A Hu-Man comic

Pacing makes a comic great.

At first I really wanted to follow each panel very closely to see and see if there was some kind of vast rabbit-hole interconnectedness each character had. I checked reddit to see if there was a graphic someone might have taken the time to draw up:

0: A brown haired boy walks down the street, and gets harassed by a hoodlum across the street.

1: The hoodlum grows up into a kind old man. He kisses his granddaughter away to school.

2: The granddaughter grows up into a mother and a divorcee’, embittered by life. Meanwhile two little girls are friends at school. One is despondent because her friend, Jo, is much smarter than she is.

3: Years later, the despondent girl looks up Jo on facebook, and discovers that she is now but a humble mother, struggling to get by. Jo is on the bus. She sneers at a young Pakistani man ahead of her on the bus for not giving up his seat to the elderly. It turns out the young Pakistani is actually quite shy, and lost his chance to do the right thing. The Pakistani gets off the bus, to meet his boyfriend, a young blond man, who makes him feel better.

2:The young blond man is a child. His father is teaching him to hate Pakistanis.

1:The father is now a child. His childhood friend is a little Pakistani girl. Their parents take them apart.
On their way home, The Pakistani girl and her mother walk past a young man in a white hoodie. The mother is afraid, and they avoid him. At home, we discover that the young man in the white hoodie is distraught because his girlfriend broke up with him. He doesn’t want to let his father see him this way. The father is wandering home from the bar. He is drunk and angry. He picks a fight with a random person, and gets a black eye.

0: The father is now a young man. He is walking down the street, and gets harassed by a hoodlum across the street….

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This is such a lost chance to insert deeper / more meaningful connections between the situations and people involved.

A lot people are saying how “deep” and “epic” this is, but all I see is somewhat complicated and loosely connected “stories”.

Of course, great art and concept, but it could have been so much more.

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I think the meaning is that assumptions about people’s character or motives are often wrong.

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Exactly! It wasn’t about the connections, but that “some people” are not the assholes we assume them to be. They’re just like us.

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This is like the Crash of comics, except not lame.

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The stories are supposed to be interconnected loosely, not meaningfully. To interconnect them too meaningfully would cross the boundary from coincidence into contrivance and make the story seem too unrealistic, which would lessen its emotional accessibility.

It’s supposed to be less like Heroes and more like Love, Actually. The message of the comic seems to be, “everyone has a story, and it’s often not what it seems,” and it goes about providing that message in a creative and well-paced manner.

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I liked the Pineapple laptop.

So maybe the timelines don’t even match up – and so this comic just is.  And we can just like it for what it is. It does a good job of showing how everyone can be so unavoidably anxious and pathetic trying to do what’s best and what’s best for their own interest (just look at PostSecret).  At the same time, our simple assumptions and snap interactions with a random stranger actually make for an inaccurate telling of their truly complex story. At the same time, the complexity of their life led them to these simple moments in time. And as father time passes, people head into entropy and just degrade regardless of how righteous and innocent they were in the past. 

This makes observers, like us reading the comic, empathetic and see what’s really going on

It really is like that movie Crash or that Green Day music video “Time of your life” – showing that peoples’ actions and in-actions shape one another quite profoundly

I wonder if there is a way to stay young physically and at heart…