The front cover is done all in shades of orange and brown. M.D., gripping a pocket knife and dressed in combat boots, jeans, and a baggy leather jacket, floats curled in a fetal ball, the Void swirling around her in a whirlpool of smoke. With a close look, the smoke seems to be made of humanoid figures.

The title page has the same basic layout as the cover, but in black and white and reversed—M.D.’s figure is now a black silhouette with glaring white eyes, and she’s surrounded by white flames, rather than dark smoke.

No portion of this work may be reproduced without the written consent of the author, except for purpose of review.

Parts of this book were originally published as “All In the Family,” parts 1-4.

Covery typography and singlet testing provided by Olivia Li. Find her work at http://lovianart.com!

This book has itemized content warnings, which also contain SPOILERS! If you want them, flip to the very back of the book. Otherwise, read on!

The Loony-Brain Crew (AKA, the regrettably required info page) 2

Dramatis Personae 3

Transition 7

All In The Family, part 1 9

All In The Family, part 2: The Angel 42

All In The Family, part 3: Doll Girl and EO 64

All In The Family, part 4: Spiral Eyes 86

Epilogue (four months later) 110

Bibliography (because six comics pages doesn't BEGIN to cover it) 113

Memory Work Recs (because this is a memoir, not a how-to guide) 113

AllFam Fam and Content Warnings 115

The Loony-Brain Crew (AKA, the regrettably required info page)

Erin: original girl. (A young white girl with long blond hair, earrings, and a tense smile.)

M.D.: rebel. (A brown adolescent androgyne with pointy features, a cocky smirk, and shaggy bangs.)

Biff: illusionist. (A black silhouette that doesn’t show much except a baseball cap, a ponytail, and a cigarette.)

Gigi: spooky little girl (A young white girl with dark circles under her eyes, an unimpressed expression, a headband, and a sailor dress.)

Falcon: imaginary pal, retired. (A middle-aged Italian man with wavy graying hair, thick eyebrows, and a solemn expression.)

Rogan: workhorse. (A put out looking bearded brown man in a flannel shirt and rectangular glasses.)

Sneak: ray of sunshine. (A white young adult with big blond pigtails and a big grin.)

Miranda: explainer. (A white woman with big hoop earrings, curly blond hair pulled into a ponytail, and a serene expression.)

Lolly: barely in this book. (A black silhouette that doesn’t show much except shaggy hair.)

Mac: fabulous hubby. (A large white man with long, floofy red hair, sideburns, and a broad smile.)

And in the center is our vessel, a doofy-grinning skinny white person with short hair and flailing arms, with the note of “what everyone sees in real life”

Dramatis Personae

Erin sits in a chair, hands folded in her lap. She’s wearing sneakers, shorts, and a tie-dyed shirt, and she smiles out at the reader as she says, “Hi! I’m Erin! It’s 1999, I’m eleven years old, and I will die when I’m seventeen!”

Erin stands disconsolate, surrounded by large ominous silhouettes with no facial features but white staring eyes. She doesn’t seem to notice them as she says, “I get picked on at school sometimes. I wish I weren’t such a CRYBABY!”

She closes her eyes and reaches into her chest. “So I’ve been practicing. Whenever I feel pain...” she turns into a dark silhouette with a glowing, black goopy heart in her chest. “...I take out my feelings and I put them in an ox-blood box.”

The goopy black heart gets put in a wooden box, shut, locked, and duct-taped. Erin holds it in her arms and grins vacantly out at the viewer, while the ghosts stand at her sides. “I imagine the book in elaborate detail, and I go numb!”

The ghosts and box all disappear and she looks out determinedly. “I’m not very good at it yet, but one day, I will be! And no one will ever hurt me then!”

M.D. sits in a chair turned around backwards, arms braced over the top of it and her legs wrapped around the legs. There is a bulge in one pocket, and a swirly shadow under her chair, while Erin sits out in the blank white space of the background, reading a book.

M.D. says, “Hey, I’m M.D. It’s 2000, I’m eleven, and I’ll bite it when I’m fifteen.” She points a finger gun at her temple. “Bang.”

Erin throws her arms around M.D. “You must be my new imaginary friend!” she declares.

M.D. approaches Erin with their mom’s big fat college Abnormal Psychology textbook (circa 1980). “Hey, have you heard of Dissociative Identity Disorder? I think...”

Erin puts down her fantasy novel and laughs. At first, it seems she’s scoffing, but the laughter just gets rawer and rawer and her expression is a rictus. Finally she cuts off and says with a creepy smile, “Don’t be silly. We’re not crazy. My mind just made this up for the attention.”

Snap back to the present, with a close-up on M.D. grinning out at the reader, open pocket knife in her hand. “Well, whatever I am, I figure my job is obvious: solve our problems.”

Zoom out. Ghosts cluster around her chair. A couple have recognizable features… curly hair, a little girl in a black and pink dress. M.D. doesn’t seem to notice them either, or that the shadow under her chair seems to be growing. She just glares off-screen and says, “She doesn’t have to like how I do it. But she’s clearly not up to the task.”

Biff stands in a huge white emptiness, staring at mostly shut folding closet doors in the upper right corner. Black goop oozes between the door joints, slats, and grip the frame. Biff himself is a stocky white man with shaggy hair with the slightest frizz, a leather armband completely covering his left forearm, and a tank-top with a compression panel across the front. He appears to have been caught in the middle of lighting a cigarette before the closet distracted him. An arrow points to him with the text, “He is Biff. It’s 2001, and he’s dreaming.”

Biff tucks his cigarette behind his ear and walks over towards the closet doors; sniffing sounds emanate from within. He grabs the knobs and pulls the door open, and finds M.D. cowering within, pocket knife in hand. Dark swirls all around her.

“Hey kid,” Biff says. His hair is straight now; it must’ve been an art error.

Biff settles himself on the closet floor with a grunt of effort, like his knees hurt. Expression nonchalant, he glances at M.D.’s arms, which is covered with dark lines.

The scene ends with them sitting together in the closet, Biff smoking. Neither seem to notice the inky blackness.

LB is apparently getting bigger. Gigi sits on the floor, curled up in a corner, darkness radiating in jagged spokes off of her, while in the background, M.D. tells a joke to Erin, who’s laughing. Falcon stands behind them but doesn’t seem to be paying attention; he’s looking around anxiously for Gigi, who says, “I’m Gigi. It’s 2002. I’m ten.”

page break

Gigi’s hair covers her face, and her shoulders are slumped. She looks like an anonymous lump. Darkness curls around her like tentacles.

“I know how to disappear,” she says, and the darkness wraps around her, embraces her, transforms her into an anonymous lump. “Can’t hurt what you can’t see.”

The darkness pulls away, showing her face a skull with staring eye sockets and a lipless grin. “Can’t hurt what’s not alive.”

Now both she and the dark swirls are depicted in childish scribbling, Gigi’s face mouthless and huge-eyed. “I’m not real,” she says. “None of this is real. It’s all a psychological metaphor.”

The art style lurches back to normal and Falcon’s there, reaching down to embrace her. Gigi smiles and reaches up for him. “I let Falcon help me, because he’s not real either. That makes it okay.”

Then Falcon’s gone and Gigi curls into a fetal ball of misery, completely cloaked in darkness.

page break

The page has no people, no chair, only a huge whorl of darkness taking up the entire page. On it, in white text, is written:

Sneak is lying on the floor, flailing zer legs and wielding a Nintendo controller. A young man sits next to zer, but his face is cut off by the edge of the page. Meanwhile, a big thought bubble above Sneak’s head shows zer headmates, now entirely swallowed up in a whirlpool of darkness. Erin is standing in a corner, face pressed into the wall. Gigi’s neck and chest are a mess of dark stains, and Rogan is dashing towards Sneak with an alarmed look.

Oblivious, Sneak declares, “Hi! I’m Sneak, short for Sneakergirl! It’s 2004 and I’m 16… or I was a moment ago...”

page break

Sneak suddenly looks younger, no more than twelve, but ze smiles on, unconcerned. “Oh well, it must not be important! Anyway, Erin has a boyfriend now: Jeff!” Ze points to the man, who’s face is still cut off. He has shaggy brown hair and sideburns.

Rogan appears at panel left. He says hey and ruffles Sneak’s hair, glaring at Jeff. Sneak beams up at zer big brother, unconcerned. “My headmate Rogan doesn’t like him,” ze explains, “but he likes hardly anyone.”

Jeff turns towards Sneak, showing his face, but a dark scribble obscures his features. He reaches out to touch zer and Sneak pulls away, zer smile becoming stiff. “Sometimes Jeff tries to touch me. I don’t like it.”

Rogan’s expression is one of panic. He reaches out to push Jeff away, going, “Hey!”

Suddenly, the view shifts to a close-up of Sneak’s eyes, worried and with an ominous silhouette in the pupil. Ze weeps black swirls which block out all the panel borders and parts of zer words.

“Sometimes, when that happens, Rogan has to go away for a [unreadable] I get scared that he won’t come back this time and I can [unreadable]”

The black swirls flood everything, bleeding out of Sneak’s mouth and eye sockets. Ze stands slumped until the black finishes, bleeding out the top of the panel. The lights click back on behind zer eyes and ze blinks.

“Oh, hi!” Ze smiles and waves and takes a new grip on zer Nintendo controller, not noticing the cord has been cut. “Sorry, I didn’t see you there! I’m Sneak...”

page break

Teenage Miranda is sitting on what looks to be a bar stool. Her hair is a mass of frizzy curls, her legs crossed. She’s wearing ballet flats a tight, strapless dress, and an irritated expression.

The dark swirls have taken over the page completely now, but they’re starting to show depth, with dark sections noting walls and floor over a vague dome shape. Gigi is clinging to the wall like a spider, hissing and batting at Lolly, who seems unimpressed and goes, “Yeah, okay.” At the right, Sneak is looking on worriedly at Rogan, who’s lying on the floor shaking.

Miranda says, “Hello, I’m Miranda, I’m seventeen, it’s 2005, and I really don’t know what Rogan’s complaining about...”

page break

Miranda spreads her hands and takes on a pious expression. “Love requires compromise. Sacrifice. You can’t always have your way!”

She crosses her arms and says, “Jeff is always lovely to me. No one has ever cared about me like him.”

She clenches her fists so hard they shake and her expression gets a little scary. “If Rogan weren’t so frigid and just did his bloody job with a smile...”

“SHUT UP! YOU DON’T KNOW!” booms a voice from off-panel, making Miranda spin.

Rogan barges into the panel, glowering at her. “YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT!” he shouts.

Miranda leaps to her feet and shoves a finger into his face, snarling, “if you didn’t resist--”

Zoom out, showing the headmates watching on in silence as Rogan lunges forward and grabs Miranda by the throat. Darkness spirals out from them. Gigi and Lolly watch on; Sneak covers zer eyes.

page break

The page is all formless dark void again, and Mac is sitting in a chair, looking absolutely shell-shocked. He’s wearing his old PIN uniform with military posture, but it seems to be out of habit; his uniform is disheveled and torn, his chest covered in a sinister dark stain, and one of his shoes are missing.

“Um, I’m Patrick MacIntire. Mac. I’m, uh, twenty-seven, it’s… what?”

Transition

We stopped scapegoating each other. (Everyone’s hands, interwoven in the middle of the panel.)

Built relationships, inside… (a scene from Rogan and Mac’s wedding. They kiss, while Sneak in a white dress flails zer arms happily and Gigi and Miranda beam.)

...and out. (LB’s vessel sits at a con table with stacks of merch, pencil in hand, talking to Olivia, who wears a dress and glasses.)

We became homeless. (The panel turns black, wrapped around a tiny triangular crawl space with possessions and a mattress, with LB inside. This is familiar to Homeless Year readers.)

In 2014, we were safely on disability, stable housed, and life was good. But something felt… off. (LB stands, looking perplexed, in their nice new room with their nice new bedframe, nice new drafting table, and nice new window opening out on a shining sun.)

With room to breathe, we wondered: what had happened to Erin and M.D.? We all felt they were dead, but why? We went through our journals and records, but they only made us all the more uneasy. (LB pores over a document, looking thoughtful. Thought bubbles around their head are filled with question marks and “2+2 = ?”)

See, around the time M.D. had disappeared, back in 2004, we’d gone on this Spring Break trip with our pedophile grandfather.

Feeling a mounting internal pressure, we called our paternal granny, a gossip hound. She was happy to dish about a man she disliked.

Granny, an old white woman with carefully coiffed hair, cheerfully chatters into the phone, “Oh yes, I remember that road trip! It was so strange. I didn’t approve; you ended up having to sleep in the car together! I said--”

“Don’t you remember?” Granny asks. LB just hold their cell phone to their ear with a wide-eyed stare of impending horror. The background behind them is flat black.

LB hangs up. They put their backs to the wall and let their legs fold up under them.

“Oh god,” they think, as black ooze starts weeping down the wall. “ohgodohgodohgodohgod...”

Text: We had a terrible suspicion that something awful had happened. And we remembered nothing.

During the Homeless Year, we’d made anxiety comics to calm ourselves. So we started again.

(A scribbly sketch of some tiny inky humanoid figure with spiky hair and huge white eyes, and the words It’s me)

What follows is a visual diary, drawn as the events within transpired (thus the page dates). We didn’t know how things would turn out; we just drew.

(Black journals and sketchbooks, shedding flaming pages of text, comics, and art.)

For the most part, these pages are as we made them from 2014-2016. We added a few expository/flow pages, removed others, and cleaned up some of the most egregious errors, but that’s it.

All In The Family, part 1

An enormous black cross made of flames and with enormous staring eyes takes up the top half of the page. To either side of it are the grandfather’s house and Aunt H’s house. Flaming Eyeballs hovers directly over the figure of LB, who’s smiling uncomfortably and with their parents on either side. Their parents are depicted as black figures wearing white smiling masks. All three of them are encompassed by the figure of the grandfather, a large man with a blacked-out face and a crown. The title circles around the family.

I feel so odd. I found out today that my mom may have been sexually molested when she was young. Even in here, I refuse to name names, because I know what a name means in this. Suffice to say they are close family members, ones I trusted.

When my dad told me, I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there, and I started to feel a little like I did when I fainted, white and light and far, far away, in a place where there were no floors and one wrong move would send me plummeting down. It took all I could to keep from laughing. That’s how I felt when the cop pulled me over: hilarity. I kept from the hysterical laughter and just said quietly, far from the land I was in with no floors, “Oh. ...okay.” What could I say? It’s dame desu yo. Unacceptable. You don’t know.

Then I went to bed. My mouth started to move and my body jerked like I was laughing, but I made no sound. Then I started to cry.

What kills me is how obvious it was. There are books on coping with abuse on our booksehfl; did I think they were for fucking DECO? Did I think how nervous my mom got with him was just NERVES?! Did I just think he was a jerk when she’d say, “...he wasn’t very nice”?! Was I frickin’ BLIND?!

Now I’m scared. I don’t want to [go] back there. No I don’t. I want to stay here, in my world, where bad things don’t happen to people and things don’t shatter like poorly made glass.

For two weeks now, we’ve been crazy. [Picture of a brain.] More so than usual.

We’re always tired. We sleep eleven hours and wake up exhausted. [LB sits up in bed, with dark circles under their eyes, slumped and obviously regretting getting up. Oppressive black slime drops crawl down the background.]

We have nightmares. [Picture of LB sitting up scared in bed, clinging to the blankets, surrounded by spiky darkness.] Constantly.

It feels like we’re being hunted. We’re afraid. [LB walks down the street, arms crossed, looking harried. Behind them is a dark apparition.]

But we don’t know what’s hunting us. [LB turns around, and the apparition disappears.]

It just follows us. [LB turns around to return to their walk, and the dark apparition reappears.]

But that wasn’t all that was going wrong. There was also this happy little thing appearing in our headspace. We had no idea what it was…

Late last night, I tried to force the memory up again. It didn’t work, again. I cried, I screamed, I rocked—but all I got was pain. No data. No emotions. Just pain.

I tried every headspace trick I could think of, and all I managed after twenty minutes was to make it manifest in headspace, eyes and flame. Sneak had to bind it.

[Image: A black cross of flames, with staring eyes, though this one is a hasty pencil sketch.]

I maybe fought it for another ten, fifteen minutes, before collapsing exhausted into sleep. I had suicide nightmares.

Unleash my rage on everyone and everything till everything is gone. [The figure is surrounded by the skyline of a city, burning to the ground.]

Till I am gone. [The figure burns, flames leaping from its eye sockets. Its heart glows white. It’s smiling.]

[What follows is a written page from a spiral, obviously in the middle of writing. It reads...]

I’m not done yet. Know. Remember. You must remember and you must tell everyone don’t let me die in vain you will know and you will speak you must or I I I I [handwriting deteriorates and gets larger and larger]

YOU MUST DO THIS FOR ME OR I WILL NEVER LET YOU REST NO MORE LIES NO MORE SILENCE YOU WILL REMEMBER for me. [handwriting mostly returns to normal] Please. Because I love you.

You must remember it is so important I know it hurts and I am so sorry but it must happen you must remember and speak because I can’t I am long dead just a ghost in your head and I will never be able to talk with you again after this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry it happened and I’m sorry it hurts if I knew a better way I would I promise it’s just there isn’t. Not that I know of.

Please. Please remember. You know what happened why it took so long to come up why you’ve been dead for weeks. You know

I know who is hunting me now. [A copy of the panel from earlier, only now it’s Rogan walking down the street while a dark apparition follows along behind him.]

Or rather, haunting me. [The ghost is a black figure with white eye sockets. It has no other features.]

Her name is M.D. She is one of the System Dead. [A teenager with a snarky expression, long blond ponytail, and a turtleneck shirt.]

She is me and Sneak’s predecessor. [A tiny little family tree, showing a little picture of M.D. and two lines leading to little pictures of Rogan and Sneak.]

The system damage-soaker before me. A real wild child. [Close-up on M.D.’s face. She’s smirking and looks fine.]

About ten years ago, she died. None of us know why. [M.D.’s picture is now Xed out.]

Our family was always one of silence. [A young girl with long blond hair and a worried expression, stands. There’s a hand on her shoulder and another covering her mouth, but the panel cuts off at the forearms so it’s not clear who’s doing it.]

Of secrets. [Zoom out. A man and a woman are standing next to and behind the girl. Both are wearing white smiley-face masks, but are otherwise completely normal human beings. The mother has the hand on the girl’s shoulder; the father is the one covering her mouth.]

Stretching back decades. [Zoom out further. There are many people now, all with vaguely defined features—a woman entirely in gray, a big man, a bearded man, a woman with a question mark instead of a face, a woman with short blond hair, a woman with curly hair, a woman with short hair. Behind and above them all, shining like the sun, is a man with a blacked-out face and a crown.]

And at the heart of it all… the King. [Close-up on the blacked-out face with the crown.] Our grandfather. The child-molester.

He has molested at least two kids, including Mom, but possibly more. Her family’s a mess. [A brief family tree diagram, showing our grandmother, the three fathers of her children ending with the grandfather, and her six children including our mother, and three of their children in turn. Of Mom and her siblings, she and Uncle J were molested. Aunt H, the sibling between them, has had three abusive hubbies in a row. The youngest, Lois, is Grampa’s favorite, and his only bio-kid. Aunt B, the oldest, had a child who lived with Grampa and was then disowned after a mysterious teenage pregnancy and drug addiction. Uncle J’s son also got hooked on drugs, which ended in his death of gangrene. And then there’s batty, batty us.]

I plan to find out what it is and end the silence. No more secrets. [The heart bursts into flames.] Burn them all.

A diagram of the big Flaming Eyeballs cross, filled with notes. Miranda stands below, serene and smiling.

“An apparition’s appearance is often dramatic and unimportant,” she says. “It usually reflects symbolically its purpose but trying to analyze it is often a wild goose chase. It’ll be obvious in hindsight. Best not to get too invested in it. This is the only time we figured one out ahead of time. We still don’t understand some.”

Notes: Theatrical appearance to get our attention. Dagger-shaped; M.D. hid knives in our pockets after learning about the grandfather. Blacked out faces and bodies are how we show dead people here; that’s why the grandfather’s drawn that way too. [Pointing to the eyes.] This was the real kicker. M.D. has very distinctive eyes (gold, though you can’t tell here). It was instantly clear who was involved. You’ve surely noticed by now that M.D. has a thing for fire…

Rogan and Mac lie in bed in their jammies, looking at the pentegram glowing quietly on the floor. Mac looks worried, Rogan just tired.

And sure enough, within a couple of days, the pentegram starts to buzz and crackle. The lines surge and waver, and with a rising screech, start to give way.

With a final KZAK, a black silhouette with white eyes surges up, shouting, “GRAAAAAAAH!” and waking up Rogan, who looks more incredulous than anything.

The ghost grabs Rogan and drags him out of bed, “GRAAH”ing the whole time. Mac reaches out and tries to stop her, but Rogan goes, “Don’t hurt her! She’s probably not...” Then he looks up and sees her wild-eyed stare, clenched fists, and panting, and goes, “Hoo boy.”

He’s bigger than her, and manages to pin her arms to her sides. “M.D., stop! You’ll—well, you’re dead, so I guess you can’t hurt yourself...”

As he talks on, M.D.’s ghost doesn’t seem to be paying attention, is just staring off into space and standing there. But then it goes, “buh.”

Her eyes snap into focus. “BURN.” She says, and then starts wailing, “BURNBURNBURN!” and elbows Rogan hard, which mostly seems to annoy him rather than hurt him.

As the rest of the system dashes in, roused by the commotion, M.D.’s ghost abruptly ka-POOFs into black swirls and vanishes, leaving everyone confused, alarmed, and upset.

Rogan just stands there, black leaking through his hands, and says, “I have no idea.”

Soon, though, LB get used to it. Rogan and Mac are sleeping peacefully, spooned in bed, when suddenly, from off-panel…

Rogan looks up. Mac grumbles and pulls Rogan to him, but Rogan slips out of bed, patting his arm. Mac goes “noooo” and tries to hang onto him, but lets him go.

Mac lies in bed, looking worried with his hands clasped to his chest; his wedding ring is visible on his hand.

“BURNBURNBURNburnburnburn...” The words trail off. Rogan seems to be talking to her, but the words can’t be made out.

“Yup. She poofed.” Rogan looks tired and crawls back into bed, into Mac’s arms.

“I don’t know,” Rogan says. “Maybe if I siphon off enough of her rage, she’ll be able to tell me.”

Rogan and Mac are kissing and obviously getting busy; Mac’s already undressed, and he’s getting Rogan’s shirt off. Suddenly, though, Rogan stops dead. An exclamation point appears over his head. In the background behind them is a shut door.

Rogan turns towards the door, points accusingly, and shouts, “DON’T YOU DARE BARGE IN HERE!” Mac, frozen in mid-smooch, looks perplexed (and a little annoyed at the bizarre interruption).

Mac just sits there, confused, and underneath appears the words, “And like that, she was back.”

The rest of the page is taken up with a large drawing of M.D., a fifteen-year-old androgyne in a manky too-big leather jacket, too-short jeans, and big black combat boots. She seems to be sneering or rolling her eyes and has her hands shoved in her pockets. She is surrounded by little circular doodles filled with varying spirals—spirals of spirals, trees of spirals. It’s dated 9/14/14, and there are the notes, “Under all the rage and trauma, this was M.D. Before, she always seemed so tough, but now...” An arrow points to the spirals and states, “M.D. had little interest in art. Spiral doodles were all she’d do.”

A page of twelve spiral doodles, all in the same format: circles, filled with spirals. The spirals come in all sorts of patterns, resembling suns, swastikas, trees and branches, goddess symbols, or just abstract patterns. Among them are the words, “I should have run away.”

[A panel turned black with the word ‘MOLESTED’ written over and over itself, nigh-impossible to read.]

I died on March 16, 2004. (Or the 17^th, depending how late it was) in Phoenix, AZ… [A silhouette of an SUV driving down the road in the middle of the night. A moon is in the sky; its headlights blast out, the only whiteness.]

The grandfather and an aunt decided to drive from Texas to Arizona and bring us. [A map showing the driving route from Austin, TX, to Phoenix, AZ. The grandfather and the aunt will drive from south of Austin, pick us up, and head on west.]

I don’t know why the grandfather, who was in very poor health, chose a fifteen hour drive over a flight. [Drawing of the grandfather, with his blacked-out face and little crown.]

I don’t know why I was on the trip at all. [A teenage girl with short hair writes in her journal on 3/10/04: “Now I’m scared. I don’t want to go back there.”]

Our parents told us that he’d molested Mom and Uncle J. But he was all better now. [Our mother waves as we drive away in the SUV. “Bye, sweetie!” she says. “Have fun on your trip.”]

[Rear-view of the SUV as it drives down the highway. A sign reads “Phoenix, 1000 miles.” Our face and hands are plastered to the back of the window, blacked out.] He was not all better.

By the time we reached our destination, it was late. [A dark, hazy scene of the SUV parked in front of a house. Everything is gray and black; it’s hard to see details.]

Too late to wake up Aunt H, they said. [The same scene, but instead of lines and cross-hatching, the shades of black and gray are created by the words “TOO LATE” written over and over again.]

We’d sleep in the car. Together. [No picture, just TOO LATE all over the panel.]

Then he he [handwriting deteriorates, blurs into scribbles and barely legible TOO LATEs]

[Scribbles and TOO LATES and barely discernible words: “DON’T TOUCH ME” “KILL YOU”]

[Blank white panel.] And so I died. Alone, unmourned, forgotten by everyone and everything. Until now.

I know she was in the car. [Blank white panel.] Why can’t I remember? Did she sleep through it? Pretend to? Leave?

Rogan approaches M.D., who’s lying under the bed and scowling. “Hey,” he says, but she just looks away and grumbles. Her right forearm is covered in black angular lines.

Rogan gets down on his knees. “You wanna talk about it?” he asks, but she snarls, “No.”

Rogan sits on the bed. “That’s a lot of lines on your arm you drew,” he remarks.

M.D. keeps glaring off into the distance and stays under the bed. “You’re very observant,” she replies.

Rogan takes off his glasses as though to clean them. “I’m glad you just used ink,” he said.

M.D.’s expression weakens. It zooms in on her upset face under the bed, resting on her arms. “I want to hurt them,” she says. “So badly.”

A scene of a house and a car burning to the ground, a dark figure dancing among the flames. The caption reads, “Burn their cars. Their homes. Their world.”

Back to M.D. under the bed. She presses her face to the floor, clenches her arms around her head. “They raped me. Killed me. And they got away with it. I’m still helpless.”

Zoom out to Rogan on the bed, looking down on her with sadness. “God why did I ever come back?” she asks.

The final panel shows Rogan under the bed with M.D., patting her and trying to comfort her.

[A spiral drawing, appearing the head of an opening silver fern, surrounded by branching swirls.]

[Another spiral drawing, showing a long spiraling squiggle and a tiny one in a circle.]

[Blank white panel.] There aren’t words big enough to contain what I feel. So I draw instead.

September 12^th, 2014: LB is walking in a grassy park, cell phone held to their ear. They’re looking nervous while their granny from the other side of the family says, “That whole trip was weird. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did something.”

LB continues walking, but they smile when Granny says, “And everyone was always so nice to him! Not me. He was creepy.”

The walk continues, and Granny finishes with, “But your parents were always very vigilant!” LB looks uncomfortable and says, “...sure, Granny.”

LB sits at their desk, reading a book entitled Healing the Incest Wound by Christine Courtois. “Chapter 6: Incest Symptoms, Aftereffects, and Secondary Elaborations.”

Zoom out, showing LB and their desk in tiny silhouette as above them hangs the following bullet list:

Back to LB, who’ve dumped the book on their desk and hid their face in their arms. “Fuck,” they say. The book’s pages are covered in the word YOU.

This is what our headspace looks like. It’s called the Void. [Swirls and blackness created by layers upon layers of cross-hatching.]

It has no temperature, texture, or horizon. Creepy? Nah, it’s home. [Sneak hugs the blackness and declares, “I love you, Void!” The Void has its own speechbubble with a little heart in it.]

Before the Void, we had an idyllic forest. (Well, Erin did.) [Erin, a young girl with long blond hair like the vessel in earlier pages, sits in the branches of a tree. She smiles as a black bird flies to her. More trees, grass, and a pond are visible around her.]

But after Jeff raped us for a while and Erin and M.D. died… [The forest, but Erin is now gone. The black bird perches in the tree, alone.]

...well, an imaginary Eden wasn’t the place for us anymore. [The rest of the system leaves the Eden, as shown in a large tree in a bubble, surrounded by dark Void swirls.]

So now we have the creepy, alien semi-sapient Void, the House. [The Void now has a house in it, which resembles a three-story mutant Igloo made of adobe and glass. Arrows point out everyone’s rooms—Rogan and Mac have the top story, Gigi and Falcon the middle, while Miranda, Sneak, and M.D. each have rooms on the ground floor.]

It’s weird, but benign, a safe, embracing dark. [Miranda sits cross-legged, meditating in the Void.]

It’s seen members live, die, and come back. [All the system stands in the Void, holding hands and surrounding four gravestones.]

It’s not Eden. It’s better: our home. [The house in its undulating Void swirls.]

M.D. approaches Rogan. She’s wearing short sleeves, showing scars on her forearms. She grins and goes, “Hey Rogan, guess what?”

Rogan sits with his head in Mac’s lap, glasses hanging from his hand. “God, why am I still here?” he asks while Mac pets him. “I should be dead. Between the child-molester, the dissociative, the malignant narcissist, the rapist, and the homelessness, why aren’t we dead?”

Rogan is sitting at his desk, reading Combatting Cult Mind Control by Steve Hassan: “The Four components of Mind Control: behavioral, thought, emotional, and informational control.”

Rogan throws the book down and raises his hands in mute appeal to a nonexist god. “GodDAMN it, ARE YOU FUCKIN’ SHITTING ME?”

The last holiday we spent with family was Christmas 2009. [A little Christmas tree, decorated with ornaments and a star at the top.]

Mac I had gotten married November 29^th. [Rogan and Mac in suits, hugging and kissing each other.]

On December 4^th, we found a stranger in the dark in our home. Again. [LB are opening their door, looking in aghast shock as a claw-like hand rises from the foreground, shouting, “HI!”]

We fled during our grad school finals.* [LB, bags packed, sprints across the panel, shouting, “FUCK OUR LEASE!”]

* Footnote: Not pictured: the roomie who threatened a housemate with an axe, and the one who grabbed me.

On December 15^th, we left to visit family, ready for a break. [LB stands in the panel, harried and with dark-circled eyes, shivering.]

We did not get it. [LB’s approached by their parents, who are depicted as large black figures in white masks. They put their arms around LB, mirroring each other’s posture, and say, “We’re concerned, honey...”]

Our parents had the idea we’d fled out of craziness. That we were unstable. [Close-up on one parent, all black with white smiling mask.]

They threatened to follow us home if we didn’t persuade them of our normalcy. [Close-up on the other parent. In such abstract form, it’s impossible to tell one from the other.]

They monitored our behavior for switches, our food intake. [LB sits at the kitchen table, looking stiff and blankly ahead while all around them is darkness and staring eyes.] It was surreal.

Around us, uncles and aunts celebrated, oblivious. [A haggard LB sits staring resolutely forward as figures chatter and smile in the background.]

But we couldn’t tell them what was happening. [One figure approaches LB. “How’s it going?” With a sickly smile, LB replies, “Fine.”]

That would be proof we were crazy, in our parents’ eyes. [Zoom out so that it’s clear LB’s parents are over their shoulder, staring at them in a not-at-all subtle fashion. In the background is ‘NORMALNORMALNORMAL’ written over and over.]

Before, we’d been stressed. Now I really worried I was losing my mind. [LB with spiraling eyes and anxious face, surrounded by thought bubbles: “Does everyone think we’re nuts?” “Am I really?” “Maybe all my friends are lying to me...” And the words STRESS STRESS STRESS STRESS ANXIETY ANXIETY.]

I called and IMed my friends constantly, to keep my grip on reality. [LB on a walk to escape their family, pacing down a street with trees, sidewalks, and a pedestrian. On the phone, their friend says, “Dude, no. You held a job and grad school. It’s not you.”]

[The other pedestrian on the street calls “HEY! Are you a boy or a girl?!” LB rolls their eyes and replies, “If you can’t tell, you don’t need to know!”] Merry fucking Xmas.

It was at this time our mom asked us if medication would make us go away. [The masked blacked-out mother kneels at LB’s feet, appealing.]

It wouldn’t, and she cried, because her daughter was dead. [The mother folds on her knees, sobbing, while the father tries to comfort her. LB just stand there.] We ached for her.

The rape that formed us wasn’t the problem. Our existence was. [A gravestone with the words “Here Lies the REAL Person.”] We weren’t their kids. We were fakes, frauds.

Somehow we made it home, safe and alone. [LB returns to their new roomie, a curvy woman in flowing dress and with short curly hair. “Everything OK?” she asks.] Then the real shit started.

Something was wrong in our family. We wanted out. We asked advice. [LB types at their laptop, “Is this a good idea?”]

They said I was selfish, unreasonable, that I couldn’t live without a family. [The jagged lines and spirals seem to electrocute LB.]

That my family was good; love and respect was a two-way street. [The jagged lines and spirals devolve into scribbles looming over LB, who lies on the floor and seems to be trying to crawl away.]

One of them said I would be crying at their graves, realizing how shitty I was, but too late! [LB lies curled in a ball crying on the floor, while the scribbles loom over their head.]

It was then I realized, my parents were right. [LB sits up, still crying, and starts grinning and laughing, but the writing for the laughter gets increasingly illegible and unhinged. Meanwhile, the earlier scribbles are forming a humanoid shape.]

I was a burden. A freak. A monster. [LB continues laughing on their knees, going, “Of course. It’s all so simple. Why didn’t I see it before? Hahahaha.” Meanwhile, the scribbles form into Self-Hate, the caped pestilence from The Homeless Year.]

It was then I decided that being alive was selfish of me. Cruel. [Self-Hate whispers in LB’s ear, “Kill yourself. KILL YOURSELF.” LB smiles.] I would be haunted by this for five years.

I was always careful not to discuss my parents in my comics. [Mom and Dad, drawn as ordinary unmasked people. Mom has short hair, Dad curly hair. Arrows point out that they’re “normal!” “never fight!” have been “married 25+ years!” “great happy people!”]

I didn’t want anyone to think I was blaming them. [Mom and Dad are now standing next to LB, who stands looking anxious with their hands clasped. An arrow points out that they’re the “freakish monster kid.”]

But the fact was, I chose homelessness over going back to them. [LB crouches in their little triangular crawl space from the Homeless Year, saying, “I won’t burden them anymore. They won’t be hurt by me anymore.”]

The sad fact was… I was afraid of them. [Mom and Dad transform into their black, white-masked representations, glommed together almost into one being.]

I wanted to die, whenever we talked. [A picture of a cell phone with a message reading, “We love you! (heart emoji)*”]

And I didn’t know why. [Zoom in on the cell phone, which continues, “*Well, we love Erin. Who was our real kid and who you killed. But no hard feelings!”]

We had a dissociative episode in June 2012. I tried to jump off a bridge. [Rogan stands at a bridge over a busy highway, looking out forebodingly.]

Falcon stopped me. [Falcon puts his hands on Rogan’s shoulders. While Falcon is drawn clearly, Rogan is an abstract scribble. “Come down,” Falcon says in normal writing. In shaky letters, Rogan replies, “OK.”]

Mac and Mir laid down the law. [With determined faces, Mac and Miranda pick up Rogan and drag him off, declaring, “No more parents!” Rogan lies limp in their arms and says, “Okay.”] I was too exhausted and crazy to resist.

A scribbly MSpaint doodle, dated 7/31/14, of a dark figure in a white, smiling mask, saying in elegant calligraphy, “Of course we love you, sweetie.” As it talks, the lettering and bubble get steadily rougher and more scribbling. “You just don’t

Rogan smiles and dances through a panel as a dark ghost lurks behind him. “Nope!” he says.

Rogan brushes his teeth, but instead of his reflection, a dark ghost is in the mirror. “Nope,” Rogan says with a determined face.

Ghosts loom over Rogan, but he covers his ears and chants, “NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE” until it fills the background.

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It is the Christmas holidays. I am at my grandfather’s house. (Erin, a small white girl with long hair, stands on the front lawn of the Grandfather’s house, which has front porch, bushes, and a door receded in shadow.)

I am wearing an ugly red vest, khaki pants, and a white turtleneck. I think I look stupid. (Erin looks discontent, shoves her hands in her pockets while a helpful arrow points out the Christmas light pattern on her shirt.)

I am a piece of Erin, and I am between eight and eleven years old. Today, I will die. (Close-up on Erin’s face. It’s blacked out.)

He grabs me in the bathroom annex. He is huge and terrifying. (Erin is washing her hands at the sink and the Grandfather looms over her in the panel. His speech bubble has a smiley face in it, but Erin’s body language is uncertain, nervous.)

When I try to pull away, he only grips harder. (Close-up on the grandfather’s hand clamping down on Erin’s right arm. Her sleeve is covered with Christmas lights; a background of jagged lines suggests pain or shock.)

Then he begins to use me. (The panel is blacked out with so many words written on top of each other as to be incomprehensible. At least one layer is made up entirely of the words “too late” but there also seems to be “dead” and other words in there.)

I don’t understand. Why is he doing this to me? Why isn’t anyone coming to save me? (A terrified Erin pulls back, trying to get her arm back. Her right arm goes off the panel, severed at the forearm. All you can see of the grandfather is his speech bubble, which is filled with illegible writing.)

There are a dozen adults here. Where are they? Am I being punished? (Erin stops struggling, starts crying. She’s still leaning away, and the background is turning dark. The grandfather is still invisible, as is Erin’s right arm.)

Yes. Yes, this is for being such a crybaby. If I scream and cry, I’ll ruin everything. (Erin’s figure is starting to look scribbly and abstract. She’s no longer fighting or even leaning away. She just stands there, slumped and inanimate, as the grandfather continues what he’s doing. The background continues to darken.)

I am a doll. I am meat. (The background is almost black now, Erin’s face a mere few lines.)

I am I am (handwriting becomes more and more illegible. The background is black. Erin’s face is mere gray scribbles with enormous staring white eyes. The panel’s lines are shaky.)

(Wordless panel, hastily scribbled, made entirely of darkness with two featureless white eyes.)

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For a long time, we saw ourselves as undeserving of love or kindness. (Erin, roughly ten years old, with chin length hair and bangs, smiles and opens her arms as though for a hug, saying, “I love you!”)

We were a freak. A monster. Disgusting. (Erin transforms into a spotty one-eyed six-legged octopus thing, wiggling its tentacles for a hug and going, “Brble hrble eeek!” Its speech bubble is decorated with hearts.)

A robot clumsily aping humanity. Not real. (The octopus thing transforms into a robot, identical to the ones from The Homeless Year. It has a little heart on its chest panel, one eye, an antennae, wheels on its bottom, and two stretchy pincer arms. It raises its metal arms, smiles, and makes a rectangular speech bubble with a heart.)

We weren’t a person, but a thing, worth only as much as we functioned. (LB-bot holds up a report card with an A+ on it.)

If we could not perform to standard, then we would be punished. (LB-bot’s arm has been torn off and it’s awkwardly postured, as though off-balance. “ERROR!” it declares plaintively as our parents in their smiling masks ignore it.)

Our father told us once that he did not believe in unconditional love for children. (An enormous eye, with our father’s face reflected in the pupil.) We remembered.

To us, it seemed fair and reasonable: be good, be loved. (The LB-bot turns in a paper, and in exchange, one of the large black figures of the parents offers a heart.)

But as more bad things happened to us and we became more monstrous… (LB-bot still clutches a paper, but it’s fallen over and is stuck repeating, “ERROR ERROR FATAL ERROR”)

It got harder and harder to earn the love. (A cross-hatched heart.) We did good, but we couldn’t be good.

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Unoriginality (11/11/14)

LB is in their therapist’s office, though Rogan is fronting. He’s complaining to their therapist, a very small woman with brown hair. “What is it with rapists wanting to shove their penises in me?” He complains. “Like, never a beating, never verbal, always with the rape & penises!”

He gestures indignantly at his therapist, who’s putting a brave face on, and he goes, “I’m just saying, it’s a criminal lack of originality!”

(In a textbox) Oh god, this is the person I’ve become. Rape has become banal to me.

Or maybe I just wish it were. (Rain pours down on a shut window. It’s dark inside, and a hunched figure is barely visible in shadow.)

Something small and trite, like a badly written story. (Zoom in: the figure is LB, hunched over their desk, face hidden in their arms.)

Something that can’t hurt me anymore. (Zoom-in on LB’s desk, which has books and scanner and paper but nothing to work on. LB sobs.) Even though it happened so many times.

(In an artfully decorated textbox) If it lasts ten minutes, it’s a crisis. If it lasts ten years, it’s just life.

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It is March 17, 2004. We are in Phoenix, and I am asleep. (M.D. sleeps curled up in the back of the SUV, though she’s merely a silhouette. The night sky and moon can be seen through the car window behind her.)

(Zoom out. The SUV sits suspended in pure blackness: M.D. is sleeping in the trunk, with the back seats folded down. She’s surrounded by luggage. The driver’s seat and navigator seat seem to be empty. In the car window is Lois, blinding white in the black and grays of the environment. The door unlocks with a click.)

(M.D. sits up a little. “Mm? Huh? Lois?” She doesn’t see that the car window behind her shows the face of the grandfather, and that lock also pops open with a click.)

Oh no. (Lois and the grandfather move soundlessly into the car, reaching for M.D.)

No. No! I can’t die this way! I won’t let you! (Lois and the grandfather grab M.D., cover her mouth, restrain her, pull her down.)

I’ll kick your fuckin face in! (handwriting is deteriorating) I’ll kill you! (Close up on M.D.’s face, white eyes in a black face, muted by a white hand, everything in a frenzy of brush strokes. The panel’s lines are shaking.)

(barely legible) I’ll burn you burn all you! (Panel lines continue to deteriorate. All that is visible is M.D.’s wide white eyes and blackness.)

page break

Rogan is explaining a conflict to M.D.: “…so she de-friended us and asked everyone not to tell us why. Because I didn’t defend her enough in her fight on my unrelated blog entry.”

M.D. seems to be doing her best to understand, but her expression shows that this it’s not flying. Finally she remarks, “I thought high school was, you know. OVER.”

M.D. sits enthralled at LB’s laptop, wearing headphones and with big shiny eyes as she absorbs a decade of games, history, music, comics, information, IM, social justice, socializing, art, movies, multiplicity, gender, sexuality, and more via the Internet.

Rogan comes over, witnesses M.D.’s fascination, and says, “Internet’s gotten better since 2004 dial-up, eh?”

Rogan sits reading a book when suddenly Sneak prances by, wielding a pair of scissors. “I AM THE BEST BARBER!” Ze declares!

Now M.D. comes by… but her ponytail is gone! Her big floofy bangs remain, but everything else has been buzzed off. “Screw you, hair!” she shouts. “Screw you, ponytail! I’m FREE! Free from looking how I did when I bit it!”

page break

We told them not to leave Lois alone with any of the kids. They may not believe us, but they will remember.

They may not believe us, but they will watch her. To reassure themselves we’re lying.

Their fucked up Disneyland has been chugging along for fifty years. I doubt we can stop it, alone.

page break

LB walk outside in a turtleneck sweater, talking into their cell phone. “Grampa molested me as a kid. Lois helped, so this holiday, please don’t leave her alone with kids.”

LB looks flabbergasted for a moment, then says, “I see they never told you.”

LB shake and put their face in their hands. In thought bubbles, Miranda asks, “Rogan? Are you okay?” Rogan replies, “Fine. I’m fine. Just gimme a sec...”

Mom’s Explanation

LB is walking out in the park again, on their cellphone, but this time, they’re talking to Mom around Thanksgiving, and they’re crying.

LB, overcome with emotion, has to sit down on the curb. Mom continues, “He… mostly preferred younger children. He was done when I was nine.”

Zoom out as LB puts their face in their free hand as Mom goes on, “And he never did more than… inappropriate touching. I thought you were safe. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Lois was our youngest aunt, the grandfather’s favorite. (A redux of the little family tree, showing Grampa, Grandma, Lois, Mom, and their sibs, plus us, but this time, the tree makes it clear that Lois is the only one biological descended from Grampa.)

She lived with the grandfather and still lives in his house now. (The house from earlier, devoid of any people around it.)

She was also his only blood child. Really, it seems so obvious now. (Lois and the grandfather with their arms around each other.)

The best part? She’s a schoolteacher. Award-winning. Beloved. Surrounded by children. (A photo of a newspaper of Lois surrounded by small children. “School Teacher wins grant for awesomeness” reads the headline. “Boy she just loves kids!”)

We’re a destitute lunatic with no case, no credibility. (LB with spiral eyes and unhinged expression in a straitjacket. Their head is opened up with a cuckoo coming out of it. Notes and arrows state that we’re “unreliable,” have “false memory syndrome” and “repressed memories? So 90s!” and that we “probably just made it up,” all this “bullshit.”

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Rogan Is Stupid! (11/30/14)

M.D. stands incredulously in her panel. “Don’t be stupid, Rogan. Won? Lois didn’t win!”

M.D. narrates, “Winning would’ve been us staying with the family, me staying dead,” while the LB-bot from earlier rolls around, smiling and glassy-eyed and saying, “BEEP BEEP HAPPY HAPPY FINE!”

Narration: “But that didn’t happen.” The little LB-bot is now towering in its anger, surrounded by flame, declaring, “DESTROY! DESTROY! BURN THE FUCKERS!”

M.D.’s back, pointing to a gravestone reading “HERE LIES HIM.” “Do I look dead to you, asshole?” She asks. “No! I’m alive! (Unlike the grandfather.)”

Narration: Because you started looking for answers. You helped me dig myself up! (Rogan looks up at M.D. in her Flaming Eyeballs ghost incarnation, saying, “M.D.?”)

M.D. stands triumphant. “I achieved all my goals! You’re the one with absurd expectations! Grow up, man! Get over it! We lived! We got out! WE FUCKING WON!”

page break

Hell

As the other dead guy of the system, Mac asks, “M.D., when you were dead… where’d you go?”

Close-up on M.D.’s face. There are dark circles under her eyes, and flames dance in them. The background has turned black and flaming.

Rogan’s cell phone rings in his pocket. Miranda leans in and says, “Five dollars says they pretend it never happened.” “No bet,” M.D. replies.

Rogan pulls out the phone which has a message from Mom: “Happy Thanksgiving!”

Rogan scowls at the phone, while M.D. strikes a sarcastic pose of astonishment and declares, “Whoever could’ve predicted such a shocking turn of events!”

The rest of the page is taken up with a close-up of LB’s crappy cell phone, receiving a call from “Mom.”

page break

Mac and Rogan are clearly rosy and post-orgasmic, cuddling in bed and smiling. “Good?” Mac asks.

Black panel with a blurry scribbly vaguely rectangular object in the middle. “What do you see?” Mac asks off-panel.

The rectangular object clarifies, gets planks, a handle. “There’s a door—“ Rogan says.

The door, which is now clearly made of heavy wood with iron bands and a big knocker, comes open and light comes blazing through.

“It’s—it’s full of light,” Rogan reports. “Someone’s—they’re scream—oh god.”

The door opens, and the panel is filled with blinding light and a small blurry figure. The word SCREAM appears blurred into the darkness beaten back by the light.

page break

Erin is crying and appears to have wet her pants. Mom, in her black-figure white smiley-mask incarnation, hands her over to Lois saying, “I’m sorry, Lois, she needs new shorts…”

Back in Grandpa’s bathroom, the same one she was assaulted in years prior, Erin puts on her knew shorts. She’s noticeably taller and older now; her hair comes to her shoulders. The shorts she’s wearing though are cut so high that it almost shows her ass, and as she adjusts the waist, she thinks, “Well, these shorts are kind of weird and cut funny… wonder why she had them?”

But then she ditches the thought and walks out with a smile, thinking, “Well, whatever. I’m just glad to have clean clothes!” Reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her is the ghost of her younger self, a hazy apparition with accusing white eyes.

Fast forward to now, where Miranda, M.D., and Rogan are digesting the thought. Horrified, Miranda holds her hands to her cheeks and says, “Poor dear!” M.D., looking thoughtful, remarks, “I could’ve sworn I was there for that…”

But Rogan goes, “Guys, wait.” His expression is unsettled. “Where did the shorts COME FROM?”

“Lois didn’t have kids,” he continues while Miranda and M.D. freeze. “Our only cousin was five years older, and…”

Close-ups on Miranda and M.D.’s faces. Miranda has her hands covering her mouth and has the look of someone who’s just witnessed a train accident; M.D.’s is more, “Oh my god, what the fuck is this shit.”

Blank white panel, with text reading, “And then we tried to think of a possible innocent explanation. But we couldn’t.”

page break

It turns out, alas, that Lois did more than assist the grandfather. (Small vague figure of Erin with bangs and long hair, with the grandfather standing at her side.)

She also molested us directly. They shared us like food. (Grandpa is now joined with Lois. They each have a hand on Erin, who’s grown a bit and lost her bangs.)

Which means other children may still be in danger, even now. (Erin’s grown more, Lois is still there, but the grandfather’s been replaced with a gravestone reading HERE LIES HIM.)

Unfortunately, Lois had far more access to us than he did. (A blurry picture of an enormous RV, with Lois in the driver’s seat and Erin in the passenger seat. The background is gray, and an arrow points out that there was a “summer RV trip we can’t recall clearly”)

So now our memory may have even more horrors to show us. (LB, walking away from another dark ghosts with white eyes.)

It feels as though it will never end. (A group of ghosts in varying shades of black and gray, all with white staring eyes.)

We have had to sedate Rogan, just to give him a break from the pain.* (Gigi tells Rogan to sleep, and he slumps back into Mac’s arms.)

*Footnote: Gigi can, in times of duress, put down any system member except herself, Mac, and (presumably) Falcon. –Mir

He sleeps, and Mac watches over him. (Rogan sleeps on the couch, while Mac holds his hand and sits on the floor, waiting.)

We hope he revives soon. We hope this ends soon. Please. (The whole system stands around the couch with Rogan sleeping on it, waiting for him to come back.) Please, let it end soon.

page break

It is after the Christmas assault, after the creepy shorts. It must be at least 1999. (Erin with shoulder-length hair stands on the front lawn of the grandfather’s house, with the housing looming over her in the background.)

Today, he has caught me again. He pulls me into the spare room for… stuff. (The Grandfather reaches through a black doorway and grabs Erin by the shoulders. Her expression is one of anxious resignation, rather than shock.)

Endure this. Go dead. It’ll be over soon. (Erin stands in the dark, hazy room with a Mickey Mouse watch clock on the wall. The grandfather pushes her down and speaks in illegible speechbubble. Erin’s eyes and expression are totally blank.)

Then the door opens. (Erin is on her knees, but both her and the grandfather look up at the click.)

It’s Lois! She’s caught him! (It’s a near copy of the lit-up open doorway from the earlier panel, but this time instead of a little girl in the doorway, it’s Lois’s adult figure.)

Everything will be okay now! She’s going to save me! (Erin is beaming, tearful from relief and joy.)

But then he says, (the grandfather speaks in illegible gibberish except for two words: “share her?”)

She closes the door and I realize… (Lois comes in, door shut. Being faceless, her feelings or thoughts are completely opaque.)

She is not here to save me. (Erin’s face drowning in darkness, her face morphing to fear and shock.) Nobody is ever going to save me.

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Rogan has revived, and he walks shamefaced over to M.D., saying, “Hey, sorry I’ve been a wreck lately so much. I—“

M.D. hugs him, though her face and Rogan’s show that this is not an easy gesture. “Um,” Rogan says.

“This is how humans express concern and affection,” M.D. snarls. “Now shut up and hug me.”

So Sorry

Awful as it was, I don’t think Lois enjoyed what she was doing to us. (Lois’s faceless gray figure stands, but her face is shaded darker, as though ashamed or resigned.)

She wasn’t like him; she hadn’t had decades to inure herself to ethics. (The grandfather jauntily marches through the panel, whistling.)

I don’t think she became a super-teacher to attract children. (Lois surrounded by small children, but her posture shows no sense of joy or confidence.)

I think she did it out of guilt. Because just maybe, she was sorry. (Lois is on her knees, looking at a photo of the Grandfather in a frame on the mantle.)

Were we the first kid her father attacked with her? Were we the last? (Lois hides her face in her hands.) Did she hate it?

…if we asked her, would she answer? (A cell phone vibrating, ringing; LB is calling.)

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When we were small we had a book called Balloonia by Audrey Wood. (The cover of Balloonia, which depicts a bunch of happy smiling balloons ascending into a heavenly sky.)

It was about a magical land in the sky where lost balloons went. (A smiling balloon ascends to clouds and rainbows.) Where they’d never pop.

I can not imagine a sadder thing than a slowly deflating balloon. (Three frowning, drooping balloons in a room.) Trapped inside.

Today is our birthday. We are 27. I am 22. And we got balloons! (Mac’s pastor gives a delighted Sneak a handful of balloons. A note mentions that her spouse was there too.)

I had fun with them all day! Mac let me take them to church. (Sneak happily sits in zer church seat with the balloons tied to the chair, with a man and woman sitting on either side of zer.)

And tonight, I knew I had to let them go. (Sneak holds up zer balloons outside on a rainy day.)

As they flew into the rainy sky, I imagined all the places they’d go. (Sneak’s hand releasing the balloons into the sky.)

I imagined them as happy, liberated balloons. (The balloons ascend over the city skyline, happy despite the foggy rainy sky.)

(Sneak waves at the sky, going, “Bye bye balloons! Be free!”) I’m sorry I littered, though.

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Rogan opens a door, only to find a ghost on the other side. It holds a sign reading “Hi.”

Rogan throws up his hands. “No! No! Are you fucking kidding me?! FUCK!” He shouts! “How much more rape can there POSSIBLY BE?”

The ghost holds up a sign reading, “Sorry,” and it does seem a bit apologetic about all this.

A rough, awkward diagram of the grandfather’s house, with lots of notes and description to make up for the wildly off-scale rooms. There’s the “front yard. There’s an elephant fountain here, but never drawn because it gets in the way)”, a “patio-ish thing (never used)” that connects to “the ‘elephant room’ with pool table, pinball, and hundreds of elephant collectibles,” and a “foyer, with candy.” The foyer leads to “the dining room,” and then to the “kitchen” and also the “living room, star of the show,” with a big-screen TV, many recliners including the grandfather’s chair.” The living room also has a fireplace and a doggie bed, with a back door that leads to a hedge maze. It also connects to a hall leading to Lois’s room “where we stayed in Christmas 2009,” the “spare room (where the grandfather ‘shared’ us),” the infamous bathroom, and the grandfather’s room “where Lois slept after he died in 2005. Far as I know, we never went in there, but…”

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During the Raping Year, we were petrified of the bed. (A hand pats the bed encouragingly, while Erin stands in a darkened doorway, obviously afraid and dubious.)

We could ‘tolerate’ it on the floor… (Erin lies on the floor, blank-faced and glassy-eyed, with the door shut in the background. A speech bubble proves someone is there with you, but he is not visible.)

…or even outside… (a poorly rendered creekbed bridge water vent, dark inside, with a blank speech bubble emanating from it)

…but not the bed. (Erin is crying, looking away, naked on a bed. A hand is on her breast and there’s a blank speech bubble, but no clarity.)

Jeff only got us there once. It’s where Erin died… (Same picture as before, but Erin is now turned into an abstract ghostly scribble.)

…and I had to finish the job. Again. (Erin is suddenly replaced by a teenaged Rogan, who looks shocked and confused. The speech bubble reads, “Erin. You promised you’d try. Come on.”)

At the time, I figured we were just trying to have some control. (Rogan curls in a ball, crying, hands held to his face as Jeff says, “Are you trying to hurt me? Erin!”)

Lord knows we had enough to worry about. (Zoom in on Rogan. His hands clench into fists, and he’s still crying, but his expression is now angry and horrified. Jeff continues off-panel, “Look, I knew you wouldn’t like it the first time. You’ll get better.”)

But I don’t think we were that lucky. (Close-up on Rogan’s eye, which contains a ghost. Off-panel, Jeff says, “You’ll love it, eventually.”)

Textbox: I can only be glad that with Erin’s death, I took power and got us away. Otherwise we might’ve married Jeff…

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Sneak dances through a panel, grinning and going, “WEEE!” M.D. watches her with a look of confusion or skepticism, while Rogan reads a book.

Rogan explains, “Okay, after you died, me and Sneak emerged, but we were weak.” (Image of the M.D., Rogan, and Sneak family tree.)

Rogan narrates: “Six months later, Erin found a sensitive geek boyfriend named Jeff.” (A teenaged Erin and Jeff, a young man with long hair and a Mario 1up mushroom shirt, have their arms around each other. Erin says, “Finally, real love!”)

Black panel, except for Rogan and M.D.’s speech bubbles: “Alas, he was a rapist.”

Rogan continues, “We were his rape toy for one year, and I got recruited for trauma duty.” (Teenaged Rogan lying on the bed, crying and looking away, while Jeff says, “You could at least try, ice queen.”)

By that point, rape was just the cost of love to us. But we needed to be happy. (Mom and Dad in their smiley-face masks, saying, “Or else.”)

So Sneak got all sad and angry circuits pulled from zer brain. (A wee twelve-year-old Sneak with short hair and cape says, “No problem!” as her skull is opened up, showing a brain with a bandage on it.)

People treated us better when we were constantly, effusively happy. (Tiny Sneak dances around grinning, going, “Wheee! La la la!”)

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Rogan’s narration continues: The rapes were less brutal. (Sneak plays Nintendo, while Jeff puts his arms around zer and tries to kiss zer. Sneak, obviously focused entirely on zer game, says, “Let’s beat Mario 3!” Jeff goes, “Well, okay, but you owe me.”)

Our parents were pleased. (Mom and Dad, indistinguishable from each other in their masks and black, put their arms around a smiling Sneak, saying, “So proud.”)

Sneak allowed us to pass as normal, mostly because zie was oblivious to all the horror’n’rape. (Sneak stands cheerfully among the ghosts, unaware.)

Finally, in 2008, zie broke the blocks, so zie can understand now. (A horrified Sneak covers zer mouth with zer hands, going, “You mean, he was… I was… all this time…”)

Zie can get sad, and angry, and grow up. (Sneak hurls zerself into Rogan’s arms, crying, “WAAHH!” as Rogan comforts zer.)

But zer development was irrevocably altered. (An adult, pigtailed Sneak dances ridiculously, going, “Rogan, look! I’m an octo-person!”)

Snap back to Rogan explaining all this to M.D. “So that’s the deal with Sneak, and why zie’s five years behind the body,” he finishes.

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Rogan stands in a black panel. A caption sings, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear [blurs], happy birthday to you!”

The song continues, over and over. Rogan covers his ears and groans, but can’t block it out.

Finally, he shakes his fists and goes, “SHUT UP! I get it, brain! I hear you! Birthday! Got it!”

February 15, 2015: Rogan and Mac are naked in bed together, and Mac is grinning as Rogan kisses him all over.

“It’s… Gigi. Very young. There’s something on her…” (Black panel with a young Gigi in it. She’s wearing a pleated skirt, short-sleeved shirt, and her traditional headband, but her face, mouth, and neck are obscured.)

“I don’t know. She’s just… staring…” (Gigi comes closer. Something is all over her mouth and neck, staining her color. Only one eye is visible through her bangs, white and staring.)

.”…and now she’s gone,” Rogan finishes. (Gigi fades into the blackness, a vague gray figure.)

Gigi and Falcon, in their room below Rogan’s, are aroused by a banging on the trapdoor up. Falcon is obviously still half-asleep, rubbing his eyes and complaining, “At this hour?” While Gigi is still alert but perplexed.

The trapdoor bursts open, smacking Falcon in the head and knocking him partly out of the panel. Rogan shoves his face through, shouting, “Gigi! Are you okay?”

Mac, Rogan, Gigi, and Falcon drink cups of tea, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I… do not remember anything like that…” Gigi says.

Falcon comes carrying a cup of tea, nursing a headache. “Your birth, maybe?” He suggests.

Rogan and Mac are trying to get laid again, are naked and cuddling, when suddenly Rogan goes bolt upright while the background goes black. Mac looks like he’s gotten used to this; he no longer looks surprised or confused.

“Yes there is,” Rogan says, and the camera view changes, showing from over Mac’s shoulder, showing Rogan’s tormented expression, while a huge four-winged angel hovers behind him, wearing a hooded cloak that drips a dark sticky mess down its front.

Textbox: But it wouldn’t speak. It just hung there a while, then left. Dammit.

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Miranda waves. “Hello! I’m here to explain the visions that appear in our headspace!”

“Our headspace is a symbolic construct of our subconscious. This means we can interact with each other…” (Picture of the House, with one system member waving from the third story to someone below.)

“…but also that our subconscious can interact with us, a bit.” (Image of Rogan clinging to Mac while the Angel hovers over his shoulder, saying, “Yo.”)

“An apparition is best described as a headspace ghost, haunting the memory of its death.” (A little cartoony white ghost with an angry face, going, “Avenge me! Avenge me! Rarr!”)

“Once the trauma that killed it is remembered and processed, it can rest. (Or come back in her case.)” (An arrow points to M.D., looking smug at her amazing powers of resurrection.)

“Unfortunately, it can’t communicate directly, only through symbols or memory dumps.” (Falcon and Miranda ponder the angel, which continues lurking ominously, but they’re busy trying to analyze it. “What does it want?” Falcon asks. “What does it mean?” Miranda wonders.)

“Ignoring an apparition only makes it worse.” (The ghost looms over Rogan’s shoulder as he kisses Mac, threatening, “I will cockblock you forever.”)

“It can still attack us in headspace, causing flashbacks, psychosis, and pain.” (The ghost punches a hapless Rogan, wailing, “STOP IGNORING ME! Rar!”)

“So it’s best to try and lay it to rest as quickly as possible.” (Sneak hugs the ghost, which now looks sad more than vengeful. It cries as ze tells it, “There, there, little guy. It’s okay now. It’s over.”)

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“This means taking its burden of pain back, and the memories…” (a close-up on the ghost’s teary eyes, which contain the image of Lois opening the door.)

“…so we know exactly what happened and how much it hurt.” (The ghost’s cartoony eyes transform into realistic Erin’s eyes, still continuing the same image, taking the experience from symbolic to the literal.)

“Quieting one ‘ghost’ can take anywhere from weeks to months. It’s exhausting.” (LB’s friend Annie asks them, “Are you OK?” LB, looking haggard and tired, says something.)

“Not to mention depressing.” (The cartoony white ghost is back, grinning and going, “Surprise! You got raped even more! Yay!” while an indignant little Rogan declares, “Dammit, AGAIN?”)

“Often, the worst part isn’t even the rape itself, but the subtext surrounding it.” (LB lays in bed at night, blankets pulled to their nose, staring at the ceiling as they think, “oh god they knew he was a child-molester. And they…”)

“Even though they are frightening, it’s best to view the ‘ghosts’ as kids. (The Angel drifts into a black panel, ominous and frightening.)

“Wounded, brutalized messengers of an unspeakably awful past…” (The Angel turns into a young Erin, face obscured by her hair, trudging on through the black panel.)

“…who have spent years waiting to tell their stories so they can sleep.” (She curls up to sleep in the darkness, finally getting her long-deserved rest.)

Textbox: They are small, and they are sad, and they are brave. The least we can do is care for them, and give them the peace they long for.

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At first, we were three: Erin (a girl with round face, long hair, squashy body), M.D. (pointy face, triangular eyes, pointy angular body), me (Gigi) (a self-portrait, showing Gigi with her oval face and triangular little skirted body.)

M.D. and Erin vanish, leaving Gigi saying, “They died, but not me. Only I survived.”

“Because I hid.” Gigi hides in a corner and covers her face with her hands, while reflected on the wall, an ominous shadow looms over a smaller one.

Gigi curls up in a ball of blackness, surrounded by gray. “I let them die so I could stay safe,” she says.

Gigi says, “People say, oh Gigi you are so cool. So brave.” A round scribble-person next to her says, “So cool.”

Close-up on Gigi’s mouthless, noseless face. “But they are wrong,” she says. “I am the biggest coward who never lived.”

Gigi stands in a long rectangular panel. Her rendition of the Angel stands at the far left; she seems to flee to the far right. “I am a coward and now the angel is coming for me,” she says. “It’s my turn to hurt now. I’m afraid.”

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Gigi has fled into a corner, and the Angel’s shadow looms over her on the wall. She covers her face. “I’m afraid.”

She curls into the corner. The panel and the Angel’s shadow grow, but Gigi shrinks. “I’m afraid,” she repeats.

The panel and the shadow of the Angel are now huge, and Gigi is trapped and tiny in her corner. “And I’m very very sorry.”

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Gigi sits tiny and frightened in her panel. Instead of a scribble, she is now a girl wearing white tights, a green sleeveless dress, and a black turtleneck underneath. Her hair goes down to her shoulder blades. The Angel’s shadow remains projected on the wall, waiting.

She approaches the Angel, which is surrounded by queasy Void swirls that distill to a dark halo around its head. Its face is still in shadow from its hood, leaving its features invisible, but slop still covers its lower face and the collar and front of its robe. Its four wings are half-open. “I’m sorry I took so long,” Gigi says.

Close-up on Gigi’s face: she is afraid, but not running. The Void undulates around her. “I’m ready. I’ll be brave now.”

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Back Cover (3/26/2015)

A big hallucinogenic spread of the Angel, hands and wings spread. Its eyes gleam white, and in the shadows of its hood, its face is just barely discernible: it is a skull. In the background are void swirls, gears, flames, flowers, and a little scrolling ribbon reading “Once upon a time… the End.” Beneath that, black liquid seeps down, with a splatter around a noose.

All In The Family, part 2: The Angel

Cover

A tiny photograph of Erin, smaller than a thumbprint. She is dressed all in pink, curled up in a ball, arms wrapped around her knees and face propped on her arms. She crouches in a tiny white circle in the center of the cover, and black Void swirls emanate out from around her.

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A scan of the first ever drawing of Gigi, from 6/17/2002. It’s entitled “Blending In,” and it shows Gigi curled in a ball in the corner, just like in her first appearance in Dramatis Personae. This version has no bangs or headband, and is dressed in pants, but we drew her in her later wardrobe so she could be easily distinguished from Erin and M.D.--back then, everyone looked super alike.

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It is spring break 2004 and I am in Phoenix. With them. (A tiny frightened Gigi stands dwarfed by the looming figures of the Grandfather, a man with blacked-out face and shining crown, and Aunt Lois, a faceless woman shown entirely gray.)

M.D. is dead. Falcon is gone. I am our only defense. (Lois and the Grandfather reach for Gigi, who seems to be screaming.)

I can’t fight. All I know is how to run and hide. (Gigi hides her in corner, watching quietly as a shadow passes her by.)

Fighting didn’t work. I must strategize or die. (Close-up on Gigi’s face, wide-eyed but calm, hands to her face. She seems to be thinking.)

There is only the small house in suburbia. No bus. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. (Tiny Gigi stands in a large panel filled with rows of identical white houses.)

It is very hot, but I take long walks. They can not get me outside. But I can’t walk forever. (Gigi walks across a very long narrow panel. She is on the far right; the blazing sun is on the left, inescapable.)

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At five, Aunt H comes home, and I am safe. (Aunt H, depicted in all white curves, with a smiling face and chin-length, flipped out hair, comes into the panel, and Gigi breathes a sigh of relief as the clock above her strikes five.)

I don’t dare tell her. What if she helps? Too risky. (Gigi reaches out in entreaty to her oblivious aunt, while the Grandfather reaches out as though to trap her.)

I must survive till five. (Close-up on a clock, a few minutes before five. Tik tok tik tok.)

It is a battle of tactics. I must not lose. (Gigi crouches in her corner, but Lois and the Grandfather seem to be catching on; they’re looking at her, leaning towards her inexorably.)

I become invisible. I hide in plain sight, or take walks. I am silent wallpaper. (Gigi hides under an table with a vase of flowers on top.)

A row of tiny panels: The clock ticks: 2:47. Gigi walks in the oppressive sun. Gigi taps on her laptop. The clock ticks: 3:05. Gigi watches it, the clock’s hands reflected in her eyes.)

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But I have to come out sometimes. To eat or walk. (The door creeks open, and Gigi peeks out at an apple, left out on a table in the foreground. It looks like a trap.)

Oh no. I need the bathroom. That’s the worst. (A door at the end of a long hallway.)

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Stupid useless child! Now I will die too! (The arm reels Gigi into the black bathroom hallway, and her expression is utter despair.)

It’s not over yet! I can still get away! I must! (Gigi rears up, kicks with all her might, smashing the door shut on the grandfather’s arm, hissing like a rattlesnake and making a fearsome face.)

I must not fail. (Using her entire body, Gigi slams the door again and again on the grandfather’s arm. She’s fighting for her life.)

I MUST NOT FAIL. (Close-up on Gigi’s look of utter focus and determination as she keeps slamming the door.)

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And then… and then… (Gigi seems to be running, or falling—the panel isn’t clear.)

Snap back to the present! Gigi is along in her panel, reaching up in entreaty, expression agonized. “Angel, no! What came next? What came next?” she cries. “…where did you go? Angel?”

Then the straightens a little. She gets angry eyes. A little stormcloud brews over her head.

She rears up and flails her arms with only the fury a small child can have. “AAAAAAAH!!” she screams, drawn with a mouth open with pointy teeth. “This isn’t fair!!!”

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April 1^st (A train choo-choos along the track. A row of smiling faces looks through the windows… except Gigi’s. She is glowering ferociously, the cloud simmering above her frowning face. She has drawn herself with a mouth, purely so she can be frowning even harder.)

April 7^th (Gigi stomps up the stairs, lugging boxes labeled ‘MUSIC’ ‘STUFF’ and ‘BOOKS.’ She is still glowering, her storm cloud over her head even larger.)

April 17^th (Gigi slumps at a table at LB’s new home in Boston—for indeed, they were moving the past few panels. The storm cloud over her head has continued to grow, taking up even more space in the panel than a smiling sun shining in the window behind her.)

Rogan and M.D. join Gigi at the table—drawn by themselves, while Gigi still draws herself and her own words in her own style. M.D. is devouring a plateful of pasta, noodles jutting from her mouth, while Rogan has put on his most prim big-brother expression. “Do you plan to stay mad forever?” he asks.

“Yes!” Gigi roars, slapping the table. “Stupid useless angel! I was brave for nothing! It has been weeks! WEEKS!”

M.D. clears her mouth enough to cheerfully add, “Yeah! It took me two months, and I was bugfuck the whole time! At least you’re sane! Sorta.”

She sulks across the panel, leaving a trail of angry dark stormcloud scribbles behind her. “I don’t want it in 2 months. I want it NOW,” the text reads.

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(4/20/2015) (The art style returns to what you might call “the house style,” since Rogan’s, Miranda’s, and M.D.’s art styles are fairly indistinguishable.)

For such an influence, we know very little about the grandfather. (The Grandfather stands there.)

He served in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, but never discussed it. (The Grandfather, tiny now, stands on a massive battleship with the note “hypothetical boat (no clue what he truly sailed on).”)

H never discussed much of anything. Mostly, he was a silent presence. (The Grandfather reclines in his enormous armchair, watching football.)

Besides rape, we ignored each other. He was more a fixture than a man. (Young Erin walks past the Grandfather, still entrenched in his recliner. They show no sign of noting the other’s existence.)

Even family stories mostly excluded him. (The mother says, “Donkey Lady!” to Lois, who laughs.)

And yet, the family orbited around him. (A bird’s eye view of the cul-de-sac the Grandfather lives in. Lois lives in his house with him and Uncle D lives right next door, while Uncle J and Aunt H live in the house across the cul-de-sac from them. Aunt B doesn’t live in the cul-de-sac, but still in the same neighborhood.) Literally.

When he died in 2005, everyone came. Everyone cried. (A teenaged Lollyanna, with awkwardly shaggy hair and a black dress, stands with her hands clasped and face blank, while all around her are grayish figures of crying relatives, including the mother and Lois.)

Except us. (Zoom in on LB. The background around her darkens, while the relatives around her grow blurry and faded, but her expression remains unreadable.)

We felt nothing. Except maybe anger. (Zoom in on Lollyanna again, and now it’s clear that her expression is hiding deep tension. Her eyes are huge, and flames dance in them, and over her head.)

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Poink! Lolly transforms into M.D. with her scarred forearms. The dress hangs awkwardly off her, since M.D. is significantly smaller than Lolly. She beams and spreads her arms, declaring, “What are you all crying for? Relief? Come on!” While Lois and the mother stare at her in shock.

M.D. rears up, plants one big black boot on the coffin, grins and points to it. “The best thing this sack of shit did for anyone was keel over! I refuse to grieve!”

She continues ranting, turning her accusing finger on the mother. “He raped my mother!” She shouts, while our mother, weeping says, “I’m over it… that was a long time ago…”

M.D. turns her finger on Uncle J. “He raped Uncle J!” she accuses, while he goes, “That’s nothing to do with me! NOTHING! I have nothing to say!”

M.D. now turns the finger on Lois. While Mom seemed to withdraw into tears and Uncle J into defensive indignation, Lois only stands, silent and resigned as M.D. goes, “I don’t even want to know what he did with you, Lois! Shit!”

M.D. stands on the coffin, towering in her rage. “But you all cover it up! Pretend he was great! Fuck all y’all!”

She hurls herself down on her belly on the coffin, glowers into the lid and where the Grandfather lies. “And you!” She snarls. “I hate you! I shit on your corpse! Cancer was too good for you!”

The lines depicting her grow rough and scribbly as the background goes black and her eyes burst into flame. “I hope you burn in hell, choking on your own rotting, suppurating COCK!” she shouts. “JUST LIKE I HAD TO!”

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Zoom out, showing a quiet peaceful church scene, with a rose window, American flag, and a wreath with the Grandfather’s photo. M.D. lies crouched on her knees on the coffin, fists against the wood, shaking and panting as though she’s been pounding on it for hours.

Then she goes quiet and still. She relaxes. Sits up, pushes her bangs out of her eyes.

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M.D. flops down on her back on top of the coffin, arms splayed down the sides. Her expression is tired. “I’d been dead for a year,” she says. “Nobody grieved.”

She crosses her arms over her chest, puts her feet together. Not it seems that she’s the one in the coffin. “Nobody even noticed, hardly. After all…”

She disappears, leaving only the Grandfather’s coffin. “…it’s not like I was a person or anything. Not like him.”

The rest of the page is taken up with a drawing, dated 12/8/2014, of M.D. triumphantly erupting out of her own metaphorical grave, spraying dirt everywhere and shouting, “SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKERS! Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me!” Behind her, an old-fashioned Puritan gravestone with a winged skull and hourglass reads, “Here likes M.D., who died March 17, 2004, in the 15^th year of her age. MEMENTO MORI.”

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M.D. in her current incarnation stands with a microphone. “Dearly beloveds, we gather here today for a special events,” she announces with a grin.

She raises a triumphant fist. “He is dead! We are alive! LET’S FUCKIN’ PARTY!”

While their vessel drinks Bailey’s and vodka, all of LB dance. Music and Void swirls fill the panels as Sneak pogos, Gigi dances with Falcon, Miranda dances with herself, and Mac and Rogan dance with each other.

Music surrounds the House, and the Void swirls seem to dance to the beat, along with the system members within.

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A spotlight shines on M.D, who’s now dressed in the spats, black spats, top hat and cane, and a white collared shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows. Her forearms are covered in scars.

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M.D. dances below her spotlight. “Over dear old Pedo-Grampa, Hell know I refuse to grieve,” she sings.

Shadows are appearing at the sides of the panels, but it’s not clear what they are.

M.D. continues singing. She’s popped her top hat on top of her cane and now makes as though to wring this imaginary person’s neck. “For that burning lake of fire brought me a much-earned reprieve,” she sings.

They put hands on her shoulders and grab her while M.D. continues, “And we know Hell don’t exist ’cept in the minds of who believe…”

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Atheist Hell

“It’s not that I believe in Hell,” M.D. emphasized. “I don’t. I’m a steadfast atheist.”

She throws up her hands in disgust. “It’s just that most of my post-death fits the popular conception of Hell.”

“It’s easier to say ‘Hell’ than ‘subconscious burny place where I’m forever reliving my death throes.’” (A frenzied brushstrokes image of M.D., in her blackened ghost form with staring white eyes, surrounded by flames.)

“But it’s a psychological construct, not a spiritual one. God wasn’t involved.” (M.D. writhes in torment in a lake of fire.)

“I died in agony and rage, humiliated and reduced to fuckmeat.” (M.D. rages in the flames.)

“And I couldn’t move on (literally) until that pain was acknowledged.” (M.D. writhes.) “Thus: Hell.”

“This isn’t to say it’s not real. Trust me, if I could’ve skipped it, I would’ve.” (M.D. stands in her fundamentalist Christian hell, a grin on her blackened face, giving a double thumbs-up and declaring, “Yay!”)

“It’s just God has nothing to do with it.” (A black cross stands in the panel saying, “Stop blaming me, y’all.”)

“Good thing too. A god like that, I’d be morally obliged to overthrow and kill.” (The cross has been broken off at the base.)

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Mapping Reality

M.D. stands in front of a linear scale. “Okay, reality,” she says. “For us, there are layers, internal worlds we can fall back on—some of us, anyway. The more subconscious a world, the more flexible and symbolic it is. The emotions and sensations in it are still very real though.”

“You have to be careful with these worlds. Ignore them, and they’ll fuck you up bad—apparitions and crap. But you’ve gotta keep your feet on the ground too. It’s a balancing act.”

The linear reality scale has “conscious” at the top and “subconscious” at the bottom, and various system members are divvied up between the worlds, with the exception of Falcon, who “goes anywhere. He doesn’t notice boundaries.” From top the bottom, the scale goes:

Dreams

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It is March 2004, and I am fleeing the grandfather. (Gigi running down a featureless white hallway while the Grandfather stars coming out of the dark bathroom.)

I see the door outside. It is safe outside! (Gigi in the foreground reaches for and runs for a door in the background. The background is going gray.)

I have not failed! I will make it! (Gigi runs past an alcove. Lois is there. The background is getting steadily darker.)

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No! No no no no! (Gigi’s hand reaches for the door, white and glowing. It’s so close, but might as well be on the moon.)

(As Gigi falls, her head whacks against a leg of furniture, and her body is slammed to the ground.)

(Black panel, but Gigi’s face appears, surrounded by white stars. Her eyes are closed.)

(The background turns back to white as Gigi’s eyes open, though a star remains.)

(View from Gigi’s position. Lois’s face looms in her view, gray and featureless. The grandfather stands in the background, saying, “Put the fear of god in her.”)

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This is then. I have failed. (Gigi lies pinned to the floor by Lois, flat on her back, arms held down and face to the sky.)

But I don’t want to die. ( Lois’s hand closes on Gigi’s throat. Tears drip into Gigi’s ears and face.)

I dive deep deep down (while in the white background, Lois and the Grandfather crouch over Gigi’s body, Gigi herself dives into the foreground, which shifts to black) into our mind.

I don’t care who they hurt as long as it isn’t me. (Gigi dives deeper into the blackness.)

I abandon us. (Gigi curls into a ball, a little bubble of white in the deep protective blackness of the Void.) And I hide.

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When I wake up, the body’s face is sticky. I am alive. I think. (Gigi sits up. Her lower face is covered with sticky slop like the Angel’s, and her collar is bloody.)

But my voice has been cut. (Gigi puts her hands to her throat. Her throat has been stitched shut; the blood is black on her neck and chest, where the Angel’s oozing blackness was.)

Speaking will be very hard for a long time. (Gigi’s eyes fill with tears as she clutches her throat, tries to speak, but all that comes out is, “Nn. Aa.”)

I don’t understand. What happened? I can remember nothing, only that I am a coward. (“Aa. Aaaa!” Gigi says, crying as she clutches her throat.)

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This page shows a couple very old pencil drawings of Sneak and Gigi. Sneak appears to be roughly sixteen; Gigi has her throat stitched shut.

Text: Gigi’s stitches were a part of her a long time—till 2007, when she accepted her existence. I’d love to tell that story, but that’s for another day.

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This page is entirely text, mostly containing a scan of some old loose-leaf writing.

Caption: We went digging through our records, and found this in our old spiral, from spring/summer 2004.

“It’s okay to love Grampa.” My mom says as we wait for Aunt Lois’s giant Ford Explorer.

I’m silent. When she talks about That, I get terrified but can’t move. I want to cry, but it’s much hard to stifle my hysterical urge for laughter. I feel dizzy, faint, dislocated.

“It’s okay to love him.” My mom repeats. “He had some problems when he was young—but he’s an old man now. He’s okay now.”

She has forgiven him. She loves Grampa. She visits him often, speaks of him fondly.

But he and—and him—caused her so much pain. How can I—what’m I supposed to feel? Love? Outrage? Sadness? Definitely not fear. Grampa has only one kidney, and his heart is controlled with a pacemaker. He can’t walk a block. I’m healthy, and with my brother’s borrowed words “I’m deadly for short-distance running.” But fear is what I feel. I slipped a Swiss Army knife into Miguel’s (my beat up, torn, ragged leather jacket’s) pocket, even though I know the most I’ll need it for is cutting open Advil packets.

My mom says it’s okay to love him. But how? My closest relatives, ones I loved, doing That. It’s wrong. Horribly intrinsically wrong. It makes no sense. It’s terrifying. How can my mom forgive? How can she do it?

But perhaps, most terrifyingly of all, I had no idea. I was as clueless as a lobotomized Holmes. And that’s what makes me shriek with laughter and tears at night. Because… which should I do?

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Back to comics. M.D., dressed in the same ragged, torn leather jacket she first appeared in, straightens up with a look of realization.

“The knife!” she says, digging into her pocket. She pulls out a Swiss Army knife. “I remember that knife…”

Suddenly, the colors reverse, with black panels and white lines. It shows M.D.’s hand gripping the Swiss Army knife, caught at the wrist by the Grandfather. The caption reads, “…for all the good it did me.”

The Grandfather squeezes. The knife falls from M.D.’s hand as her arm is pinned to the floor. Everything goes black with one last tiny panel of the knife lying forgotten on the floor.

Text: Of course, I doubt I even made it that far. All I know is, I didn’t get to use it, and they found out, because… because…

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Snap back to the present and white panels. M.D. is on her knees and the Swiss Army knife is on the floor by her hand. Above her head are the words, I made things worse.

The words appear again: I made. Things. WORSE. M.D.’s face is of one dawning realization. The panel background is darkening.

Then she slams her fists down and rages, “I HAD ONE JOB: SOLVE PROBLEMS. And I blew it! I fucking blew it! I COULDN’T EVEN DIE USEFULLY!”

She clutches her head and starts to shake. The panel’s lines are getting rough and jagged and the background has gone completely black, leaking onto the words “I solve problems I solve problems I solve problems I solve problems I solve I solve I solve I solve”

the handwriting is barely decipherable; M.D.’s hand goes down on the knife lying on the floor. “I SOLVE PROBLEMS”

The hand grips the knife, snaps out the blade. The panel’s lines, background, and writing snap into whiteness and clarity: “And the problem is me.”

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A huge spread of an abstract blackness with a white expanse, covered in black slashes. Without context, it wouldn’t be at all clear what it is.

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It is March 2004, and they are putting the fear of God in me. (Gigi is on her back, crying, flailing at Lois’s hand around her throat.)

Because M.D. fought back. They fear she’ll tell. (Gigi’s view of Lois’s featureless gray face above her.)

They choke me to keep in line. They are boss. (The Grandfather’s hands, opening his jeans.)

I am so tired. (Gigi stops fighting. She closes her eyes. The panel background is going black.)

ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum (Blank black panel, with nothing but a small white heart in the middle.)

Is this how it ends? With her hand on my throat and his penis in my mouth? Is this all there is? (Black blank panel.)

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At the bottom, M.D. draws herself on her knees, bloody forearms bandaged, crying into her hands. “I’m sorry…” she weeps, the writing and bubble shaky. “I’m so fucking sorry…”

Gigi, in her own scribbly kindergarten style, stands next to her, patting her shoulder. She’s crying too. “They are the ones who should be sorry,” she says. All around them is a blank white expanse.

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Binding of Isaac

I’ve been playing a lot of a game called ‘the Binding of Isaac.’ (A logo from the game, showing a weeping horned skull.)

You play a brutalized child, hiding in the basement from his mom. (Isaac, a bald, cartoonish figure crying in a fetal ball, lies beneath a trap door.)

Your mom plans to kill you. Your only weapon is your tears. (Reflected in Isaac’s tearful eye is his mother, a behemoth with unhinged expression, curly hair, spotted dress, and a knife in her hand.)

To grow stronger, you become monstrous. You hurt yourself… (Isaac now wields a wooden spoon, and his face is covered with blood and scratches.)

…take drugs… (A beaming Isaac holds a spread of pills, shots, and mushrooms over his head.)

…and find things to make yourself cry more. (Isaac clutches the head of a dead cat and weeps.) Anything to survive.

Sometimes, the Devil will show up, offer you deals. (A large black-winged Bahomet statue, also from the game.)

God also shows up, but the Devil’s more reliable. (A similar statue, but this one of a white winged faceless angel.)

Sometimes you beat the game, only to kill yourself. (Isaac hangs himself.) It’s a surprisingly apt metaphor for what it’s really like.

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Friday night: LB is talking on the phone with their brother, petting roomie’s lazy cat. Their hair has gone long and shaggy, desperately in need of a haircut. Rogan is fronting, smiling.

Then Bro says, “Hey, Mom called me in tears Tuesday. They follow you online. I’m not calling you a liar, but…”

Rogan rubs his eyes as Bro continues, “Look, Mom & Dad’ve been real good to us. I’ve been asked not to talk to any lawyers. I hope to god you’re using creative license, ‘cause there’s no way they raped you…”

Rogan looks confused and annoyed. “The hell? They never raped me!” he says, even as his thought bubble reads, “Pleasebetrue pleasebetrue pleasebetrue.” “Where’d they think—“

“Really?” Bro asks, as our roommate’s cat paws Rogan’s leg for attention.

Bro continues, “You don’t remember dates. You… you have trouble. I’m just saying. I want to be neutral. I don’t want to read your book, or hear about what happened. Just don’t say anything you can’t take back.”

LB’s vessel stands, tiny and disconsolate in the vastness of their panel, lost in their own thoughts as the cat meows for attention. The caption reads, “Then I realized the game was rigged. I couldn’t argue my case without going into detail, which my brother didn’t want. I couldn’t win. But I could choose not to play.”

LB’s vessel bends, pets the purring cat, talks on the phone but there’s no speech bubble. Caption: “I apologized to him for getting pulled in. Assured him I wouldn’t discuss it unless he wanted to.”

LB continues petting the cat and talking, a reassuring expression on their face. Caption: “Let him vent about the stress of it. How sad Mom was. When he was done, we talked about video games.”

“Then I went to bed and felt like a cruel, delusional, attention-seeking liar.” (LB in their room, curled up in bed. Around them are their windows, art, a lamp, and a trashcan.) “But I didn’t cry.

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LB’s phone rings in their hand, vibrating. A thought bubble, attributed to Miranda reads, “Well, we expected this… let’s get this over with…”

LB picks up the phone. Rogan is fronting; he drew the short straw. With a nervous smile, he says, “Granny, hi! How’s your health?” She replies, “Oh, fine, clean bill of health…”

Then she says, “So, I heard through the grapevine you’re accusing my only son of abuse,” and Rogan’s smile becomes downright queasy as sweat breaks out on his face.

Scene break: we are now looking at LB’s therapist’s door, closed for a session. “So, how did it go?” he asks.

Rogan, in his own guise, hunches on the couch and rubs his eyes with frustration, his glasses hanging from his collar. “Ehngh,” he says. “Fine, I guess. Said my main issue was Lois ‘n the grandfather. Just…”

“Have you considered sending the book to them?” The therapists asks off-panel.

M.D. pops into existence on the couch next to Rogan and grins. “Oh man, that’d be hilarious!”

She disappears and Rogan polishes his glasses viciously. “They already see it as an attack,” he says. “I don’t want to make things worse.”

The panel lines and background fade, leaving Rogan just sitting there, sad and tired with his glasses in his hands. For just a moment, he is so tired of this.

Then he puts on his glasses, obscuring his eyes. “It can always get worse,” he says.

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Rogan and Mac are taking a nice long walk around the local pond, full of trees, water, and stone ledge. Mac has his hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Actually, I don’t think it’s a half-bad idea,” he says.

“Hon, they’re playing you,” Mac says. “Counting on you not making a scene. But they started this. You kept the comic anonymous. They’re the ones making it about them. You didn’t even want them to know about it. They stalked your blog for it.”

Rogan seems to be thinking hard about what Mac’s saying, though he doesn’t like it. Mac continues, “You pull your punches, because they’re your family, in blood if nothing else. But I don’t think they’ll do the same for you, baby.” His expression is sympathetic, but also firm.

Zoom-in on Rogan’s tired, saddened face as Mac continues off-panel, “You’re going to have to deal with them, whether you like it or not.”

They sit on a park bench together, watching the ducks in the pond, framed by trees. Rogan leans into Mac’s shoulder. Mac smiles at him and says, “Never could do things the easy way, could you, boo?”

Rogan replies, “Ugh. Next time, I’ll make a comic about kitten unicorns in space.”

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A full-page breather spread of a beautiful garden, the local Arboretum. It is beautiful, calm, and still, with only one tiny figure sitting on a low stone wall. There are trees, bushes, pebbly paths. However painful and hard life gets, the world moves on.

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Miranda is working at LB’s desk and computer, digging up paperwork for Social Security when she receives an email from Dad. Her expression is conflicted.

Zoom out—she’s now a small silhouette at the desk and computer. The email has the subject line “Don’t understand” and the body text, “I spent much of my life trying to give you a good life. So, why do you hate me? etc. etc. etc. sad panda”

The rest of the page is taken up with a small doodle of Rogan sitting on a stool, hand in his lap, as he says, “In some ways, our father has been the hardest to understand.

“Mom’s easy. She’s never dealt with her own victimizations. Ours reminds her of hers, and she can’t deal with it, so she pushes it away.

“But Dad apparently really believes everything was great, until his firstborn cracked and suddenly started hating him, somehow.

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The Research Part

Rogan stands in a room, with window and ancient mammoth air conditioner visible behind them. There is also a bashed up radiator, with the aside "Hi, Agent Radiator!" (A reference to Cracks of Sunshine.)

Rogan: The whole time I've been making this book, I've wondered: IS THIS REAL? Not the library I'm drawing this in; that's obviously real...

Rogan is now assending a spiral staircase, with a twirly wooden banister. He's only visible from the hips down.

Rogan: ...but the rest of it: the rape, the cover-up, Lois, the memories. How could we forget? And for so long? Did we make it up?

He is now at a bookshelf, going through books, with a slab under his arm and varying little sketches of things illustrating what he's investigated.

Rogan: So, like a good nerd, I did some research: academic articles, histories of incest, MPD/DID, memory research, and the backlash against all of the above. Personal/family records--journals, photos, questioning relatives, art and stories we did then. Here’s what I learned:”

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Caption: This research became way more hardcore than anticipated. Thus, bibliography. (See last page)

A picture of a woman talking to a stereotypical mustachioed, pipe-smoking shrink.

Caption: Okay, so incest, rape, and child sexual abuse came to public attention with second wave feminism in the 1970s.

Caption: But traumatic amnesia and recovered memory was studied prior, with World War I and II veterans.

The man is now in army clothes, wielding a gun, a haggard look on his face. The image is fragmented puzzle pieces, with blackness filling the gaps.

Caption: In a significant minority of cases, there was at least some memory loss.

Caption: This wasn't really controversial. Incest is private and secret; war's not.

The veteran gives the finger to someone off-panel saying, "Maybe you made up the war, so as not to take control of your life."

Now it's the woman giving the finger to someone off-panel saying, "Maybe you made it up.

Picture of our cell-phone, taking an incoming call. Someone is saying, "I'm not calling you a liar, but..."

A picture of a newspaper with the headline "All McMartin Suspects Acquitted." Underneath are the lines, '"Massive clusterfuck" everyone agrees' and "Do we care too much?"

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Caption: ...and you get the backlash. The National Center for Reasons and Justice, Witchhunt [sic], and...

The next panel has a picture of the book 'Sybil Exposed,' written by Debbie Nathan, a member of the National Center for Truth and Justice.

A new book: "Witness for the Defense," by False Memory Syndrome Foundation member, Elizabeth Loftus.

* There are hundreds (or thousands) of falsely accused people in prison on a child's word.

Rogan holding a book, leaning away with a horrified expression, saying, "The FUCK?"

Caption: But False Memory Syndrome had no criteria, no studies, and was determined solely by the accused.

A woman, labeled 'Jenny Freyd, PhD,' says, "Dad, you molested me," to the dude, labeled 'Peter Freyd, founder of the FMSF.' He cries, "NEVER!" (There is also a footnote saying that the Freyds are not actually drawn as they appear.)

Peter Freyd waves his arms and declares, "And to prove it, I'll create an entire foundation to bash you, harass you at work, and never leave you be! So THERE!"

Caption: And he's admitted to being a 'kept boy' at nine, with alcoholic blackouts as an adult.

Peter Freyd puts his hands on his hips and declares, "It wasn't abuse! I'm proud!"

Caption: That HE might have false memories (or lack thereof) isn't acknowledged.

Caption: The FMSF were a failure, scientifically, but they were a political success.

A mouse runs on a wheel posed above a conveyer belt which pumps out scientific looking papers. The entire device is labeled 'spin machine.'

A figure in a motor board and college gown goes, "Wait, but--" but Peter Freyd interrupts, "Psh, don't listen to him! WE'RE just like you!"

A figure reads a newspaper with a partially visible headline, 'Rape of two,' and wipes sweat off their brow with a sigh of relief and the words, "Phew! Thank god it's not real! I'd have to CARE!"

Debbie Nathan's book now has the added note, "supports Father Shanley, admitted and convicted child molester, thinks child porn laws too strict." Elizabeth Loftus's book now has the note, "avoided ethics investigation by resigning."

Rogan is now his current, adult self, and he puts the book down, and asks, "Is there any corroborated case of recovered memories being true?"

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A picture of a computer screen, at Brown University's Recovered Memory Project website.

Caption: Studies are still limited, but seem to imply that recovered and contiguous memory are equally fallible.

A person stands, thinking hard, looking perplexed. Two thought bubbles are above their head, one of a dog, the other of a cat.

The person now stands in front of a framed picture of them with a white horse. They smack themselves in the forehead and go, "D'oy!"

The figure looks confused again, and has a speech bubble with a picture of a horse, and many question marks.

The figure smiles. Their speech bubble now has a picture of a snake and an exclamation point.

A woman with braided hair and a long road touches the figure, describing a happy heart-filled ride on a unicorn, while the figure listens with rapt attention.

The woman is now a masked figure, and the figure it's touching is now LB. Its speech bubble describes and idyllic childhood with two loving parents.

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Caption: That the old man attacked kids, there's no question. Both parents and granny corroborated on these victims.

An arrow points to faces labeled 'Mom' and 'Uncle J.' There's also a picture of a journal, open to the page of being informed of the grandfather's predilections.

Caption: Ditto the Pheonix trip and the sleeping together. Granny knew about that.

A picture of LB's old DeviantArt account blog, with an entry up entitled 'In Phoenix All Week.'

A picture of a car pulled up to a driveway late at night. A hand is pressed against the window.

Back to Rogan in the library, a book in his hands. "The thing is," he says, "I don't WANT it to be true. I WANT the memories to be false."

Caption: If they were, all I'd have to do is stop being crazy, and we could be a happy family.

Gigi stands with stitches in her throat, in front of a tombstone labeled 'Here lies M.D.'

Caption: M.D.'s death. Gigi's stitches. How we became multi. We never understood why.

The puzzles is full, and has a similar resemblance to the happy family photo of earlier, only the child now has head bowed and shoulders slumped with defeat. She does not look happy. Above the tableau hovers a ghostly image of the grandfather, face blacked out and wearing a crown.

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Things you’re intended to mistreat scared the shit out of us as kids. (Still do.) (Tiny Erin hides behind the couch, whimpering as a Stretch Armstrong commercial comes on TV. For those of you who weren’t 90s kids, Stretch Armstrong was a toy man that you could twist, stretch, and tie in knots. Apparently it wasn’t uncommon for kids to rip him apart to see how he worked.)

It wasn’t the toy itself, just what you were expected to do with it. (Picture of another toy intended for abuse: an inflatable punching bag with a smiling clown face at the top and a bulls-eye on the chest.)

We couldn’t explain why we wanted to ‘save’ those toys. (Little Erin, in her skorts, holds a stuffed doll, an alarmed look at someone off-panel explains, “It’s a voodoo doll. You stick pins in it for folks you hate!” Obviously, a voodoo doll is not a toy, but explain that to a kid.)

(Erin hugs the voodoo doll to her chest and with a determined look, thinks “I will play with it gently and never hurt it, ever.”)

We never told anyone this. We were already ‘sensitive;’ no need to add to our rep. (One of our parents kneels next to a weeping, inconsolable Erin, explaining, “Honey, Barney growing up is funny,” only for Erin to wail, “NOOOO!”)

We felt like freaks, empathizing with inanimate objects. (Erin holds up the voodoo doll and looks at it sadly, as though wondering why its lot in life so to be stabbed and pricked.)

Of course, now I know why we did that. (Erin hugs the voodoo doll as though to comfort and reassure it that she will never hurt it.)

Grampa never looked us in the face or talked to us, just at us, during rape. (The Grandfather grabs little Erin’s arm and yanks, ignoring her look of total despair and betrayal.)

We wanted to save dolls. (A voodoo doll with eyes and mouth made of tiny X stitches and a little sewn heart. It has yarn hair in the same style as Erin.) The doll was us.

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Human Voodoo Doll!

(The rest of the page is taken up with a more realistic, detailed voodoo doll like the one on the previous page, only with Erin’s realistic face and hair, rather than yarn and stitches. Her little cloth heart has pins shoved into it and is bleeding down her cloth chest; other pins are rammed into her throat, right forearm (the one M.D. cut earlier in the story), and three are jammed into her groined. She is smiling in a terrified way, and saying, “I… I love you…” Arrows point out her various features…

There’s also a “lifetime warranty against damage, civil and criminal charges, and reputational inconvenience!”

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The page is blank except for an enormous black brushstrokes girl, standing slumped, with her long hair covering her face.

Text (growing increasingly awkward and disjoined as it continues): There is something in my head.

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Back Cover

M.D. sits with bandaged arm, leaning into Rogan who has a concerned arm around her. “Welp, I fucked that up,” she says.

Close-up on her face, which shows circles under her eyes, exhaustion and sadness. “But you know something?”

She presses her face into Rogan’s shoulder. “I’m really glad I’m here.” Rogan smiles sadly at her.

All In The Family, part 3: Doll Girl and EO

Cover

A big ominous black figure stands with a clenched fist to the right foreground. In the center background M.D. stands, calm and balanced, holding a cracked white smiley-face mask in her hand. She’s wearing shorts, big black boots, and a death’s head T-shirt. Her legs are hairy.

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A family photo from early 1993, showing a very young Erin and Bro. Erin wears a black turtleneck and pink dress; Bro wears a collared shirt and suit jacket. His face has been cut out with a dashed line, leaving nothing but vacant whiteness.

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Rogan is standing in a white panel when suddenly words appear about his head, gradually growing larger: “huuu… hauuuu… HAAAA”

The words bleed into the next panel, becoming outright howling as Rogan covers his ears. The background darkens to gray.

The howling ratchets back to sobbing, and the background morphs into Void swirls. Rogan drops his ears with a look of realization.

He turns around, and deep in the Void is a little girl in a black turtleneck, a pink dress, and Mary Janes. She’s sobbing into her hands, and when she raises her hand to wipe her eyes, her face is blacked out.

Rogan kneels and offers her a little stuffed bear, and she goes quiet. Even with Rogan on his knees, she only comes up to his shoulder; she’s tiny.

She takes the bear, and enormous white ghostly eyes appear on her face as she cuddles and pets the bear.

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This page is a full-page, full-size drawing of the little yellow bear. It’s quite small, maybe the size of an adult’s full-spread hand, and appears to maybe be a knock-off Care Bear, with a little strawberry embroidered on its white tummy. Its little arms and legs are outspread as if in request for a hug. It has shiny button eyes and nose, a ragged little red tongue, and is wearing a battered, tarnished silver bracelet with little heart charms as a necklace. It seems to be smiling.

Caption: Yellow Bear was our cherished toy of childhood, one of the few we kept. He was the only toy we had left from Doll Girl’s time, the only one I could think to give her, but it calmed her down right away…

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Doll Girl continues looking at the bear, and in thought bubbles, her story unfolds…

The Grandfather, an enormous man with blacked-out face and a shining crown kneels in front of Doll Girl, who holds Yellow Bear. “You and I are going to play a game,” he says.

Doll Girl clutches Yellow Bear to her chest and says, “No. I don’t want to play.”

Then he snatches Yellow Bear. “Maybe Yellow Bear will play for me,” he says.

She jumps up and tries to get her bear back, but the Grandfather is so much taller, all he has to do is hold up the toy and she can’t reach it. “Give him back, Grampa!” She says. “Give me back my bear!”

Zoom in on the Grandfather’s big hand, squeezing tight around Yellow Bear, its little head extending from his fist. “You should share your toys,” he says. “I want to play too.”

Zoom in on the Grandfather’s featureless void of a face. “I want to play with you,” he says. “Play with me.”

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But Doll Girl has had enough. She pumps her pudgy little fists and screams, “No! I don’t want to play!” The lettering gets bigger and bigger, and an enormous white mouth appears on her little black face as she starts to howl. “I DON’T WANNA PLAAAAAAYAAAAAA”

The Grandfather is apparently completely unprepared for a tiny child’s meltdown. He just stands there awkwardly with Yellow Bear, going, “Um.”

But Doll Girl is having none of it. She continues banshee wailing until our mother comes into the room, a vague black figure wearing a white smiley-face mask. “What on earth is going on? Erin?”

The Grandfather spreads his hands in innocence, still holding Yellow Bear. “Search me.”

Doll Girl is in full tiny hysteria, but manages to get out, “Muh… my bear…”

Our mother puts her hands on Doll Girl’s shoulders. “Oh, Pops, give her back her bear.”

The Grandfather bends over, gives the bear back. “We’ll play later,” he says. “After your birthday party. Okay?”

Doll Girl takes her bear back, clutches it to her chest. Her expression, what little can be seen with her huge ghostly eyes, is deeply suspicious. She doesn’t know what’s going on, only that something is wrong.

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Back in November, when we told Mom about the incest, she asked us… (Close-up of LB’s cell phone, receiving a call from Mom. A speech bubble from it says, “Did Dad do anything?”)

She meant our Dad. We remembered it, since it seemed so random… (LB on the phone, with buzzed short hair, looking perplexed. “Noooo…” they say.)

…but it didn’t seem important, what with all the other stuff. (Zoom out, the panel graying, as LB continues talking on the phone, but their speech bubble is blank, irrelevant.)

But then, in June… (Close-up of LB’s cell phone. This time it’s Granny calling. “Just call him for Father’s Day,” she begs. “You’re breaking his heart—and mine!”)

“But why?” she cries. “He didn’t do anything. He didn’t rape you, right?”

LB transforms into Rogan. “First Mom, then Bro, now this!” he thinks. “Why does everyone keep asking? What does Dad have to do with this? It’s not like he…”

Zoom-out, until he’s a tiny black figure in a panel. From the phone, a speech bubble says, “He never did anything to you, did he?”

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Snap back to Rogan’s face. He gets it. Suddenly he knows exactly why everyone is asking, why everyone is begging to know, why everyone has this one idea in their head. “…at this time, I do not recall him ever raping me,” he says very carefully.

“There, you see?” Granny says cheerfully. “Just one call. He’s a sensitive man, even if it doesn’t show?”

She prattles on while Rogan paces and tears at his hair, in a complete panic: “Remember how he’d bike to see you at college? How many fathers do that? I’m sure if he knew…”

Even in his mounting horror, that gets Rogan. “He knows, Granny!” he snaps. “He stalks my blog and sends me passive-aggressive email about it! HE FUCKING KNOWS!”

“Yes, but that’s so public! Just one call, one private call; you’ll work this out…”

Rogan realizes he’s been baited. This has never been about him, about his history. It’s all about getting him back into the family. He hooks his glasses onto his collar, rubs his eyes as Granny continues, “What if he died of a heart attack tomorrow? Then how would you feel?”

It’s the wrong move. Rogan snaps, “A lot of my pals are suicide risks, Granny. I’m used to the idea of people I love dying!”

Scene cut. Rogan is sitting at his desk, expression anxious and distressed, glasses hanging on his collar, staring into the distance. A thought bubble above his head contains a first place trophy for the worst human ever award.

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M.D. sticks her head into the panel. She sees Rogan fretting and clears her throat.

M.D. puts her hands on her hips, starts looking irritated. “I could fight you,” she says.

M.D. stands above Rogan, glaring at him, fists clenched. Thanks to the magical power of comics, she’s glaring darkness and lightning, but Rogan stays in his chair, expression calm, and it all fizzles out.

Then M.D.’s eyes go wide. “Wait a sec! The system has rules for this, don’t they.”

M.D. realizes her in. Her grin is sadistic. “And I haven’t picked a jurisdiction yet! HAVE I,” she says.

They both know the answer to this question, but Rogan is a stickler for rules and they both know that too. “No,” he says coldly. “You haven’t.”

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Miranda’s back! “Welcome to the exciting world of headspace politics!” she says.

Every multiple system needs government of some kind to run. (Sneak and Gigi are in the grocery store. Sneak wants an apple. Gigi wants a banana.)

Ours makes all major decisions through unanimous consensus. (Sneak and Gigi are arguing about what fruit to get. Each are getting heated in their passionate defenses of their favored foodstuff.)

Of course, sometimes this just isn’t practical. (The LB vessel can’t move until things are reconciled. So they just stand there with a vacant expression and a thought bubble with a flying toaster in it while someone off-panel asks, “…you gonna get fruit? No? Then move!”)

Thus: jurisdiction. (Mac appears in jeans and a flowing white blouse. His hair is down to his shoulders now. “Food’s mine,” he says. “Let’s get both!” Sneak and Gigi both cheer.)

If you have jurisdiction, you can break locks; your word goes. (LB goes with their shopping cart, which now contains both apples and bananas, to the delight and relief of all.)

All of us had various jurisdictions… (Little system member faces next to little pictorial representations of their jurisdictions. Mac’s is food, represented by an apple; Miranda’s is diplomacy, represented by shaking hands; Gigi’s is danger, represented by a caution sign, and Rogan’s is money, shown by a dollar sign.)

…except M.D., who died before the rules were set up. (M.D.’s face, surrounded by question marks.)

But now, she saw one she wanted, and the discussion moved to text.* (The picture of the jurisdiction M.D. wants: our parents in their mask people forms, arms around each other.)

* Footnote: We were on transit, and since we couldn’t talk aloud, we wrote for clarity.

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This page and the next couple are purely text-only pages, copied from our journals. Normally, our minutes are color-coded, with each system member writing in a different color, but this is a black and white book, so… tags!

Mir: M.D. has called a full-system meeting to discuss taking jurisdiction re: the parents. Her argument is that Rogan’s stonewall tactic isn’t working, and since he never called for a united system decision regarding the last email/calls, he has to argue his case as well. Thus far, I have argued that I have superior jurisdiction (diplomacy) and therefore have the right to delegate as I wish to her, with my oversight. M.D. has agreed to this.

Rogan: Look, you guys have all the reason to do this, but I think it’s a bad idea. They’ll never leave us alone.

M.D.: They already have, dude. Me, Mir, and Mac have already voted in my favor. Regardless, what can they do? Push Granny and [Bro] at us? They already have! Send a lawyer? No case. Make a bash site? Oh no, I’m shaking.

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M.D.: Yeah, I’ll bet that’s what Europe thought when Hitler started moving in. I’m not being their roll-over anymore.

In a way, it’s my fault they’re harassing us. I called them—or got you to, anyway. So it should be my job to deal with the consequences.

M.D.: We can always go back to your strategy if mine fails. We’ve gone public, dude. There’s no turning back.

I know they’ve done terrible things. I know. But if you promise not to flame them, I’ll vote for you.

Sneak: Saying things purely to upset or hurt them. You—you can be critical. You can be mad. But you need to have more reason to speak to them than that, or they’ll just manipulate us again. When we’re furious we make mistakes that—that could really hurt us.

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Sneak: They’ve done bad things, and that’s not okay. But that doesn’t give us free reign to treat them as badly as we want. We don’t have to be nice, but we must do right.

M.D.: That’s cool. I’ve already got majority, since Falcon doesn’t count. What’s your deal, Rogan? You afraid we’ll look bad?

M.D.: You afraid more of your so-called friends will treat you like shit about it?

M.D.: Then what is your fucking deal? I’ve given tons of reasons for my plan, and the best you’ve come up with is some vague, “it could get worse,” when it already has.

I think Dad knows something, and we won’t squeeze it out of him by ignoring him. Give me one good, concrete reason to.

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Rogan: I’m afraid of them. Afraid they’ll fuck with my head again and get me back. Afraid they’ll build a relationship with us again until we’re back to being their smiling robot golem child again. Okay? Get it? That’s fucking why.

M.D.: See, now that’s actually a reason. It’s wrong but not total bullshit.

The page reverts to comics, showing the full system meeting. Falcon is in the background, being a silent moderator in case things get out of hand. Rogan has his face in his hands, and both Sneak and Mac are hugging and comforting him, while Miranda and Gigi look on in concern. M.D. has her arms crossed and is looking away.

M.D., pressing her advantage, adds, “Yeah! We won’t let you be a moron! We’ll keep you safe, totally!”

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Full-page spread of M.D.’s face. She’s grinning and flames dance in her eyes and in the background.

“Then it’s settled,” she says. “They’re gonna regret not killing me properly.”

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Texts with Mom

The page is taken up entirely with the subject, with a small sketch of M.D. in the bottom right, frantically mashing phone buttons with both thumbs. Her expression is calm and not sardonic; she’s working to keep her head cool for this. Mom’s texts are shown in black bubbles with white text; M.D.’s are shown in white bubbles with black text.

M.D.: 6/30/15 9:26 AM: Don’t be forgetful. Lois raped me too and she has constant access to kids. You said you would call [AUNT B]. Do something about it.

M.D.: 6/30/15 9:27 AM: Also, I have a question. When I told you about this, you asked if dad had attacked me. What midd [sic] you ask that?

Mom: 6/30/15 4:17 PM [note the time]: I did speak to [AUNT B]. I never asked if [DAD] did anything to you. I will never ever believe that he did.

Mom: 7/2/15 3:15 PM: [SHE] does not believe anything happen with Lois. I am willing to communicate with you but I am not willing to be an information gatherer. I have no interest in helping you pursue a vendetta against [MY] family.

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Email With Dad

This page has the same format as the previous one, with email conversations taking up most of the page, with a little sketch of M.D. in the bottom right hunched over our desk, frantically typing at her laptop, with the same cool expression.

Dad to me, 9:47 PM Jun 10: I spent much of my life trying to give you a good life. So, why do you hate me? I would have never predicted our current (lack of) relationship. I always thought that we communicated well. I don’t get it at all.

Dad to me, 7:12 PM Jun 29: Uh, because you don’t communicate with me? Why don’t you give me a call some time? I’m okay.

Dad to me, 4:40 PM Jun 30: I should have asked what “this” referred to. In my response, “this” referred to lack of communication. Given what you’ve texted Mom, I worry that it might mean something more sinister to you.

I ask that you be very sure before you make accusations. Judging from some of your posts about “discovered memories”, I worry that you are a creating a horrible make-believe world. I have to say that I never saw any indications that terrible things were happening to Erin when she was living with us. I may be unobservant, but I don’t think that I’m that unobservant.

Given that you lived with me for over 18 years, you should know both in your heart and in your mind that I am a basically honest, trustworthy, and good man. You should talk to me.

M.D. to Dad, 1:50 PM Jul 10: If you forgot about Jeff, then you ARE that unobservant.

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Back to comics! M.D. strikes a wise, pontificating posture. “‘It’s not that you got raped;’” she opines, “‘you just have a BAD ATTITUDE!’”

Rogan is laughing so hard he’s actually having to wipe away tears. “Man, I went to the cops about Jeff in ’07!” He says. “I broke down telling Dad about it! He hugged me!”

Now M.D.’s laughing. She and Rogan turn to each other, spread their hands, and say in unison, “And he forgot! BWA-HAH-HA!”

They calm down and Rogan puts his glasses back on. “Hoo, man, this family. You gotta laugh or cry,” he says.

M.D. snickers. “Hey Rogan. Bet you he claims bringing Jeff up hurts him, boohoohoo.”

Rogan gets a competitive gleam in his eye. “Bet you he ignores it entirely, goes on a tangent!”

And sure enough, on July 12^th, Dad sends us a new email from a new email address, new thread, new subject line: “your filters suck.” The body of the email, copied here, reads…

“Everybody filters the info they receive. ‘Close-minded’ people restrict information to mostly those things that agree with what they already feel, and ignore or discount conflicting information. As a consequence, they find what they are looking for. If you spend all your time trying to establish that your life is/was crummy, I’m sure you could. However, it’s self-defeating. If you spent your time trying to establish that your life is/was good, I’m sure you could.”

In the corner, a little doodle of M.D. spreads her hands and wails, “Noooo!” while a smug doodle of Rogan says, “Pay up.”

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Doll Girl wasn’t the only apparition around. Once she got Yellow Bear, she calmed down. (Doll Girl holds Yellow Bear.)

We also had this. (A vague gray figure, thin and tall but otherwise completely indeterminate in gender and age.)

Its name was Escape Object, and it first appeared in a nightmare. (Our new journal, a black book with a red heart and a banner reading “Love Rocks.”)

The rest of the page is taken up with a scan from our dream journal on 6/21 at 3:44 AM. The handwriting is scrawling and the sketch haphazard, on account of the hour and the darkness of our room. The text reads “Would you like to return with an escape item?” and there’s then a rough sketch of what looks to be a white doorway or a card with Escape Object on it.

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…Escape Object was silent and unemotive. (Escape Object patiently lurks, looming over Mac and Rogan who were clearly hoping to have sex without getting gatecrashed. A deeply annoyed Rogan snarls as it, “Goddammit, AGAIN?!”)

Its shtick was our stomach, of all things. (Escape Object now has a diagram of its digestive tract, with esophagus, stomach, and intestines showing up in white.)

It inflicted gut pain… (Rogan curled in a tight ball of misery in bed, unable to uncurl or stop shaking)

…and diarrhea. (Mac knocks on the bathroom door. “You okay?” he asks. From inside, Rogan replies, “Blurgh…”)

I didn’t go to a doctor. This was old hat to me. (A little diagram of LB, with their shaggy long hair and cargo shorts, hunched over against the little notes around them: “hysteric,” “psychosomatic,” “somatoform disorder,” “hyperchondriac,” “malingerer,” “WASTE OF TIME!”)

We had so much gut problems as kids, we thought it was normal. (A young LB chows down on pizza, the worst contender, thinking to themselves, “Bathroom in half an hour!”)

But the one image EO had coughed up had left me retching and choking. (A hazy image of Escape Object looming over a tiny figure curled up in a fetal ball on the floor of what appears to be a walk-in closet.)

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Rogan is in bed, and Escape Object appears, patiently standing over him. Mac, off-panel, asks, “It’s back, isn’t it?”

Rogan, bleary with exhaustion, sits up. “Look, what happened to you wasn’t right,” he says, “but I’m in pain. Could…”

An enormous gurgle emanates from Rogan’s gut. Blinking, he straightens, pats his stomach, clearly suddenly pain-free. “Wow. Uh, okay, thanks. That’s a lot better.”

Escape Object’s response is to pop out of existence with a blast of air, flash of light, and a “ka-POWF!”

Rogan, too exhausted to care about anything, says, “Thank you for your consideration. G’night!”

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Back to Doll Girl! The page’s panels are entirely made up of thought bubbles, her memories.

It’s her birthday. There’s a chocolate cake, and Lois, the Grandfather, and Uncle J are all singing to her: “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”

Close-up on the Grandfather’s face, unreadable in its censored blackness. “…Happy birthday dear Erin…”

Close-up on Doll Girl’s worried face. She is wearing a festive party hat. “…Happy Birthday to you!”

Someone offers Doll Girl a slice of cake, but she still looks anxious. She narrates, “He smiles at me, the whole party. I don’t like it.”

Scene break. She’s now walking through the bathroom hall, past the sink and towels to the next door to the bathroom proper. “After, I need to go,” she narrates.

The door opens, and the Grandfather is in there. The room is inky black. “Oops!” he says.

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The Grandfather lunges, shutting the door and trapping Doll Girl in the bathroom with him. “Now,” he says, “the game.”

Doll Girl shivers and shakes. She’s still wearing her paper hat. “I don’t want to play,” the narration reads.

The Grandfather ceases speaking in words. His speech bubble shows a question mark and Yellow Bear.

Now he’s pointing downward emphatically, and his speech bubble contains Yellow Bear, a heart, a little girl. “I can’t let him hurt my bear!” Doll Girl narrates.

Close-up on her shivering, terrified face, her little fists close to her mouth. “And I need to go!” she narrates.

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Snap back to the present, and Rogan is comforting Doll Girl with Yellow Bear. Off-panel, a distorted speech bubble appears, filled with jagged bold scribbly handwriting: “BURN”

“Okies!” Sneak comes in to make sure Doll Girl isn’t alone, and Doll Girl smiles up at zer, obviously enamored of zer giant overall-wearing protector. “Big Girl!” she says.

Mac and Rogan race to M.D.’s room, and they open the door to find her a black ghostly figure, thrashing and howling, “BURN BURN BURN BURN” The panel’s outline is shaky and jagged.

Things snap back into clarity, focusing on Mac and Rogan. Mac looks alarmed, but Rogan’s stone-faced. He knows that having an enormous redhaired man with any resemblance to our father at all is not going to improve M.D.’s sanity. “Patrick, sweetheart, I need you to go outside for me,” he says calmly.

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Rogan shuts the door to M.D.’s room, carefully lowers himself and sits cross-legged in front of it. M.D. shakes but does nothing.

Her face is all black, scribbly, flames dancing in her eyes, and when she speaks, the letters are haphazard and messy. “I HATE THEM,” she bellows. “I hate this whole fuckin family and this whole world and wanna burn BURN BURN it all fuckin down and WHY AREN’T YOU ANGRY?”

Cut back to Rogan, eyes hidden from his glasses. “Heh. I am angry,” he says. “I’m fucking furious.”

M.D. looks up, and her lines clarify. She goes from black to dark gray, and speaks in normal letters: “You don’t show it.”

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“And have two loonies raving and frothing at each other?” Rogan says. “No thanks.”

Back to M.D., who’s now medium gray. She listens calmly as Rogan continues, “I can’t afford to be upset right now. I’ll cry in Mac’s arms later, no worries. I used to use my anger to hurt people. I’m never doing that again.”

M.D. looks away, shamefaced. She’s no longer a humanoid sketch, but back to her regular features, and only light gray. “The grandfather’s dead,” she says. “I can’t even kill him.”

M.D. looks up and there are dark circles under her eyes. She’s not a terrifying rage specter anymore; she’s just a tired sad teenager. “No,” she admits, hiding behind her bangs. “Still, though. Still.”

Drained from her outburst, she crawls over to Rogan and flops against his shoulder. He smiles at her and ruffles her hair. “Hey. You just made it through a rage fit without hurting yourself or me. Congratulations.”

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Full-page drawing of 2003-era M.D. Her hair is long and in a ponytail, and she’s wearing her jeans and boots. Her forearms are covered in stained bandages held on with medical tape, her clothes and hair are disheveled, and there’s a feral look in her eyes. She stands in the doorway of a broken-down apartment building with cracks in the walls, smashed mailboxes, stains, and a sign reading “DON’T FEED THE RATS.” Underneath, someone has scrawled on the wall “fuk you I wanna.” The doorway if filled with dark Void glop, crawling across the floor and wrapping around the doorframe, but M.D. doesn’t notice it now anymore than she did in 2001.

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You have to understand, I was a failure, both in the real and imaginary world. (M.D.’s shaking clenched fist; there’s a hospital bracelet around her wrist, and the bandages are just visible.) I was so angry…

…and the only thing that calmed me was pain. (M.D.’s fist now has a Swiss army knife in it.)

As long as I didn’t hurt our body, who cared? (M.D. fidgets with her stained bandages. Her face isn’t visible, just bits of her torso and arms.) It’s not like I was real.

None of it was real. Not me, not my pain… (M.D. curls up sleeping on a battered, stained couch. One arm hangs over the edge; the knife is on the floor.)

…not my anger… (Biff, now an adult man wearing a baseball cap and a leather jacket identical to the one M.D.’s worn throughout the series enters. M.D. doesn’t move.)

…not the world that was my only comfort. (The man takes off his leather jacket and puts it over M.D. like a blanket, with an air that he’s not surprised by her presence and has done this before. Under the jacket, he’s wearing a tank top and a leather armband. Tattoos are visible at his shoulders, but with his shirt it’s not clear what they are.)

I was nothing. (Zoom out, a large panel of M.D. on the couch. She’s in a crappy apartment with plaster peeling off the walls, a box of junk, a folding table, and a cardboard box of junk. There’s a glass door out to the balcony, but the glass is covered in cracks. The couch is the least crappy looking thing in the place. M.D.’s boots are at its side. She and the couch are in gray, rather than black, as though she’s fading away.)

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By the end, no one had much use for me in either world. (M.D. wakes. She looks terrible.)

Except him. I camped out in the story world with him, when reality got too bad. (Biff is cooking something at the stove, back to M.D. A rusting fridge is to his right and he’s reaching for something off-panel to the left.)

He was a godawful role model, thank god. (Close-up on his arm. It’s the one with the armband, and his knuckles are a mess of bruises and scrapes, as though he’s been fighting. In his hand is a bottle of beer. There’s also a counter with salt and pepper shakers and a cup with ladles, spoons, and spatulas jammed in it.)

I’d had enough of good role models. (On the coffee table is another beer, this one a can, and a pack of cigarettes. The surface has rings from drinks on it.)

(M.D. pulls a cigarette. She’s wearing biff’s leather jacket, and he calls from off-panel, “Omelets for breakfast.”)

(M.D. smokes. She looks haggard. “Not hungry.” Off-panel, he responds, “too bad.”)

He was a violent drunken asshole, and I miss him. (Biff’s hand comes down, holding a plate with an omelet. “Shut up and eat,” he says. Despite herself, M.D.’s smiling a little.)

Because at least he gave a shit whether I lived or died. (M.D. holds her cigarette in one hand and puts the plate on her lap as she calls mischievously, “Tastes like shit!” Biff gives her the finger and replies, “Shat in it just for you.” His face still hasn’t been shown properly.)

Which is why when Lois and Grampa were done with me, I went to him. (M.D., even more disheveled and her pants undone, stumbles over. She has a white-eyed hysterical grin and says, “’Eey! A minor incident!” Biff is in the foreground, but his back is mostly turned to the viewer, so his expression isn’t visible.)

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Finally, Biff’s face is visible. He has thick eyebrows, sideburns, and long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, though nowhere near as long as M.D.’s. He doesn’t seem to quite understand what’s happened and grabs M.D. by the shoulders and shakes her, going, “What did you do? Tell me what you fuckin—

The leather jacket slides off M.D.’s shoulder. There’s blood. “I solved problems,” she says quietly.

Biff seems to be in shock and M.D. holds up a cigarette. “Light my cigarette? My hands aren’t working…”

As he frantically tries to get his lighter going with a shaking hand, M.D. says, “Biff, lie to me. Tell me everything will be okay.”

The cigarette falls from her mouth. She’s smiling. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

She’s still smiling, but now she’s crying. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

Darkness is encroaching. Her speech letters are getting sloppy. “It’s all going to end now. I fixed it.”

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Now there are no figures, only shaky panels filled with steadily darkening cross-hatching. “Miss me?” M.D. asks, but she can no longer be seen. Nothing can be seen. It’s all disappearing into the darkness of the Void.

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Text box: At least we now had some context for old art like this. (An ancient drawing, dated 12/14/03, showing M.D. with bloody bandages around her arm, crying. A hand is on her shoulder.)

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Scene-break. Black-backgrounded panels of a man, smiling, his eyes shaded out. He’s speaking, but his speech bubble is blank, and he’s holding a girl with his hands. Her mouth is occupied but hidden. She’s crying.

Rogan wakes up from the dream. His room is dark, Mac is sleeping beside him, and Escape Object is looming in the dark, waiting patiently.

He sits up and starts tearing into Escape Object. “No! You can’t fucking do this to me!”

Rogan is shouting now. “You cocksucking son of a whore, it’s been twelve days! It’s five in the god-fucking morning! THIS ISN’T FUNNY DAMMIT!”

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Rogan’s not shouting anymore. He’s crying, and Mac’s sat up to comfort him. Escape Object just stands there.

“This isn’t funny,” Rogan says. “But it happened. Dad… he attacked you. Killed you. Tell me. Show me…”

Thought bubbles come from Escape Object, become panels with black backgrounds…

Our father is there, no longer the ominous black figure but just an ordinary man wearing a smiley-face mask. He has curly hair, a T-shirt and jeans. He’s shoved his child’s head down, and clearly oral sex is happening, though nothing is visible.

Close-up on the father’s mask. Its expression doesn’t change, of course, but a crack appears down the forehead.

He stomps out, adjusting his jeans, obviously angry, while the child retches. Fortunately, most of her body is hidden by the panel’s edge.

Afterward, she curls up in the walk-in closet she was assaulted in, hides her face in her hands, cries. All around her are clothes, shoes, and a puddle next to her.

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Back to the present day. Rogan’s still crying, but now he’s laughing. “Aha. Hahaha! Oh man…”

While Mac looks on worriedly, Rogan continues, “Y’know, all these memories, all these attacks, and what’s stood out to me is… we tried everything.”

“Doll Girl screamed,” Rogan narrates, and there’s a picture of Doll Girl howling. “Gigi ran and hid.” Gigi flees through her panel, scared and desperate. “M.D. tried to stab our grampa in the fuckin’ face!” M.D. with her ill-fated knife, face contorted with rage.

Back to the present. Tears are rolling down Rogan’s cheeks. “And none of it worked,” he says. “None of it did a damn thing… except you vomiting on Dad’s cock.”

Rogan hides his face in his hands, grins. “Wish you’d lived longer… I could’ve used that trick… haha…”

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Zoom-out. All of Rogan and Mac’s bedroom is visible now, a glass dome with billowy white curtains and potted green plants. Mac and Rogan sit on the bed, Mac comforting Rogan, while Escape Object stands there.

Zoom out. The whole house is visible now, floating in the dark swirls of the Void. “I’m so sorry…”

At the bottom story of the house, a window is lit, a little silhouette. Zoom in on that. “Hmph,” the silhouette says. It’s M.D.

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The page is taken up entirely with M.D. in profile, thoughtful disdain on her face. Her forearm is corrugated with old scar tissue. “Well, no need to talk to Dad anymore,” she says. “Hope our stomach acid burned, you son of a bitch.”

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Doubt

It has been eight days since Escape Object. (Escape Object stands, endlessly silent.)

The nightmares have faded, and the gut pain. (A picture of LB’s room, with bed, AC, fan, and windows.)

I have drawn nothing, written nothing. The words slip like sand through my fingers. (An open sketchbook, surrounded by pencil, pen, and eraser. The page is blank.)

People say that my work is brave and honest. (The caption is contained in a speech bubble, spoken by a person at LB’s con table, covered in zines and comics and magnets while a tired LB sells.)

(LB leans over the table, speaks to the visitor. “But I’m not. I’m plagued by fear and doubt!”)

How could our aunt, who teaches underprivileged kids, do this to us? (A photo of a theme park roller coaster line, but the main figure has been erased and replaced with Lois’s comic guise, a faceless gray curvy woman with curly hair.)

How could our father, who talked science and philosophy with us? (The words become a thought bubble leading down into a photo from 2007 of LB with their father, whose face has been erased and replaced with the traditional smiley-face mask. They are down in the local greenbelt, with a creek, rocks, and trees. LB has their arm around their father, with their own face blacked out with white ghost eyes.)

I feel so uncertain. (The words become a thought bubble leading to a recent photo of LB standing with their arms akimbo behind a table of comics at Boston Comic Con in 2015. Again, their face is blacked out ghost-style.) And maybe, that’s okay.

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Some of the memories are so old, they predate our records and can’t be checked. (A very old studio photo of LB and their little brother as toddlers. Bro’s face has been replaced with blank whiteness, while LB, dressed in a pink dress and black turtleneck, have their face blacked out with white eyes—it’s Doll Girl.)

Others are so devoid of context, we don’t know when they might’ve occurred. (A photo of people riding on a roller coaster. All of the people have been adulterated… Lois is her gray featureless self, and her boyfriend’s face is scribbled out in white. Our mother has her face covered by a smiley-face mask, LB has their face blacked out with white eyes, while Bro has a white, featureless face, and a boy next to him, our ill-fated cousin, has a black scribble over his face.)

In some cases, the only other witness is dead. (A photo of the Grandfather at our mom’s wedding. His face is blacked out, a little white crown drawn floating above his head.)

In others, there’s no chance of getting an answer. (An old studio photo of our parents, arms around each other. Their faces are covered with smiley-face masks, and Mom says, “I never asked you that.”)

In a family where reality is constantly rewritten, doubt is natural. How couldn’t it? (A studio photo of the whole immediate family, faces adulterated so LB’s is blacked out with white eyes, Bro’s is whited out, and our parents have their masks.)

It’s important I test our memories. That’s reason. (A picture of Ibn al-Haytham, father of the scientific method.)

And I can do it respectfully. (Doll Girl cries while a cold-faced Rogan tells her, “Sorry, can’t comfort you til you win your case in court.”)

The memories may not be true, but they’re still here, still need dealing with. (A cartoonish ghost shrieking, “COCKBLOCK FOREVER!”)

So I will do my best to make my peace with doubt, and record it diligently. (A big black question mark.)

Footnote: I hate removing their faces. It’s so dehumanizing. But I don’t know how else to keep them recognizable and anonymous. So I’ll deface us too, to be fair.

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The Summer of ’96

Judging by what it wore, EO would’ve died in ’96. (This is a new drawing of Escape Object; it is still gray and featureless, but instead of the looming, adult silhouette of our father, it’s now a little girl with long blond hair, an Eagles school shirt from 1^st or 2^nd grade, and sunflower skorts from 2^nd grade.)

Dad didn’t pretend what he was doing was fun, loving, or a game, like Grampa. (The Grandfather and Lois stand there, Lois clutching his arm.)

He seemed angry. Like he was punishing us… (A hand shoving down on a girl’s head, though her face isn’t visible. The background is black.)

…or maybe our mother. After all, she was the one who first asked about it. (A confused LB petting a cat, while their mom asks on the phone, “Did Dad do anything to you?”)

But then she rewrote it out of existence, like usual. (M.D. rolls her eyes at the phone in her hands, which reads, “I never asked you that.”)

I wonder what Dad told her in the meantime. (Our mother texts with both hands, while Dad, in a cracked smiley-face mask, stands behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders, speaking in a blank speech bubble.)

That summer, at the age of eight, we were sent to sailing camp, alone. (A wee tiny be-skorted Erin rides astride a cartoony plane that flies from Texas to Dad’s parents in eastern Louisiana, declaring, “I am so grown up! WEEE!”)

We were so excited that we didn’t wonder why Dad didn’t visit his parents. (An ecstatic Erin with a back-pack runs into a pair of wrinkled hands, crying, “Granny! Pop-Pop!”)

Or why Bro didn’t come. (Wee Erin in a swimsuit hops haplessly up and down on the centerboard of a capsized sailboat, trying to right it, but she isn’t heavy enough to really shift its weight. “Un-capsize it!” Someone calls from off-panel. “I’m trying!” Erin calls back.)

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It’s daylight, and Rogan stares up at Mac with shiny, hopeful eyes. “Hey sweetheart, EO and Doll Girl are laid to rest!” He says. “You know what that means…”

Ever the smoothest operator when it comes to flirting, Rogan removes his glasses and looks up hopefully. Mac smiles.

Together, they grin and shout, “THE COCK EMBARGO IS LIFTED!” Thanks to magic headspace shirt-away powers, their shirts vanish! Over their little heads are “zomg” and “yay.”

Rogan kisses down Mac’s neck, then his chest. He gets down on his knees, and Mac starts working at the front of his jeans. They’re smiling at each other, happy, completely unlike Escape Object.

Then there are no panels at all, merely a scene break denoted by a row of happy little black hearts with an exclamation point: after three installments of coitus interruptus, fun is being had!

When the panels cut back in, Rogan is flushed and smiling in bed, eyes closed. He opens them.

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He puts his hands on Mac’s shoulders, and Mac says, “I hate them so much.”

“I knew it’d be bad,” Mac sobs. “I—but this… I didn’t… and it’s only going to get worse. Isn’t it?”

Rogan holds him as Mac says, “It’s been a year, and all I can do is… is be here! It’s not enough. I’m not enough.”

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Most of the page is taken up with a black and white brush drawing of Rogan holding Mac and kissing his forehead.

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How can I describe the feeling of seeing my own agony reflected in my husband? He’d bottled his pain, not wanting to co-opt my experience. Now I held him as it all gushed out.

Afterward, I encouraged Mac to take a break from my shit—have fun, play with Sneak and work out with Falcon, get some rest. He was my husband, not my caretaker. He resisted, but we both knew he needed the time off.

(A drawing from Rogan and Mac’s wedding. Mac’s hair isn’t even down to his shoulders, and Rogan has neither glasses nor beard. They’re dressed in tuxes, and Mac smiles as he leans down to kiss Rogan. Between them is a heart with interlocking wedding rings making an infinity symbol. There’s a date: Nov. 29, ’09.)

page break

Rogan sits at his computer desk; the background contains Gmail filter options for emails from (CENSORED). Currently, the options selected are, “When a message arrives that matches this search, mark it as read and apply the label Toxic Waste.”

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Back Cover

Comic, dated 8/23/2015: Our father, no longer an ominous black figure but an ordinary curly-haired man wearing a much-battered and cracked white smiley-face mask over his features.

All In The Family, part 4: Spiral Eyes

Cover

Biff walks off the left side of the page, his face obscured by his baseball cap and the comic’s spine. At the right, M.D. strains to reach him, but can’t. Below her is Spiral Eyes, a long-haired dark ghost with spiral white eyes, smiling up at her.

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M.D. opens the door to her bedroom. “Hello again, Dad!” she cheerfully declares to a very battered smiley-face hanging on a hook on her door.

She shuts the door and keeps talking to the mask. “You know, I’ve felt pretty good about myself lately! I got you, Mom, and Granny out of our lives, got my info…” She gropes for a chair, pulls it over and sits in it. “For the first time in my lives, I feel like I’m accomplishing shit!”

Zoom-out, showing the emptiness of her dome-shaped room, leaving just her in her little chair, the door, and the mask. Suddenly, her mood sobers.

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“I crunched some numbers, and I don’t think Lois and Grampa axed me alone,” M.D. continues.

“Grampa was in such bad health by then, he needed Lois to do his heavy lifting.” (A picture of the Grandfather, transformed into an anatomical diagram laying out his health problems: a pacemaker in his heart, a cracked bone representing the bone cancer that killed him, the kidney he had removed.)

“Even with her and luck, he can’t’ve got me more than three times that year.” (A calendar showing the dates the Grandfather could’ve attacked us: Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2003, and President’s Day in February of 2004.)

“I was the system tank and I was a wreck before Christmas.” (A very haggard, disheveled looking M.D. lurks unhappily, surrounded by a Christmas tree, wrapped presents, and a soundtrack singing “the most wonderful time of the year.”)

Lurch back to the present. “What would’ve caused that?” she says. “Who’d have the opportunity?”

Dad’s mask, much worse for the wear but still smiling, just looks back at her.

She steeples her fingers, brow furrowed in through. “What did you do to me, Dad? Besides rape? What made you special?”

M.D. gets up, walks out of the room. “I got you out of our life. I’ll get you out of my head too. Just watch.”

page break

M.D. is riding on the subway, which is mostly empty. The windows are a blur of motion.

Suddenly, something catches M.D.’s eye. She looks up, and across the aisle, behind another commuter, there’s a ghost visible through the window. It’s a black armless shade with long hair, big spiral-shaped white eyes, and a manic grin.

M.D. snorts. “Seriously? Old news. I already know I got raped multiple times by ‘trusted’ adults and it sucks. Boohoohoo, blahblahblah, give details or piss off.”

The subway continues on and M.D. continues riding. “Overdramatic needlessly cryptic pile of horseshit,” she grumbles.

page break

M.D. has apparently just finished telling Rogan about what’s happening. Without looking up from the book he’s reading, he tells her, “You know it’s not doing it to annoy you, right?”

Rogan looks up, holds up his book. The page reads “Psych 101: M.D. knows this already.” He says, “Look, you’re trying to get subconscious material. By nature, it can only use symbols.”

“Whatever!” M.D. snarls, shaking her hands. “We already know it’s rape! Why all this rigamarole? Ugh!”

He narrates, “It broke you. Sent you fleeing into an imaginary world. You. The tank.” The panel shows a hazy picture from the previous chapter, M.D. with bloody bandaged forearm, sleeping on Biff’s couch, the knife by her hand on the floor.

Snap back to the present. Rogan continues, “It humiliated you. Left you beyond rage’s protection, alone, afraid.”

M.D. does not appreciate having this pointed out. Her expression is starting to get angrier.

“You hide behind snark and anger to feel strong. Spiral Eyes is about your weakness. Your shame.”

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Rogan and M.D. are taking a walk through the local Arboretum, following a gravel path and stone wall covered in vines and lush plants.

Suddenly M.D. spins. Spiral Eyes is there, done in sloppy brushwork, making it look somewhat ghostly next to the strict black and white line-work of everything else. It’s still grinning.

“Easy,” Rogan says, and they continue walking, with Spiral Eyes following along. “It’s not your enemy. Don’t fight it. Let it come to you.”

Spiral Eyes starts laughing, then screaming, then vanishes into blackness. M.D., looking pained, gasps and says, “Okay. It’s gone.”

She rubs her head, suddenly looking groggy. “But all it did was laugh and scream. Why am I tired?”

“That’s normal,” Rogan says with a smile. “It’ll tell you more next time. Good job.”

page break

Smile. (M.D. turns into her black ghostly form, and the background erupts in flames.)

SmileSmileSmileSMILESMILESMILE (handwriting degenerates, and the ghost turns into Spiral Eyes.)

“There’s a certain purity to that rage, a cleanliness,” Spiral Eyes/M.D. says, long flowing hair in brushwork. The next words appear in white in the hair: “It wipes everything else away.”

“Pain.” (A jagged black scribble, which the words appear on in white.) “Grief, care.” (White letters on black droplet spatter.) “Betrayal.” (Black liquid dripping down the page.)

M.D. appears in her little black ghost form, with white eyes and smile, no hair, just a vague shadow of her living self. The words appear over her head: “All is cleansing fire.”

The ghost, and her smile is reversed, so she seems to be falling. “But I guess at the end, I lost the knack. Because I felt everything they did to me.”

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M.D. is walking home at night, following a gravel path that buttresses a fence. Around her are trees, the moon, shrubs. A streetlight illuminates her from above.

Spiral Eyes suddenly appears behind her. Its darkness overtakes M.D. and she starts to smile and chuckle. “Heh.”

The background becomes completely black, though the spiral eyes and smile remain in it. M.D. starts laughing, increasingly hysterically, until her eyes are filled with tears and the letters are jagged and rough. “Aha. Hahaha! HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

She continues walking, laughing maniacally, but she thinks, “Why am I laughing? Nothing’s funny?”

Tears are running down her cheeks, and while she’s still grinning, her expression is afraid. “Oh god I can’t stop,” she thinks.

She remembers Rogan, stuffy and pontificating, going, “Try not to resist! Let it pass through naturally!” and around her grin, she’s glowering now. “Easy for you to say, asshole!” she thinks. “But I’ll try. You’ve been right so far.”

The final panel shows the front door of LB’s apartment building, quiet and still. The caption reads, “And I made it home, and it passed.”

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Okay, so when Erin was little, she handled reality by checking out of it. Created these big elaborate worlds in her head where she could be loved, powerful, a hero, instead of fuckmeat. (There is a little doodle of Erin, but her head is a smiling balloon floating above her shoulders.)

Our brain made me, M.D., to be hardier, a fighter. I was never to tell anyone in the real world I existed, which really limited my social options. So, I spent a lot of time in the story world of Infinity Smashed—had friends, a job, crap like that. It wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing. (A little doodle of M.D. darting through a rippling liquid portal, to better things.) Erin wrote stories about it—Rogan still does, though it’s just fiction now.

The story world was a psychological construct. It was all an elaborate way of filling our emotional needs, self-model shit like unconditional care, conflict, and growth.

But as things got worse, even our own personal fantasy world couldn’t help us. Or me…

page break

Biff and I had been through some shit in the story world, together. (Biff, with his ponytail and baseball cap, smoking and scowling.)

He was the most powerful visual illusionist I knew. (Biff, invisible, goes up to a long-haired, pre-death M.D. and goes, “Boo.” She jumps and goes, “AUGH!”)

Lots of people had powers there. Hell, even I formed psychic links through touch. (A copy of the earlier panel, but this time Biff is visible, and he’s bumping into M.D. Their bare arms touch and they both jump and go, “AUGH!” with looks of utter disgust.) Involuntary TMI forever.

But death is permanent. No returning, that’s the rule, same for Mac. (Mac from his pre-death days, young and butch and wearing his old work uniform, a three-piece navy blue suit and tie.)

If we try, it just feels fake, not real anymore. Not that it ever was. (A ponytailed smiling stick figure wanders through a very cartoony, simplified landscape with a cauliflower-shaped tree, a smiling sun, and a sign reading “TOTALLY REEL!”)

I know the whole thing was just an elaborate coping mechanism. (An anonymous pair of hands plays a shell game, moving a little black marble around and around under some cups.)

But I miss him. I still dream about him, always just missing him. (M.D. reaches out for Biff, who walks off the right edge of the panel, a simplified, smaller version of the cover.)

What would I even say? (M.D. grabs Biff by the lapels of his leather jacket, turns him towards her, expression desperate. “Thank you!” she says. “I’m sorry! I hope my corpse disposal didn’t inconvenience you!” Biff’s face is shaded by the baseball cap, body language neutral—M.D. can’t even imagine how he’d react, what he’d say back.)

All I know is that it’s something important. (M.D. sits up in bed at night, panting from a nightmare.)

page break

Mac and M.D. are talking—Mac, being the other resident dead person, has a vested interest in talking with M.D. about it.

“Do you think he’s looking for you?” he asks her. No need to say who “he” is.

M.D. rolls her eyes. “What? Don’t be stupid. Even if he could, why would he?”

“I’m just saying, it sounds like he had a lot of shits to give,” Mac says.

M.D. snorts. “Whatever, dude. I know it’s real to you, born there, but it’s not.”

M.D. faces Spiral Eyes. She looks intensely unimpressed. Spiral Eyes has its usual maniacal grin. Its lower body has no legs, merely an undulating swathe of dark swirls.

“Well?” M.D. asks, expression bland. “What’ve you got for me this time?”

Spiral Eyes’s eyes flash, and M.D. clutches her right forearm with a cry of pain.

The panels suddenly morph into black brushwork—Spiral Eyes giving a memory in broken, context-less moments.

Biff is carefully daubing at M.D.’s slashed-up forearm with a cottonball. He unrolls bandages. “’S fine,” he says.

He rests his forehead against M.D.’s, expression determined. “Gonna be fine.”

M.D., her hair in a long ponytail, has dark circles under her eyes and doesn’t appear to care, or even register what he’s saying.

page break

The panels snap back to normal, to the present. M.D. is standing in the dark swirls of the Void, clutching her arm and panting.

“Why are you showing me this?” she demands. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Back to the black brushwork panels: M.D. and Biff are having an argument. Her hair is long, her forearm bandaged—it’s clearly after the prior moment, but before her death.

The panels get smaller and smaller, the pictures vaguer. M.D. and Biff shout and argue with each other, M.D. stomps out in a huff with a “forget you” gesture, and slams the door behind her.

Back to the present, the Void, M.D. with her undershave, Spiral Eyes. Now M.D.’s mad.

“What… what was that supposed to be?” she snarls. “Was that supposed to impress me?”

page break

M.D. tries to wrestle herself under control, withdraws behind icy sarcasm. “You’re supposed to be telling me something real! Something useful!” She snarls. “Not this puerile imaginary horseshit!”

M.D.’s working herself into a temper now. “Erin made up that stupid world because she was a stupid child who didn’t want to grow the fuck up! And she didn’t! She fucking died instead!”

“I’m not going down the rabbit hole like her! I survived. It’s time for me to grow up and face reality!”

page break

M.D.’s face is a mask of rage. “He couldn’t care about me!” She rants. “He couldn’t miss me! Because he never fucking existed!”

Silence. M.D. seems taken aback by her own words, then despite herself starts weeping.

“God,” she whispers, hiding her face in her fists, “why do I miss you so much?”

page break

M.D. looks away, pushes her bangs behind her ear. “Yeah, in the story world. It… didn’t go so well.”

Now it’s M.D. as she was before she died, forearms unscarred, hair long and in a ponytail, body language tense and sullen as she sits in a different therapist’s office. The caption reads, “Pouring out my darkest secrets to a stranger didn’t appeal. No offense.”

M.D.’s younger self is now arguing with a large cat, who appears to be arguing back. The caption reads, “Had a big blow-out with… with the person who tried to get me into it.” An arrow points to the cat with the words, “don’t ask.”

M.D.’s younger self slams a door and stomps off, scowling. The caption reads, “I ended up stomping out in a huff. I did that a lot, back then…”

M.D.’s younger self, wearing a backpack, comes to Biff’s apartment; he’s opened the door for her with a look of surprised confusion. The caption reads, “I just up and jetted and left almost everyone behind. …I did that a lot too.”

“You know, except for Gigi and Falcon, everyone I knew in both worlds is gone.” In Gigi’s art style is a drawing of Gigi and Falcon.

“Teachers, family, friends, and neighbors…they’re all gone. Because I left and died.” The panel is filled with many people, the vast majority of whom have never appeared before or since in any of our comics. Biff is there, and also Lizzy from LB Goes to Alaska, and Raige and Thomas from Infinity Smashed, but good luck recognizing them.

Snap back to the present of M.D. sitting in therapy. Her expression is sad. “Maybe it’s easier to pretend they never existed than admit I hurt them,” she confesses.

page break

Another full-text page, this one a page pulled from a spiral dated 9/28/15. It’s a journal entry from M.D.

It’s like it’s easier to pretend none of it was real and meant anything than to admit it was important and that I fucked it up.

Like Biff. Whatever he was, real or not, he gave a shit about me. He gave a shit, and he wasn’t some trained professional, he was just this guy, this asshole with a drinking problem and some wicked scars under his armband, and I fucked it up. I knew his history, knew for years what’d driven him from his family, and I still ended up [CENSORED] in the exact same way he’d tried to do, a year younger and in his own god damn apartment. I don’t think I could have hurt him harder if I tried.

And the whole year I’ve been back, I’ve acted like it was all Lois and Grampa’s fault, when no, they didn’t kill me, I killed me. And I did it in the worst possible way to the least deserving person, and I still fucking blew it!

I thought that I was the problem, that if I killed myself, the pain would stop. But it didn’t! I just ended up passing the buck, almost getting Gigi killed, leaving Rogan to take up my job. I completely failed at everything I set out to do, and it’s my own goddamn fault! I can’t even fucking say sorry, because I’m fucking dead and locked myself out, and ain’t I the fucking smartest?

I can’t even be angry. I want to be. But all I feel is just sad. And tired. And sorry. Really, really sorry.

All I wanted was to make it stop hurting. And I couldn’t even manage that. I just passed the pain on to everyone else.

I’m sorry, Biff. I’m sorry I did that to you. And the words aren’t enough, but I’m sorry for everything. For dying on you because I was too scared to tell you what was going on. For killing myself and leaving you to deal with the mess. I’m just sorry.

I’d say I’m sorry you’re still looking for me in Dreamland* apparently, except that’s my last hope for telling you this in person.

page break

M.D.’s back on the subway. Spiral Eyes wanders over and plops down next to her.

She looks to Spiral Eyes, but it just sits there, undulating in a nonexistent breeze, staring straight ahead.

page break

“You want to read the old Infinity Smashed drafts?” Rogan asks with a skeptical look.

Him and M.D. are walking through the Arboretum again. The weather’s gotten colder; Rogan’s in a hoodie, M.D. in her (well, Biff’s) leather jacket.

“Yes? No? I don’t know!” M.D. says, spreading her hands. “It’s all I can think of!”

Her expression is frazzled; her sarcasm is breaking down. “It keeps harping on about Biff, and that’s the only record we’ve got, so…”

From off-panel, Rogan narrates, “Well, books 1, 3, and 4 haven’t been edited since the end of ’03…” as a hand grabs an ancient black laptop bag.

“…and we have book 2s from ’02, ’05, and ’10.” The hand opens up the bag; inside is a tiny, Windows ‘98 laptop, so old it has wrapped around the other side and actually looks somewhat modern again. It has a big round sticker on it.

“I admit, I haven’t dared read them, but…” M.D. and Rogan open up the laptop, Rogan with a nostalgic smile, M.D. with a look of incredulity.

They open up the laptop, pull up the story. Mac wanders up from behind them, an excited look on his face—he’s dying to read the old teen magnum opus he came from, and he’s never been able to read these old drafts because Rogan goes into hysterical tizzies of shame whenever he tried. All three of them read with looks of eagerness and curiosity.

Then they make faces—Rogan a wince, Mac a look of surprise. With the expression of someone whose mother has just whipped out the naked baby photos at her birthday party, M.D. pulls her leather jacket up over her head.

She slinks down in her seat while Rogan looks away with embarrassment, and Mac watches with curiosity as she says, “Dying of shame now. Don’t mind me…”

page break

Unfortunately for everyone, tiny LB wrote really, really long drafts. M.D., Rogan, and Mac all cluster around their desk and the ancient tiny laptop, reading their way through the drafts.

First, page 120. Rogan turns to M.D., who’s still hiding in her jacket. “Ring any bells, kid?” “Nope.”

Next, page 170. Mac, desperately trying to be complimentary, says, “Wow. Um. Y’all’ve gotten better?” Still hiding in her Jacket Of Shame, M.D. turns and goes, “I’d hope so, after ten years!”

Page 220. M.D., fed up, snarls, “UGH WHAT A WASTE OF TIME.” Rogan, determined to do this in one go so he never has to again, says, “C’mon, just a hundred more pages left.”

The panels revert to black brushwork, the same as Spiral Eyes memory chunks from before, and with equal lack of context. The panels form moments in time, with no surrounding details.

A teenage boy with a bruised bandaged cheek speaks, but plastered over his words is narration: “Things had gotten really bad in the story world.”

M.D. in a curtained hotel room, gripping a red-haired freckled boy’s face as he cries. She too is talking but her words are blocked out with more narration: “Reality leaking into story. I’d rather not say how.”

Outdoors, in an alley of the city. M.D.’s gesturing angrily at Biff, whose face is unreadable under his baseball cap as she rants. The narration silences her, reading, “So I did what I always did: dismissed it all as puerile fantasy, dashed off, and ditched everybody without explanation or goodbye. Except for Biff.”

Now she’s sitting on the railing to Biff’s apartment, and the dialogue cuts in again. Biff is asking, “So this ain’t goodbye?”

page break

The black panels continue, but now things streamline a bit, things become more contiguous. It’s Biff’s crappy apartment, with a plant in a coffee can out on the balcony rail, busted glass door.

Now it’s clear who’s talking. M.D, her hair out of her ponytail, stands at the busted door, silent and staring out. Biff has taken the bowl of pasta; he asks, “How much did he like you?” Neither of them faces the viewer, leaving their faces unreadable.

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M.D. and Biff are eating dinner, sitting on the floor with the bowl of pasta between them. Biff has obviously been drinking a while; two bottles and two empty cans are next to him, and his posture is relaxed, but not obviously intoxicated. Behind him you can see the slightest bit of a mattress on the floor. M.D. crouches in a ball in front of the battered couch she slept on earlier, saying, “It’s the worst feeling. You can’t stop someone if they want something from you, no matter how much you want to. Because you’re weak.”

The perspective switches to Biff, the stereotypical tough guy. He’s looking away, fidgeting with his armband, and while his face can be clearly seen, his expression still is hard to read.

“You wouldn’t know,” M.D. says. She looks haggard, strained. Her forearms are clean, for now.

Biff reaches for one of the bottles of beer, drains it in a panel that shows his figure in black, only the bottle and his armband visible. He dunks the bottle down empty, and then cracks open another, while M.D. watches with a look of confusion and slight alarm.

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Biff’s smirking now, his features a little loose as the alcohol hits. His hair oddly seems to be darkening, growing the slightest bit frizzy. “Cheers,” he says, and chugs the second bottle while M.D. looks on with growing alarm.

Biff plunks the bottle down empty, steeples his fingers, and seems to be considering something carefully. M.D. just watches, clueless as to what he’s doing.

Whatever Biff’s taking stock of, he seems to get an answer he likes; he nods a little and then says, “I do.”

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At first, M.D. doesn’t seem to get it. She just looks at him with skepticism and confusion. Then she thinks about it, chewing on her thumb.

“I’ll make it easy and blame it on the booze now,” Biff says, holding up the bottle and pulling out a cigarette. His body language is a little loose and lopsided now.

Biff’s face grows serious again. “I ain’t got enough booze in me and I don’t think I ever will.”

He glowers at his lighter, flicks it desperately to try and light up. He’s steadfastly not looking at M.D.

Biff looks at her. He seems to think the question over, deciding whether he’s drunk enough to answer it.

page break

Text: Rogan pointed out the draft dated from December ’05, a year and a half after I bit it. Maybe the scene was written way later.

The art, with the date described, is of Biff’s crappy apartment balcony, the rail bent and damaged, with M.D. leaning on it from outside. Biff is pointing at her with a look as though asking what she’s doing there. M.D. looks a little sad. There’s still Erin’s original note attached to the drawing via sticky note: “A scene in progress in B2. Had fun, but evidently I lost my mind while drawing the balcony rail. M.D. has never been one to use the front door.”

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A bandaged up M.D. sleeps up Biff’s couch. From off-panel, M.D. narrates, “Everything changed after that. It’s why I stayed with him, afterward.”

Snap back to the present; M.D.’s hair is buzzed short again, she’s wearing the leather jacket and she’s gesturing angrily at Mac as she talks. “God, he had such issues about suicide! I knew!”

Mac looks on with concern as she rants, “And I’m such a BITCH. I can’t even say sorry and UUUGRAGH!”

“You didn’t know!” Mac asks incredulously. Then, seeing M.D.’s face, tries to comfort her. “Work hazard. You know. Got impaled, so I asked…”

The panel shows a younger Mac, with short hair and his work suit, lying in the sand and surrounded by a growing puddle of blood, dying. From off-panel, the present version of Mac narrates, “So I suicided by proxy. And I know it messed him up. But I’m not sorry.”

Mac’s expression is sad, but caring. He’s long since dealt with this part of his past, and now he’s trying to help M.D. with hers. “Because it’s okay not to want to be in pain,” he says. “I didn’t. And you didn’t want to die alone. That’s sad. But it’s not evil.”

page break

Mac narrates from off-panel, “Everything you’ve said about Biff, he knew you were in a bad place.” Meanwhile, in the past, Biff pulls a patchwork quilt over M.D. on the sofa. The backgrounds are black.

“With his history, don’t you think he’d get it?” Mac asks. Biff, shaking and blank-faced, walks away from M.D. on the couch. His hair’s darkening and starting to curl again; the backgrounds are black.

He reaches into a liquor cabinet, grabs a large bottle a bit over half-full. He slugs back most of it, and the backgrounds return to white. Still shaking, he plunks the bottle down on the counter by the sink, waits for the alcohol to hit so he stops shaking, then turns around, avoiding looking at the quilt-covered lump on his couch that was once M.D.

Then a series of tiny panels: Biff grabbing a duffel bag, packing, going to the door, looking back at M.D. on the couch, then leaving.

The final panel shows him outside, at a payphone outside the apartment complex. At least one other apartment is boarded up, but his (clearly marked because of the plant in a coffee cup on the railing) still has the lights on, even though Biff is clearly never going back. His expression is blank, in shock. From the phone is coming the words, “911, what’s your emergency?” The sky is pitch black.

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Back to the present! Well, sorta, the caption reads “Yesterday, Cartoon Night.” M.D. is at a gathering with friends including Holly and Annie from the Homeless Year. Two of the friends are sitting on the couch, typing on their laptops, but others are watching the TV, which is shouting, “Team Avatar is BACK!” M.D. sits on the floor, smiling and engaged.

Spiral Eyes comes up from behind. M.D. stiffens. The ghost isn’t smiling, and the TV prattles on, but now the letters are getting cut off by the edge of the panel: “How can—you forgi—me, Uncl—”

Spiral Eyes comes closer, and M.D. thinks, “No! Not now!” as she stares determinedly forward, trying to ignore the ghost.

M.D. curls in on herself, clenches her fists and grimaces, trying to will the ghost away, while Holly, the grand dame of Cartoon Night looks up from her laptop with a look of concern.

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All is black. There is nothing but M.D. and Spiral Eyes. M.D. cries, shakes, pants.

The tendons are standing out in her neck. Even the ghost is gone now. There’s just M.D. in a sea of black.

“oh god I’m going crazy,” she thinks. “In public. And I can’t get up.”

In the sea of blackness, Holly leans over, passes a note. Written on it are the words, “are you okay?”

M.D., silently crying, is starting to disintegrate into shaky lines. She shakes her head.

Holly writes more, passes the note back: “Is there something I can get you? meds, water etc?”

While the TV hovers in the blackness, showing fiery explosions and fighting, M.D. shakes, a blob of miserable scribbles. A worried-looking Holly, still in crystal clear pen lines, brings water and Tums, then sends another note: “If it would help at all, you’re welcome to go sit in the guest room where it is quieter.”

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M.D., a scribbly stick figure almost like a ghost herself, blunders into the guest room, filled with crammed-full bookshelves. Here, everything is bright and light; behind M.D. and through the door is pitch blackness with spiral eyes staring out at her.

M.D. crashes onto a futon, taking the blackness with her. Panting, she reaches for a Kleenex, only to fall over on the floor.

“No… no!” she thinks, clutching a tissue, expression barely readable in the disintegrating lines. “I don’t want to deal with this right now!”

The panels lurch into blackness and curves, like with the previous Spiral Eyes memories, moments fragmented in time. Its eyes peer from the backdrop.

Strong hands grip M.D.’s scarred wrists. A Christmas tree, decorated with ornaments and an angel on top. Dad’s smiley-face mask, looking much the worse for the wear.

Dad is dragging M.D. down a hallway, filled with doors and family photos. M.D. is fighting, trying to get away, but he’s got her. At the end of the hallway is a huge bed, resting in a pool of blackness.

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The black curvy panels continue. M.D., as she’s dragged, thinks, “Not again! I can’t do this again!”

She’s being pressed down onto the bed, its plush comforter, its carefully stacked pillows. The caption reads, “I try to flee the body to the other world… but I only make it halfway.”

The panel is shaped almost like a pair of barbells—on the left, Dad bends M.D. over the bed of his bedroom, a dresser and a wedding photo of Mom behind him. On the right, Biff sprinting through his crappy apartment, leaving a pot of something cooking on the stove. In the center, he and M.D. grip each other’s arms. The caption reads, “And I drag him back with me.”

All he could do was be there. (M.D., crying and feral, clutching Biff’s jacket.)

Take it with me. (M.D. howls into his shoulder. Nothing else can be seen—not Dad, not Biff’s face, just M.D.’s rage, terror, and agony.)

And say, (The perspective reverses; Biff’s face is a mask of grief as he says, “I know. I know…” His hair has darkened and frizzed through the panels.)

page break

Eventually, I guess I kinda broke. (Back to M.D.’s perspective. Her expression is broken and she starts giggling.)

(Now she’s grinning, just like Spiral Eyes, laughing hysterically in barely legible letters as tears run down her cheeks.)

I don’t think Dad noticed. (Back to Biff’s face, half-hidden but grief still visible.) He was busy.

We always thought that we’d never been vaginally raped. (Blank blackness.) I guess we were wrong.

December, 2003. Mom and Bro were out Christmas shopping. (A big wrapped present under the Christmas tree, and a speech bubble: “Get up! You got to get up, kid!”)

M.D. is curled in a fetal ball in nothingness. Her pants are missing. The speech bubble above her head (but not coming from her) reads, “They coming home soon! C’mon!”

She goes to the front door, opens it. Outside is a sea of blackness. The caption reads, “I went outside. And life went on.”

page break

Snap back to the present. No more seas of blackness, no more hasty brushwork. Everything is clear and bright and precise. M.D. is walking out, just like she did in the previous page, in the same position and posture.

“I guess we all like to imagine we’re badasses. Especially us ‘protector alter’ types.”

M.D. is walking up the front steps to LB’s apartment building, same position, same posture. “We like to pretend we’ll stay brave and stoic and strong no matter what. Why be human when you can be a power fantasy?”

M.D. crashes onto her bed, still fully dressed. It’s 1:00 in the morning, and the decorations hanging from nails on the wall, the art stuck on with sticky tack does not comfort her. She looks utterly exhausted. “Ungh.”

“But I’m not a power fantasy. I’m a kid, and Dad broke me that day. But I wasn’t broken anymore. And the night wasn’t over yet.”

page break

We’re in headspace now, and M.D.’s still walking, still leaving. Now she’s leaving her room in the mutant three-story Igloo thing out into the dark undulating swirls of the Void.

M.D. halts. There’s a hazy bright point in the middle of the formless ether of the Void, but it’s not clear what it is.

page break

The hazy point expands, and Biff pops out. Him and M.D. stare at each other in shock, then race towards each other to hug.

page break

A full-page spread of M.D. and Biff hugging, while the Void swirls and undulates around them. Biff has gotten himself a new leather jacket, more motorcycle style in contrast to the bomber one he gave M.D. A pack of cigarettes are in his back pocket. His hair is curly.

page break

M.D. clutches Biff’s jacket—it’s like the flashback, only this time they’re reunited in the present. “Biff, I’m sorry, I—”

Biff, face weathered and lined from the decade plus they’ve been apart, smiles a little says, “Shut up, I know.”

They pull apart and Biff looks at her wonderingly. “You ain’t changed a bit.”

“You have.” And indeed, Biff has. He’s aged. Freckles are visible at the corners of his eyes, his hair is kinky and curly—it’s clear that the visage he wore back when they knew each other was helped by illusion. Stripped of it, caught by surprise, he’s no longer white, but mixed race.

They sit cross-legged, close enough for their knees to touch. Biff’s speech bubble holds a question mark, M.D.’s a skull. The caption reads, “We talked a bit, there in the Void. But it was 1 AM. And we were both exhausted…”

page break

With a groan, she sits up, rubbing her eyes. Then she sees Biff asleep on a mattress on the floor of her headspace bedroom.

It’s been a long night, and M.D.’s exhausted. She doesn’t bother pondering it out. She just crawls into bed with him, gets under his arm. He grunts vaguely questioningly.

They go back to sleep. The caption reads, “I didn’t get anymore nightmares that night.”

page break

She sits up, rubbing her eyes. She is indeed on a couch, though one in much better shape than Biff’s ever was. “Must be at Biff’s…” she thinks. “No, no, that can’t be right…”

Indeed, Biff is, though he has a look of confusion and alarm—after all, as far as he knows, he got dragged through a portal into an eldritch pool of darkness at an ungodly hour of the morning to see his dead kid friend.

M.D. pushes her bangs out of her eyes. “I can’t believe it even WORKED. I mean—”

Now her common sense wakes up and she looks uncomfortable, maybe a little embarrassed. “Oh man,” she says, and rubs her face with her hands. “Rogan is going to flip. His. SHIT.”

page break

Biff’s up, dressed, got his hair back in his ponytail, and is all set to be introduced to the rest of LB.

First, Gigi (drawn in her own kindergarten style, while Biff is the normal “house” style). She runs up to him, waving her little stick figure arms. “Rarr!” she declares.

Gigi, assured that she is still the scariest, smiles and wanders off. M.D. leans into the panel and gives Biff a thumbs-up. “Cool!” she says. “Gigi likes you.”

Next, Sneak, who at six feet towers over Biff, who’s only 5’3. Ze beams at him and goes, “Huggle?”

“No,” Biff says, a little taken aback by Sneak’s size, as contrasted with zer giving him the big shiny puppy dog eyes.

But Sneak accepts his answer. “Aw, okay. Pancakes for brekkie!” ze says, and darts off. Biff watches zer go, looking extremely uncomfortable.

Miranda comes up behind him. “I suppose you’ll do,” she says, making Biff jump. She too, is taller than him, though not by much.

While she’s surveying him, Mac approaches from Biff’s other side. He of course, is even taller than Sneak, and when Biff sees him, he looks a little cowed.

M.D. clutches Biff’s arm and says with a nervous smile, “C’mon, Mac, put in a good word for me?”

Mac gives M.D. a look that shows he knows full well she’s trying to do, and also how much trouble she’s likely to be in. “Hmmm… good luck. Falcon says congratulations, by the way.”

Mac leaves and M.D. pumps her fist excitedly. “Sweet! Okay, Rogan last. Don’t fuck this up, Biff; one slur and I swear…”

page break

M.D. has apparently taken no chances; she decides to introduce Biff to Rogan outdoors, at the local pond, as though hoping that Rogan will be less upset if he’s in public. She stands between the two men, hands on hips, looking from one to the other.

Both men hastily look away from each other. Rogan crosses his arms. Biff scratches the back of his neck. M.D. watches their reactions with interest.

“Wow,” M.D. says with a double thumbs up, “this isn’t awkward or uncomfortable AT ALL.”

“I gotta go do a thing bye,” Rogan says and makes a hasty escape. Biff is blushing and looks excruciatingly uncomfortable.

page break

M.D. doesn’t get their reactions, but she’s too relieved to care. “Wow, thanks Biff, y’all were so awkward that he didn’t give me shit!” she declares.

Biff just looks away and gets the expression of someone faced with a one-night stand he hoped never to see again.

M.D. doesn’t care; all that matters to her is, she’s now officially gotten Biff approved by everyone in the system—or at least not summarily ejected, which is good enough for her. “Oh, by the way, you should know: there’re stories about us.”

M.D. punches Biff in the shoulder. “You asshole,” she says, “you never told me you were trans!”

Biff looks deeply forlorn. He’s been deep stealth since his teens, and now it’s all blown out of the water.

“Hoo boy, if that bothers you, wait till I tell you about this comic…” M.D. says. Then, taking mercy on him, “But maybe that can wait. Can… is there anything you need? From home?”

For a moment, Biff looks deeply tired, a little sad. Then he frowns, looks determined.

page break

What do you say to someone after eleven years? (Biff and M.D. walk around the pond. Biff is smoking, M.D.’s elbowing him in the side. They’re smiling a little at each other, relaxed and familiar despite the years.) After everything?

Sometimes a lot of explaining. (M.D. and Biff continue walking. Biff looks on while M.D. talks and explains. Her head is surrounded by speech bubbles—one has a drawing of the Grandfather, Dad, and Mom, another has a picture of M.D. in her black ghost form surrounded by flames, a third has a brain, and the final one shows a little map of the state of Massachusetts.)

Sometimes nothing. (Biff puts an arm around M.D. and kisses her cheek. He’s just glad to see her… and also isn’t quite ready to talk about what exactly has gone down in his own life just yet.)

page break

M.D. and Biff are on a bench, waiting for the subway. M.D. has one hand gripping his bicep, while the other reaches for his left forearm. Biff doesn’t mind the physical contact—considering how they last parted ways, they’re going to be sticking close to each other for a while. “Hey, you don’t have the armband anymore,” she says.

M.D.’s turned his left arm over. There’s a huge keloid scar going down the inside of his wrist. There’s no questioning how he got it.

Biff gently takes his arm back, shifts his weight, looks away. M.D.’s look is sad. Then her expression becomes fierce; she shoves her right arm at him.

Biff takes her forearm in both hands, carefully touches over the scars down the back. “Tryin’a quit?” he asks.

Biff turns M.D.’s arm over. Her scar is much neater and smaller, but it’s the same as Biff’s.

Biff puts an arm around her. They sit together, silently sharing a very dark history from a long time ago.

page break

It’s night, and Biff and M.D. are on the floor of M.D.’s bedroom. They both have individual mattresses pushed together, and they’re chatting. Well, M.D.’s chatting; Biff’s just listening.

“Poor and crazy, with a gutted memory, and we still got away,” M.D. continues. “Dead for ten years, back for less than one, and I’d changed a ton.” The panel shows M.D. typing on a laptop, expression closed.

“Dad? Exactly the same.” The panel shows Dad typing on his own laptop. He wears a black shirt, but he’s no longer an eldritch monster like earlier in the series. He’s just an ordinary middle-aged man in a battered smiling mask. He’s typing furiously.

“We’d moved on, while he was still trying to get us to come back, still pining.” (A letter coming out of an envelope, with the words, “Dear firstborn, why do you hate me? I know you told me but I forgot. (sadface emoticon) –Dad.”)

“Every time I worried I was baiting him too obviously, he bit hard. (Dad swims in the sea and bites down on a naked hook, going, “OM NOM NOM!”)

“He had all the good cards, all the privileges, and he couldn’t keep us,” M.D. finishes, and Biff grins knowingly.

page break

M.D. rolls her eyes, but doesn’t fight him. “Except you. ‘Night, asshole.”

They settle back onto their respective mattresses, not touching, dressed in pajamas. Biff’s hair is loose, past his shoulders; he rests on his back, while M.D. curls into a ball on her side.

“S’okay,” Biff says. “We cool. I know it ain’t like that, you’n me.”

M.D.’s ball tightens, thinking of the last father figure in her life. “No. We’re not.”

Biff, expression determinedly stony, says, “…you can do it again, you want.”

Caption: “I didn’t have any nightmares that night. For the first time, I felt safe enough to sleep. When I woke up, he was still there, warm and solid and alive. And I knew we’d be okay.”

Back Cover

The rest of the cover is taken up with a comic. M.D. pontificates, “You know, after all this time we’ve spent together, I’ll tell you my full name: Mori Deathforest.”

She gives a double thumbs-up and a grin, but whoever she’s talking to off-panel says, “…for real?”

“Screw you, I’m an adult!” M.D. retorts. “I can name myself any fool thing I want. Not like you can talk…”

Epilogue (four months later)

M.D. and Biff are once again standing at a balcony… by this time, it’s LB’s house, not Biff’s apartment. The rail is black wrought iron, the house a massive adobe dome. Biff and M.D. look out on the Void, which swirls peaceably around them. Biff is standing; M.D. leans and rests her weight on her arms on the rail.

2016, February 3: Bro drunk-dials us, going, "So, did you hear about THE MURDER?"

Blobby LB sweeps all their crap off their desk and flail for pencil and paper. "Uh, no Bro... why don't you tell me about it?"

"Kay!" he goes. "Y'know how Mom always said her real dad committed suicide when she was two? Nope! MURDER! Grandma got charged! So Mom'n'all were all put in foster care for one and a half to three years! Crazy, right? (hic)"

As he talks, pictures of Grandma and Grampa's gravestones appear. Grampa's reads Beloved Parents, while Grandma's says Together Again. Not even joking, swear on their graves. Bio-grandfather's tombstone has only an invisible shape--it doesn't exist with the other two.

Meanwhile, Rogan is at front, holding the phone to his ear and slumped over the desk, with hastily jotted notes in front of him. He looks resigned; nothing this family does surprises him anymore. "That... explains a lot, Bro," he says. "Thanks."

Meanwhile, M.D. just stands there, hands spread and mouth open, but uncharacteristically stunned silent. What do you even SAY to that?

But Bro keeps talking. "'Ey! 'EY! Why you lie 'bout us, sis? Why you make up all'a this... this stuff?"

Rogan's expression chills. "I'm not lying, Bro."

But that just upsets him more. "YES YOU ARE! (sob) YOU FUGGIN' LIE! YOU WERE THE SMART ONE! AND NOW YER A CRAZY LIAR!"

The words hit home; it shows in Rogan's face. But then Bro says, "YOUR FAM'LY LOVES YOU AN' YOU STAB US IN THE BACK, SIS!" And Rogan rages out.

Zoom out to Biff, who's outside the room, but whose attention is drawn by Rogan shouting, out of view, "Our family is full of rapists, and EVERYONE KNOWS IT BUT YOU!"

Biff comes into the doorway and leans on it, exchanging looks with M.D., who hunches uncomfortably in the background while Rogan continues bellowing, tears streaming down his cheeks, "ASK GRANNY! ASK MOM! Ask ANYONE, and they'll fucking tell you about Grampa!"

"Now, don't get upset, sis..."

"I'M NOT UPSET!"

M.D. fidgets uncomfortably and stares on wide-eyed; she's never seen Rogan wig out like this before. Biff puts a comforting hand on her shoulder while, off-panel, Rogan says, quiet now, "I'm not upset..." and hangs up.

Biff and M.D. are sitting on the stairs twining down the side of the house now; the railing is gone, allowing Biff to sit on the edge, legs hanging off into the Void. M.D. sits a stair below him, and has clearly been talking a while.

“--still so much we don’t know! What made me, Gigi, or Rogan… how long’ll it take?”

“Mm.” Biff isn’t paying much attention. He’s smoking, focused entirely on odd wisps of swirls around his hands.

Biff keeps manipulating the swirls around his hands; it fluxes between shadows and smoke like that emanating from his cigarette, but it doesn’t seem to be coming out right. “The Void. ‘S weird. Tryin’a get the effect.”

Biff frowns, tries to wrangle the swirls to imitate the darkness around him, looks over his shoulder at M.D.. “How you say it made again?” He asks.

Biff clearly doesn’t like that answer and goes back to scowling at this work. “Void mean ‘empty,’ right?”

Now he seems to be getting somewhere. The shapes between his hands fluctuate, turn into layers of darkness that he tries to interweave together.

“I know smog,” he continues. “This ain’t smog. Light’s all wrong. ‘S like… layers’a shadows. All movin’ around.”

M.D.’s getting curious now. She gets up next to him to look over his shoulder, watching as he finally starts getting a reasonable facsimile of the dark Void shadows going, like the ones that have been omnipresent throughout the book.

“You ever notice ya ghosts made’a the same shit? Void ain’t empty, kid...” He builds his small illusion of Void shadows, and now they’re layers of humanoid shadows, like the ghosts. “’S full’a ghosts, I bet.”

M.D. looks a little nervous. “Biff,” she says, “I know you’re way smarter than you let on...”

Zoom out to the House, a tiny three-story adobe construct floating in a vast ocean of Void swirls.

Full-page spread of the Void. A parade of dark, white-eyed ghosts are coming in like the tide as dark waves surge around them. They reach back far as the eye can see, unto the vague suggestion of a horizon… some look more human than others. Among them:

Bibliography (because six comics pages doesn't BEGIN to cover it)

A 500 page bookslab, exhaustively researched, about the high-profile child sex abuse cases of the 80s and early 90s. Dull, depressing, and massively informative.

* Dallam, S. J. (2002). "Crisis or Creation: A systematic examination of false memory syndrome." Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 9(3/4), 9-36.

* Freyd, Jennifer. (1998). "Science in the Memory Debate." Ethics & Behavior 8(2), 101-113.

* Salter, Anna. (1998). "Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned." Ethics & Behavior 8(2), 115-124.

* Calof, David. (1998). "Notes From a Practice Under Siege: Harassment, Defamation, and Intimidation In The Name of Science." Ethics & Behavior 8(2), 161-187.

* Cheit, Ross E. (1998). "Consider This, Skeptics of Recovered Memory." Ethics & Behavior 8(2), 141-160.

* Cheit, Ross E. 'Recovered Memory Project.' Brown University, 2010-2015. Web. 12 June 2015. <http://www.recoveredmemory.org>

Mad thanks to Jee Hyung Lee for connecting me to the Ethics & Behavior articles!

The page ends with a little cartoon of Rogan slumped dead over a table with a book on it.

Memory Work Recs (because this is a memoir, not a how-to guide)

* Our essays on the nuts and bolts of our memory work, made specifically for this purpose. Includes:

- “Memory Work Personally”: our personal cycle, data, and experience with memory work, five years in.

* Bass and Davis. (2008). The Courage to Heal, 20th Anniversary Ed. William Morrow Paperbacks.

This book gets shat on a lot. It’s the only decent book I’ve found that discusses memory work at all, and only on a vague, introductory level. Still. Cis-woman-centric.

Deals specifically with the nuts and bolts of reclaiming sex and dealing with triggers and such as they come up. Practical, down-to-earth, cis-woman-centric.

* Schiraldi, Glenn. (2009). The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook. McGraw Hill Company.

I’m sorry to have so few resources. It’s become a taboo subject since the Memory Wars. BE CAREFUL.

AllFam Fam and Content Warnings

Special thanks to the super-generous Kickstarter backers who made this book possible. Y’all are truly mighty!

Sexual, physical, and emotional violence against children, including rape, choking, memory and reality distortion, vomit, self-harm, blood, death, and suicide.