's own state of mind, her own hell - which is well her mind.
This quote at the very end of the issue sums of it's themes, intent, and purpose:
Do I believe in Actual Hell. One's own mind is actual enough. - C.S Lewis (1898-1963)
The issue is about Drusilla's hell or what hell would be for Drusilla. It is also about how and why Drusilla is the way she is. Since it is told from her pov, the imagery and lines are almost poetic in nature. Which may explain, in part, why Dru fell for William and turned William. And why of the all the people she's known - William is the only one she felt truly understood her. He is a poet, who understands and thinks in metaphor, and Dru's entire mental landscape is nothing but metaphor. She speaks in rhymes and poems and verse.
A lot of people have said that Dru is one dimensional, I never saw her that way and Landau clearly doesn't. Dru is actually quite complicated and I think this comic does a good job of conveying those complications, along with the internal battle inside of light and dark.
How does it do that? We see the violence Dru inflicts in the asylum, but inside Dru's head she is reliving the days after Darla and Angelus nabbed her from the convent. The bodies strung around the asylum lie in much the same poses as those strung around Angelus and Darla's rooms. The artist juxtaposes the scenes by placing the Angelus/Darla ones in black and white initially and the Dru one's in color. We don't see Angelus and Darla in color until Dru begins to draw them in her journal, coloring them, much as a child would a coloring book with magic markers.
What Angelus and Darla do to Dru is horrific. In one sequence, we see them having sex on the floor after their killing spree, and Dru caught watching, stating : Snake in the woodshed and pony ride and darkness.
Snake in the woodshed - means of course "penis in the vagina"
pony ride = riding Darla
Darkness=dark all around her
And she is a child while they lie beneath her, her dark parents...
This is in her head as she sails into her killing spree. It is her personal hell. She keeps reliving, over and over the images of what they did. Never freed from them. She writes on the walls..."little fingers, little hands" - alluding to the little fingers, little hands broken by Angelus. Her little sisters by his hands in 1860 as she watched.
Then she jumps from this hell into another - the one of her visions of what is to occur or what is occuring - painting Spike, her lover, and Angel, and Connor, and the Dragon...the Dragon which metaphorically represents her vision of herself. She tells the doctors to run..warns them. Yet they do not. And again she crashes into her own mind. Tumbling into yet another corridor of hell. This one is yet again Angelus and Darla, torturing her, taking what she loves. She paints their leering faces and the locket she loved and they threw into the flames.
Then she falls again...and this time she paints all those she has hurt or killed or maimed...a crowd of endless faces coming after her, a crowd of ghosts. The Doctors relate that it is not real, and it isn't. Except inside Dru's mind. We see them as does Dru. Coming behind her as she attacks the Doctors...who plead that they can help her.
But the crowd overwhelms and swallows her, pulling her down. The crowd inside her own mind.
Until finally there's nothing but quiet. Just Dru. And she's in another corridor of her mind.
In old time, Victorian dress, and in 1860 London, but no Angelus, no Darla, no dark. The cobbled streets are lovely. The air is fresh. The sky is blue. And the panels unlike the ones before have a yellow glow like an old photogrpah faded yet bathed in sunlight. She smiles as it touches her cheek. Then enters her home. Wondering in her head.."the fall, the fury, hell, hmmm..." A familiar and kind voice tells her to go upstairs and wash her hands, lunch is ready, and up she goes to find a brand new doll, prettily displayed on a bookcase. She picks it up, rocks the doll, kisses the doll's forehead, and asks herself "I wonder how long this will last?"
And the final words are that quote I listed above...hell is the mind. Dru ever since Angelus drove her insane then turned her, has been trapped inside her own hell, her own mind. Angel has trapped her there. Undead. Not alive.
It's a horrific tale...because it is about what it is like to be stuck inside your head, a hellish reality that you cannot escape and cannot control. The story also relates back to Angelus/Angel and Darla - exploring once again the monsters these two were and possibly still are. Note, Angel never staked Dru. Darla never did. And that perhaps is the cruelest cut of all. Angelus let her live, because he delighted in her torment. Why, I wonder as I read this comic did Angel let her live? It is also a great noir tale - with a great anti-heroine.
Dru survives, true, but like any noir hero or heroine...she does so tragically, her survival as it is, makes us cringe. And like most noir tales - there's a decidedly anti-feminist theme inside - she is childlike, helpless, not in control - the patriarchial society around her controls her, minimizes her. It's almost apologetic in a way...look how horrible we are.
Look what we are doing.
Anyhow that was why I loved the comic - because that was the story I saw told inside of it.
I entered another perspective, learned a bit more about the character at it's heart, and more about the universe in which it took place, as well as more about the title character - Angel.
It discusses the fascinating battle that takes place in all of us between dark and light.
If your mileage differs, which it most likely will, and you decide to respond, please make sure to back up your opinion with reasons why it differs, and why you saw it differently and why you think that. Thanks.
I loved this comic, but I won't be the least bit surprised if I was amongst the few that did.
It is not a plot heavy comic, actually the plot that is there is fairly simplistic - the comic is a character sketch. It is in a way an actor's exercise - a method actor's. Let me explain, because unless you've taken a course in method acting - you'll have no idea what I am talking about. My high school theater professor, Max Brown, was a method fanatic. If you want to know what he was like? Just listen to James Marsters Q&A's on acting - they say almost the same things. When I listen to Marsters, I hear my high school theater teacher. Uta Hagen and Stanislaski were Max Brown's idols. We spent entire classes doing method acting exercises. At any rate - whenever we got a role, regardless of the role, Max would ask us to write an entire back story for the character. Imagine our lives as this character. Find an emotional pain in our past to build into that character. I remember writing twenty pages on
Sally Cato in Auntie Mame, who she was, what she did, what she liked and thirty on Tituba in The Crucible (another role that I played - and yes, I went to an all-white high school, depressing but true). The exercises made me a better writer, if not a better actress.
This two part Drusilla comic reminds me a great deal of those acting exercises. What Lynch and Juliet Landau have done is write about what lies inside Drusilla's head, what makes Dru tick. The plot is that Dru has entered a sanatorium or insane asylum, at the same time that WRH has more or less sent LA to Hell to punish Angel. We aren't really told why she's at the asylum - because Dru herself doesn't know why. We are almost completely inside Drusilla's head. We do not know anything that Dru herself does not know. And the sanitorium and people inside it to a degree serve as a metaphor for Dru's own state of mind, her own hell - which is well her mind.
This quote at the very end of the issue sums of it's themes, intent, and purpose:
Do I believe in Actual Hell. One's own mind is actual enough. - C.S Lewis (1898-1963)
The issue is about Drusilla's hell or what hell would be for Drusilla. It is also about how and why Drusilla is the way she is. Since it is told from her pov, the imagery and lines are almost poetic in nature. Which may explain, in part, why Dru fell for William and turned William. And why of the all the people she's known - William is the only one she felt truly understood her. He is a poet, who understands and thinks in metaphor, and Dru's entire mental landscape is nothing but metaphor. She speaks in rhymes and poems and verse.
A lot of people have said that Dru is one dimensional, I never saw her that way and Landau clearly doesn't. Dru is actually quite complicated and I think this comic does a good job of conveying those complications, along with the internal battle inside of light and dark.
How does it do that? We see the violence Dru inflicts in the asylum, but inside Dru's head she is reliving the days after Darla and Angelus nabbed her from the convent. The bodies strung around the asylum lie in much the same poses as those strung around Angelus and Darla's rooms. The artist juxtaposes the scenes by placing the Angelus/Darla ones in black and white initially and the Dru one's in color. We don't see Angelus and Darla in color until Dru begins to draw them in her journal, coloring them, much as a child would a coloring book with magic markers.
What Angelus and Darla do to Dru is horrific. In one sequence, we see them having sex on the floor after their killing spree, and Dru caught watching, stating : Snake in the woodshed and pony ride and darkness.
Snake in the woodshed - means of course "penis in the vagina"
pony ride = riding Darla
Darkness=dark all around her
And she is a child while they lie beneath her, her dark parents...
This is in her head as she sails into her killing spree. It is her personal hell. She keeps reliving, over and over the images of what they did. Never freed from them. She writes on the walls..."little fingers, little hands" - alluding to the little fingers, little hands broken by Angelus. Her little sisters by his hands in 1860 as she watched.
Then she jumps from this hell into another - the one of her visions of what is to occur or what is occuring - painting Spike, her lover, and Angel, and Connor, and the Dragon...the Dragon which metaphorically represents her vision of herself. She tells the doctors to run..warns them. Yet they do not. And again she crashes into her own mind. Tumbling into yet another corridor of hell. This one is yet again Angelus and Darla, torturing her, taking what she loves. She paints their leering faces and the locket she loved and they threw into the flames.
Then she falls again...and this time she paints all those she has hurt or killed or maimed...a crowd of endless faces coming after her, a crowd of ghosts. The Doctors relate that it is not real, and it isn't. Except inside Dru's mind. We see them as does Dru. Coming behind her as she attacks the Doctors...who plead that they can help her.
But the crowd overwhelms and swallows her, pulling her down. The crowd inside her own mind.
Until finally there's nothing but quiet. Just Dru. And she's in another corridor of her mind.
In old time, Victorian dress, and in 1860 London, but no Angelus, no Darla, no dark. The cobbled streets are lovely. The air is fresh. The sky is blue. And the panels unlike the ones before have a yellow glow like an old photogrpah faded yet bathed in sunlight. She smiles as it touches her cheek. Then enters her home. Wondering in her head.."the fall, the fury, hell, hmmm..." A familiar and kind voice tells her to go upstairs and wash her hands, lunch is ready, and up she goes to find a brand new doll, prettily displayed on a bookcase. She picks it up, rocks the doll, kisses the doll's forehead, and asks herself "I wonder how long this will last?"
And the final words are that quote I listed above...hell is the mind. Dru ever since Angelus drove her insane then turned her, has been trapped inside her own hell, her own mind. Angel has trapped her there. Undead. Not alive.
It's a horrific tale...because it is about what it is like to be stuck inside your head, a hellish reality that you cannot escape and cannot control. The story also relates back to Angelus/Angel and Darla - exploring once again the monsters these two were and possibly still are. Note, Angel never staked Dru. Darla never did. And that perhaps is the cruelest cut of all. Angelus let her live, because he delighted in her torment. Why, I wonder as I read this comic did Angel let her live? It is also a great noir tale - with a great anti-heroine.
Dru survives, true, but like any noir hero or heroine...she does so tragically, her survival as it is, makes us cringe. And like most noir tales - there's a decidedly anti-feminist theme inside - she is childlike, helpless, not in control - the patriarchial society around her controls her, minimizes her. It's almost apologetic in a way...look how horrible we are.
Look what we are doing.
Anyhow that was why I loved the comic - because that was the story I saw told inside of it.
I entered another perspective, learned a bit more about the character at it's heart, and more about the universe in which it took place, as well as more about the title character - Angel.
It discusses the fascinating battle that takes place in all of us between dark and light.
If your mileage differs, which it most likely will, and you decide to respond, please make sure to back up your opinion with reasons why it differs, and why you saw it differently and why you think that. Thanks.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-20 03:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-20 03:49 am (UTC)The one by Kelley Armstrong - Angel:Aftermath is NOT canon.
The ones by Brian Lynch after that arc? They aren't canon according to Joss Whedon. Whedon hasn't looked at them and has not exchanged notes or provided ideas regarding them. (So depending on how you define canon, they are more or less excellent fanfic. )
[I'm assuming your definition of canon is anything okayed or stated as canon by Whedon? Am I correct?
People define canon differently.]
no subject
Date: 2009-09-20 12:27 pm (UTC)