Connor Clue loved superheroes. He spent all day dreaming of caped crusaders. He wasn’t a clinically prescribing obsessive about them, he didn’t own hundreds and thousands of pages of materials. Connor was sort of niche. This was his happy hobby. He had a selection of 30 or so collections of his favourite heroe’s stories which he would read again and again, with such precision and such an inspired perspective that every time he turned the page he learnt something new.
Connor knew lots about the genre. He sucked it up like a sponge. He was the first to share trailers and to discuss how authentic castings were. He didn’t own many books so he spent a lot of time checking facts on online encyclopaedias. He debated thematic directions, implications of conflicting moral archetypes on the same teams. Connor had drawn a whole ethic system for himself based on the comics. What was right, what was wrong, who as good and who was bad. He would apply these to the rest of the world, his own rule book.
Connor would go to work, a non-comics related desk job and he would listen to his iPod on the train. He would play theme tunes from his favourite superhero movies and he would imagine himself running/flying/rope swinging beside the carriage, fighting the bad guys who threatened the lives of the innocent passengers aboard the train. He would imagine his closest friends garbed in bright colours, armed to the teach with weapons or fists burning with elemental abilities which he attributed to them according to their personalities or how he perceived their positions in his social group. The strong man, the shadow, the witch, the archer at a distance, or the close hearty rival.
Connor had been doing this since he was a young boy. The characters had changed, as had the themes of the powers and enemies. There had even been different maidens for him to save. It was harmless, it was his way of spicing up his life. It was how he expressed love for his friends or relieved frustration over his ‘enemies.’ It was just in his head.
As Connor got older, life began to take a hold. He had a full-time job, he had a girlfriend that he loved, there as an increasing pressure for him to make important decisions regarding his life. These decisions did not include saving the day, fighting the crime or rescuing the world. These decisions involved tasks he perceived as menial, including saving money, maintaining communication with clients or hitting targets. Connor began to spend less time in his world, and more time in this one. He was too tired to read, too distracted to discuss and he even felt like the pictures he drew in his head were losing colour. Becoming strained.
Until one day Connor just forgot. Connor never drew, he never wrote, it was all in his head, it was his light behind his eyes and as he had never expressed it, it flickered out.
After a while, Connor became entertained by the more primal joys of life. He didn’t dream anymore, he sought pleasures on earth. Excitement and adventure were I short supply in the snow globe life that Connor lived. He began to shut doors, he made errors and poor choices. He lost hope. He trudged day by day in his commute of a life. Reality consumed him.
One day he slipped, he fell and he was broken. Whether it was in love or life, it didn’t matter. Connor Clue found himself curled up on the corner of his bed, sobbing tears in to a beer-stained pillow. His world had broken. There was no masked figures with super strength to put his heart back together. He did not possess the extra human intelligence to forsee himself past grief and he certainly did not have the power to go back in time. Connor, for the first time in his life, truly felt what it was to be a human.
Connor Clue didn’t know what to do. He’d spent so long with his head in the clouds. Drawing images in his minds eye of a black and white world with single pictures for hope and courage. Now he was left with nothing but a dark hole in his chest, draining the life from his brain, crushing his being in an uncontrollable emotional vortex of shame, regret and loss.
Days went by and Connor remained lost. In his dark world there was no food. All food tasted bad. He didn’t wash. His beard grew as fast as the bags beneath his eyes. His body became a crumbling temple of depression. He lost faith in himself. Inside became the outside. He had shot the albatross and found himself on dire straits. Connor Clue wished himself in to a tomb.
Then, one fateful day, Connor rolled over and a comic book caught his eye. Buried deep beneath a heap of hamburger wrappers, a single fist gleamed in a sliver of sunlight that beamed through a slit in the curtains. The fist sat at the base of an accusing finger, the finger leaping from the page, emblazoned with a crimson glove, striking straight out at Connor. The image pierced Connors brain and jabbed a wall he’d put up in what seemed like an age ago. With a sigh, Connor got up on one elbow, as if to get up, but then rolled over.
Old habits die hard.
For a few more days Connor rotted. He had long since let his phone run out of battery. The calls from work and the texts from friends who had never listened had hurt his ears, but the silence from the only person he wanted to hear from was like a saw blade spinning through his heart. After a large pepperoni pizza, Connor put the box down on one of the fast food obelisks that he had been steadily building around him as the day went by. But the box was the last straw, and with a tumble the pieces fell and laid out across the floor, right in the path to the bathroom.
With a heavy breath, Connor rose to rebuild the monuments. Heaving his legs over the edge of the bed, he looked past his new-found gut to the floor below. They were there waiting. His collection of comics. Brave characters with chests struck out, wide gleaming smiles and fierce furious fists. They screamed at him, they beckoned for him, never assuming, never judging, they just wanted to push him forwards. He picked one up. Opening a curtain, he squinted as the day took shape. He began to read.
He finished the first few and had a strange realisation. A brief hypothesis, so he continued to study further. He cleaned the heaps of rubbish from his room in his search for his lost tomes. He changed his bed sheets because the smell was distracting. He took a book to bath with him and his sleeping pattern improved because he appreciated the sun light more. Everything formed in a new light for him. The books began to take a new shape.
When he had read them before, he had not appreciated his life, and had been bored with the mundane nature of his existence. Connor had only focused on the capes and powers. These had just been pictures, exhaggerations of a life had felt not worth living. But he was truly operating on a loss now. Spiralling towards oblivion and on the edge of losing it all. It was only from here that he could really begin to understand the comics he loved. These were extraordinary characters, but they too faced the threat of loss. Their stories may also be against extraordinary odds, but that’s just a question of scale. These were myths, with lessons to teach. Written by other. Others who had also lived through loss, lived through regret, lived through shame.
With this in mind, Connor took up a pen. He found a piece of paper and he began to write. Whether it was a great comic expressing his own story, or if it was an apology letter to someone he felt he’d hurt, doesn’t matter. The act of taking up his tools and trying to make his place in the world is enough. Connor Clue stood up and rejoined the world.
Collections 