Dear Stranger

This is an old drawing. One of the first comic layouts I ever did. I sometimes work on little stories about this pair of characters. Aubrey may or may not be Arienette’s imaginary friend, but he’s certainly her best friend. All of the stories about the two of them are about that strange loneliness that even the closest of people sometimes share, rather than filling in the gaps that cause it for one another.

I got a C when I turned this in for class. Newgarden wasn’t much of a fan.

Anyway, I’m posting this because I started drawing a panel for Arienette a few days ago, and I figured this would give it a little more context. I’ll post Arienette’s bio with that drawing. This is Aubrey’s:

Aubrey:
Aubrey is pretty convinced of his own existence, but has trouble convincing others of it. For the most part he walks about unseen and talking to himself. He has the body of a cherub but, much to his dismay, his wings can hardly lift him half a foot off the ground. He wears a pair of WWII fighter pilot goggles at all times, to hide the fact that he has one blue eye and one brown one, also because he thinks it might make it seem like the wings are just another part of the costume.

Arienette claims that he’s her imaginary friend, and that he’d stop existing if she did, but he has some other theories. For a while he thought he might be a ghost. He spent months trying to work out the dynamics of walking through walls, and came away from the experience with a newfound contempt for his own solidity. After a 48-hour sci-fi channel Quantum Leap marathon, Aubrey entertained fantasies of being a holographic entity sent back from the future to guide a leap-er (which should be carefully distinguished as entirely different from a leper or one might be subject to the wrath of Arienette when one suggests that she is indeed the leper one means to be guiding). He and Al had so many things in common (or one thing specifically), like being completely unseen by all except for small children, the mentally “absent”, animals and people near death… oh and, um, Arienette. Arienette’s conviction that she was in fact inhabiting her own body and therefore perfectly content to lie about on the couch and not “change her life for the better”, combined with his previously discovered contemptuous solidity, grounded the Al Theory mere hours after it had lifted off. But he still likes to fantasize about it.

Aubrey is an amnesiac character. He remembers tidbits of details of a past life that could be his. Like the fruit trees that grew in his grandfather’s yard: pomegranate, peach, and lime. Or the color of his mothers best dress. But has no recollection of the people or places themselves. He is ageless. When he speaks you sometimes get the feeling that you are listening to an ancient, at other times a child.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Aubrey and Arienette, Comic, Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.