By David Baillie
David Baillie's short story Scribe, tells of a maimed and unnamed Super villain in retirement, wrestling with his new career as a novelist. The failed ‘Red Herring’, a caped bank robber recounts his experiences from childhood to villainy and explains the accident that cost him his left arm and his freedom, ‘I got five years’. With the loss of his arm he discovers that he does have a superpower after all and wasn’t the total fraudster he felt himself to be. However little really changed for the glum hero. Failure or perhaps fear of failure is the worse fate, which the Red Herring is stuck with unless he can redeem his true self (a storyteller) and write himself out of his void. Scribe is a follow up to the more autobiographical ‘Awkward Fascination’ and is much more writerly, as the title would suggest.
A lot of the same themes persist- self-aggrandizing pitched with introspection and accompanying horror, worldly success matched with internal failure. The stuff that Baillie eloquently writes about in both comics is the stuff that most people (especially those with artistic ambition) can relate to. However there is a change of tone over the two comics. At the end of Awkward Fascination the artist pictures himself naked and trapped in tall, unscalable brick walls. At the start of Scribe the author rather snottily tells us ‘we had better appreciate it’ as the comic took a lot of time and effort. It sets this reader off on the wrong foot and Baillie succeeds more in revealing his own blind spot than invoking admiration.
It’ ,at moments, difficult to separate the fictional Scribe with his author Baillie. His hero, though capable of cheap success (just as Baillie tells us he himself is in Awkward Fascination) really hankers after making his mark, creating something ‘so special, so perfect’.
DB’s hero can see the big picture, see what it is that he wants but somehow can’t grasp. And he misses the details completely, and the details are where God resides, or so I gather. The character bemoans that he has no real contact with anyone and goes days without speaking to anyone except the checkout girl. His only interest is his own void.
The attention to detail is inherent on a technical level also. The hero wants to be like Kerouac but Baillie can’t be even be bother to spell Kerouac’s name properly. It’s a flawed comic, but flaws are okay so long as it’s interesting, and on this count, Scribe succeeds. The artwork functions but only just. It looks like Baillie’s searching for an identifiable style but isn’t equipped as a draughtsman to carry it through.
Bailie’s definitely a talented storyteller capable of creating convincing and well-realised worlds. I’d be interested in seeing him work in partnership with an artist, it has to be said, but for his writing alone I’m interested in seeing future stories.
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