TDM page 53 and Funny Sorrow

This is a rough one.  Eric just knows all the wrong things to say.  It’s painful to see Angel reacting so poorly to Eric’s fumbling.

Alex is good at writing painful.  A lot of our dark humor derives from this.  Alcoholism, poverty, stupidity, unhappiness, awkwardness, anger; all these are common fodder for us.  Why so gloomy?  Probably extensions of our cynical life outlooks.

It’s not like we’re the only ones who make fun of such things; that’s why the term black comedy exists.  Occasionally we drift into silliness, but for the most part I’d say we stick with dark humor.

This page feels especially dark to me, not because the content is so horrible, but rather because it focuses so much on the failure to connect and having your dreams shattered.  I don’t even know if it is really comedy at this point.  It may just be a sad drama, depending on how much you care about the characters I guess.

Angel’s reactions to Eric are particularly painful because they are quite natural, and we’ve all probably experienced something like that in our lives.  Opening up ourselves to someone only to find that they don’t understand us at all, and reject us.  Illusions fade to realizations, which typically leads to devastation and depression.

The silence at the end…ugh.  One of the more unpleasant awkward silences we’ve done.  Only to be broken up by the delivery of the expensive and unwanted wine.  A fine closer to the scene.  I thought this was really funny when I read it as a script, but drawing it and seeing it…well, that’s something completely different.

Maybe it was written as more straight comedy and I just brought darkness to it through my interpretation.  I don’t know.  I do like the way it all turned out though, and this was a tight little scene that shows some dramatic improvement in writing versus how it would have been (and kind of was) handled back when we were doing the comic books.