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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Robert Frost
Frost is one of my favorite American poets. There are poems of his that I reread periodically. It’s always nice when one of your literary heroes agrees with your own philosophy of writing. Of course, perhaps reading his work when I was in my mid-teens helped shape my own attitude towards writing. So maybe it’s not that Frost shares my philosophy of writing, but that I embraced his without realizing it. We’re always so impressionable as young writers. We’re like wet clay waiting for someone to put their finger prints on us.
I chose the quote above, because I’ve been looking at the art for issue nine of the comic book. It’s Phillip. I’ll assume here that everyone has read the book GUILTY PLEASURES. If you have not this is a major, read major, spoiler. If you haven’t finished the book, this is your last chance to stop reading and save the surprise, no, the shock.
Okay, I have to assume if you’re still reading, you know what I’m about to type. Here goes: Seeing Ron Lim’s art, with Phillip chained against the wall, so helpless, so hopeless, really hurt me. It’s been over ten years since I wrote GUILTY PLEASURES. Over a decade since I created Phillip, and had to watch him die. I didn’t know he was going to die until about a paragraph before Anita found him dead. I thought, until the last possible moment, we’d save him. But we didn’t, we couldn’t. It was the first time I cried for one of my characters.
I cried for his death. I cried because we couldn’t save him. I cried because he’d been trying to get his life together, and making some progress, and now all of his chances were gone.
Ron and I went back and forth a little on Phillip, just as Brett Booth and I did. For some reason he seems a difficult character to pin down in art. But just as Brett finally nailed it, so did Ron. But whereas Brett’s art had been confident, flirting, and more light-hearted; Ron’s was Phillip when he was hurting, bleeding . . . Ron did such a good job at the first images of Phillip chained up and looking into the “camera” with that hopelessness in his eyes. Ron’s art reminded me that Phillip didn’t expect to be saved. He gave up before Anita did, before I did. It was all there in Phillip’s eyes, all there staring up at me from the pencils.
I had to put the pencils away, and wait an extra day, because my initial reaction was that I hated them. I was angry, and it took me a little bit to figure out why. Of all the people we’ve lost in the books, Phillip’s death hurt me and Anita the most. That pain, those shed tears, are probably one of the main reasons we have a cast of dozens but few deaths of main characters. It hurt too much.
I wrote back to Ron with some small changes, he made them. I told them how his art had effected me, and assured him that I was sane about all the other characters. It was just Phillip’s death, and how well he had captured that look, that air of tragedy, that had messed with my head. Ron was actually flattered that his art had gotten such a reaction from me. I guess it was a complement.
I miss Phillip. I miss him almost like a friend that died young. You think about them every once in awhile. You wonder, would he have broken his addiction? Would he have straightened his life out? What would have changed in Anita’s life if Phillip had survived that first book? Would we be looking at him as her one and only boyfriend, and would he have taken up too much room for Jean-Claude to invade? Or would it just have been Richard who wouldn’t have found enough room to be in her life? Or would Phillip have simply been regulated to a minor role, and his living not have changed that much for Anita. I think that last is almost the saddest of all. That if he had lived it wouldn’t have changed that much, except for him.
I don’t know, and now we’ll never know. He died young. He died horribly. Anita still dreams of him, and his death, and her failure. Because that’s how she sees it, as her failure. We killed those that murdered him. We’ve had all the revenge we can have for Phillip. It didn’t bring him back. It never does. More’s the pity.