One of the fun things about comix is the way you can use the art to say things without having to spell them out, or to underscore things touched on in the dialog. In this tale I wanted to enhance the sense of drunkenness, so I used distortion to give it an off-balance unsteady feeling.

At 21, Jason’s drinking was kinda out of control, limited mostly by available cash. Of course bars were always available, especially with a real ID, but they were expensive, so Jason couldn’t go to them every night. Instead he would crash pretty much any party he could get into without getting thrown out.

And house parties had the advantage of handy bedrooms.

There’s a thing in literary analysis known as the “unreliable narrator”, and in case you haven’t figured it out yet: it applies to this whole damn thing here.

It usually refers to things like Chris Kyle (American Sniper) making up shit in his autobiography to seem more bad-ass or sympathetic, or the character of Humbert Humbert, who narrates Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, filtering everything he tells to the reader thru his perceptions.

But in comix, the artist is the narrator too, and I wanted to take advantage of that with this tale, filtering the visuals thru the drunken filter of the protagonist’s poor judgment. At least until the sober light of daybreak splashes him with cold reality. In this particular case, you can trust the writer (the dialog is accurate), but not the artist (the art is … not).

One thing I am trying not to do with these stories is to massage the facts to make Jason look good. I’ll massage the facts alright – and for the record, nothing in this series should be taken as fully factual – but as this tale indicates, Jason won’t necessarily come out of it looking like some kind of role model. I’m pretty sure I’m no Humbert Humbert, but I’m also not Chris Kyle’s version of Chris Kyle. I’m … something else.

And this isn’t the end of the story. The story continues several years later in “Party’s Over”