Preamble

In the one-to-one with Rachel Marsden, I mentioned that I had briefly considered creating a mini comic for my ARP – exploring my freshly minted theme: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Workload, Burnout, Anxiety, and ADHD in Higher Education (a work in progress title).

Rachel commented that my “face lit up” and that I “had a big smile” (paraphrasing here…) when I mentioned it, and was very encouraging that I pursue this idea if it was something I was excited about – she’s so lovely!

Creating a comic is not something I’ve done in a long time… but that’s what appeals to me about it… It’s different than my usual work, and therefore hopefully might be a fun experiment and exploration into something fresh. A break from the subject I teach that is so entangled in my personal work and can lead to this feeling of burnout, both in creativity and in teaching.

It’s also a good choice for me, because the time in my life that I drew the most, and the time that I was unknowingly forming my identity as an artist – is also so inextricably linked to the primary subject area for my ARP – ADHD.

As a young person, what I now attribute to my poor attention span and hyperactivity, my outlet in school and way of coping with the torture of having to sit confined to a seat and focus, often with little opportunity to speak (oh but how I found a way to speak anyway – which led to a lot of getting told off…) was to draw. I filled every margin of every piece of paper I could get my hands on. I drew caricatures (known to me then as funny drawings of my friends), comics, observational drawings, the teacher with a pencil in their head. I just drew a lot… that’s my point. And as a result, I didn’t always learn a lot…

English was perhaps the most manageable of the core subjects… I am after all the son of two English parents… Poetry was creative and imaginative, I could intuit a lot of the grammar. Let’s face it the rest was hard… Math(s) required far too much attention to the rules and formulas. My visual brain couldn’t imagine the abstract concepts nor the usefulness of any of it. Science and History were too much memorization. My memory has always been atrocious.

Unsurprisingly, art class was an oasis. Not only was I allowed to draw the whole time, they actually wanted me to! And they gave me sweet tools and extra colors! Usually it was just ballpoint blue or graphite grey… now I have paints!

But more importantly were the teachers… they saw something in me, my creativity, my love for drawing. They saw me as an asset to the student body… somebody brimming with potential, somebody with value. A stark contrast to the way I seemed to be reduced in my other classes… a waste of space… hopeless… irritating… small.

Not shocking then to imagine why I found myself drawn to Art, and later to teaching. With a hope to foster the creativity and imagination of young people, and to help them to achieve.

The Comic

I don’t know how I came to this idea… my brain works in mysterious ways, but perhaps somehow all of the above was in there, and then my mind naturally went to one of the most beloved and influential comics to date, Watchmen by Alan Moore.

One of the most interesting characters in Watchmen is Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan is not so dissimilar to Superman – having far too many powers to face any real danger in his daily life. He’s an exploration of what happens when you are too smart… too powerful.

The key difference is that while Superman was an icon of 1950s Americana and patriotism, a beloved hero to the people, Dr. Manhattan is a look a more realistic and brutal exploration of the absolute isolation that would surround a person of this ilk.

Superman crash landed on earth from an alien planet, but appears as an ideal specimen of mankind. He has greek proportions, is full of muscles, a chiseled jaw…

Dr. Manhattan was originally an ordinary man. Well not ordinary, a Princeton graduating Nuclear Physicist, but he was plausibly human. A freak accident made him capable of pretty much anything… he can teleport between planets, construct matter from nothing, grow to any size, duplicate himself, and even live in multiple times simultaneously. He is effectively a god…

Oh yeah… and he’s glowing and blue and always naked….

But what Dr. Manhattan can’t do is maintain any relationship with humans. His unique appearance, limitless intellect, and dangerous presence around humans (he emits cancerous radiation to mortals), have made him the loneliest man (god) on the planet. His relationship falls apart when his partner discovers that he, while in the throws of passion, is also conducting research, and countless other tasks while splitting himself into many copies.

Dr. Manhattan is not a hero… Dr. Manhattan isn’t a villain either. Dr. Manhattan is a marvel…. a liability… a danger to men. In the film adaptation (maybe the comic too… I can’t remember…) Dr. Manhattan single-handedly wins the Vietnam war for America by exploding the Vietnamese forces with his mind. Okay maybe he is a villain… shit… I need to go re-read this, I was pretty young…

Dr. Manhattan’s personality through the lens of a human can best be described as a “hyper-intelligent Alexithymiac” – or one with an “inability to express feelings, an affected person might come across as being out of touch or apathetic”.

He knows only logic… He could be seen at times to appear to have ASD. He can’t understand people… he intellectually comprehends social ques, but has no relationship to them.

I feel this way myself at times… I am far too logical… I don’t always understand emotion, and often times feel numb to where I can’t even feel it myself. My wife has asked me numerous times if I could have ASD. I too am a blue naked giant. Blue as in sad, naked as in vulnerable and exposed, and a giant as in 6 foot 3… I too am arguably the smartest and most powerful person who ever lived.

Another very important characteristic of Dr. Manhattan that I would like to translate into my comic, is that he can experience everything in time and space all at once. My brain feels this way… I can’t physically transport myself back to 1963 to re-experience the tragic accident that caused me to be reborn as a sort of god, but isn’t that what trauma does? We can be anywhere at any time and be suddenly confronted with very present thoughts and feelings of another time. Having ADHD means that my mind is often in hyperdrive. I can be in the midst of a monumentally important moment and simultaneously planning my evening, wondering about a film I watched, or worrying about a time that hasn’t happened yet. And like Dr. Manhattan, this can cause some serious relationship troubles as those around me struggle with my perceived inattentiveness and inability to focus.

I may not physically be on Mars constructing a strange castle of matter that I produced with just my thoughts, hiding from all of humanity, alone with nothing but my thoughts, but emotionally that’s pretty identical. My days spent tapping away in my own “crystal castle” ignoring my friends and family, hours melting into nothing, perhaps we’ve all got a bit of Dr. Manhatten in us.

The hollywood take:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVEspFZCmmA