A Small Killing - chapter 2

Welcome back! We're on to chapter 2 of A Small Killing. You can find my write-up of chapter 1 here.  If you want to follow along (warning, there's going to be a lot of spoilers) you can easily find a used copy online, or if you're less morally inclined, you can read it online here.

At the start of chapter 2, we're now in London. The years on the chapter page say 1979-1985, which don’t correspond to the setting of this chapter, as it continues the story of Timothy from New York. What becomes obvious is that even though the story is moving forward in time, we’re also traveling backwards through Timothy’s past to when he worked in London from 1979-1985.

In a way, this comic is like Memento, where it is moving both backwards and forwards, also with an unreliable narrator. Let’s see who ends up dead at the end, shall we?

The chapter page opens on 1980s London architecture and business people moving quickly while wearing strange headsets. (Were those headsets a thing in the late ‘80s?)

Timothy says of landing in London, “It’s like New York was just a peculiar mood I flew out of.” Remember that quote, as I’ll be coming back to it later.

Timothy doesn’t see any boy depart the plane and goes to his hotel and sleeps. All better, right?

He rides an automated train and more voices surround him, this time throat clearing replacing the sniffing of cocaine. He refers to the train as “a little clockwork train” and the architecture as “nursery architecture, like those wooden bricks they used to make, columns, blocks, triangles…” He says how after 5 o’clock this part of London must empty out. It’s weird because while that describes an office place, it also describes a daycare.

There are so many symbols for children here, but I’m not completely sure what Moore is getting at. Are we just grown up children? Does Timothy have children on the brain? I can’t decide.

Timothy’s thoughts turn to his ex-lover, Sylvia, who used to have a workshop in the area, where she made puppets and art for children’s performances. Timothy’s also stuck on how it ended with her, about how he thinks she wanted him to choose for her when “they go on and on about women’s right to choose.”

And then we see them in a flashback, him going to see her at her shop after meeting her at Barry’s party (Barry being his boss at the Forbes-McCauley advertising agency at the time). He’s checking her out and yet making sure she knows he’s married. Making sure she understands the rules before they start anything. (I love Zarate's drawings of the wildlife art and Timothy wearing the elephant mask.) Notice that she doesn't take off her welding goggles until she cuts through the bullshit and talks truthfully about knowing he's married.

Quickly the flashbacks jump to them in bed, but clearly not for the first time. And he says that he told his wife about them. In the stream-of-conscious monologue, Timothy thinks about all the art Sylvia created to mimic real animals and life and yet she hated his eggs, which were from real life and not allowed to have life. That he can’t see the difference speaks to the difference between them. And if you look at that last image between them, they almost look like a yin-yang symbol. They were never right for one another.

The fallout from the affair destroyed his marriage, but he threw himself into work and produced some car ads that were “brilliant. They kept Forbes-McCauley afloat.” We see a bit of that ad, just frightened lady’s eyes. The dots are from an ad, but they also look like comic book dots, don’t they?

In the present, he thinks about Thatcher and Bush and complains a bit, but you get the sense that maybe he voted for them. Then he sees a kid, and rushes after him, but it’s just a separate kid on a skateboard. He feels humiliated, “such a prat. It feels great.” What?

This is another place I get stuck. Why would it feel great to be an idiot or an ass? I guess it’s because it isn’t the kid from New York and he’s relieved? But if you have a better theory, let me know.

He goes back to his hotel and hears more voices. And he starts thinking about Flite and what he’s going to do, which leads him back to the car ad. He tells us that the car ad is what got Flite to notice him. He wonders where his inspiration came from (but we'll soon see).

He heads out on the town and recalls a night out with Barry and Nigel. Of Barry, Timothy thinks, “He turned out to be a bastard though, didn’t he, Barry? Pretending to be ill… When I said I was leaving, trying to make me feel g…”

The “G” word you’re looking for there, Timothy, is gay. And when Barry was pretending to be ill, did he have AIDS?

He flashes back to being hired by Barry. Barry hires Timothy with very little experience and little room at the agency, and Timothy is grateful. And the flashback ends with Timothy’s finger touching Barry’s. Who came on to whom?

Remember, Zarate connected with Moore by submitting a piece to Moore's anthology against homophobia. Moore was putting out an anthology against homophobia because he was living in a marriage with a wife and her girlfriend, so homosexuality was on Moore's mind at the time. (To be clear, I'm not suggesting Moore is/was gay, though good for him if he is/was, too. There's just no evidence that I've come across in my readings.)


My friend Koom, with whom I recorded the podcast about A Small Killing that started all of this, disagrees with my take on Timothy being gay or having gay flirtations:

"I'm not convinced they were sleeping together but I'll concede that perhaps Barry is meant to be read as gay. I think a lot of the other points are circumstantial at best. If they were sleeping together, Barry would not have introduced Tim to Sylvia or been detached/neutral when asking about the end of Tim's marriage. The body language between the two as Tim announces he's taking the Flite job suggests disappointed mentor and mentee. The panel where Tim touches Barry's finger is the most compelling aberration but that can also be described as evocative of a child asking an adult for something which fits into the other/thread."

To be fair, that's probably the more overt reading but there are some problems. That finger touch is hard to interpret any other way. And if Moore wanted Timothy to say that Barry was making him feel "guilty," he wouldn't have left it at "g..."

Honestly, I think Moore is playing with us here and left this purposefully vague and left the clues to us to decipher. Personally, I can't rectify that finger touch as anything other than a come-on. But there's no evidence they acted on it. Maybe Moore just wanted us to know that Timothy was flirting around beyond just Sylvia. He could have also been doing it to show the difference between now and the start of the book where Timothy pulled back his hand from the flight attendant. Or maybe that Timothy was willing to lie to Barry through that touch in order to get the job. I have my theories, but I'm curious what you think.

Just a note to say that I love the way Zarate uses real photos and bits of map to illustrate this part. It looks so odd and new and different. This is very far removed from Watchmen.

And then we flashback to Barry’s party where Timothy met Sylvia. It feels like a mirror image to the party in New York. We hear the sounds of puffing weed in the crowd behind them. But this time Barry leads Timothy to Sylvia. So, maybe he didn't sleep with Barry? Or maybe they had an open relationship?

Timothy’s still thinking of the Russian campaign and his old car campaign, trying to recapture his glory. The car ad concerned Barry, who wondered how the breakup with Maggie was going. With the car ads, Timothy knew his audience. “Young, single, white, male. Earning between ten and fifteen grand.” Hmmm… that target audience sounds familiar. But I'll deal with that at the end.
Timothy sees the boy in the crowd in London and goes running after him. Interspersed with the chase are flashbacks of him leaving Sylvia, who is pregnant. She just wants him to say what he wants, and he refuses to have an opinion and puts it all on her. We also get the flashback of him leaving Barry. He just barely admits to leaving Barry in the lurch, but not quite. And the more I read this, the more I wonder if Barry's more distraught than just because he was losing an employee.

The boy leads him into a club where a riot is just breaking out. Timothy is convinced that the kid is trying to kill him, first with the car crash and now with the riot.

Zarate goes crazy with the riot police taking on the crowd. It’s some amazing work.

I think Moore is making a connection between the London crowd, filled with animosity and boiling rage, with the car ad we’re just about to see. Did the ad feed off of the animosity and rage in the English young men or did the ad feed them animosity and rage. Moore doesn't say, but it's a question he wants to raise.

In flashback, we find out that the marriage with Maggie ended and he stayed with Sylvia, but made her feel terrible about it. “You do it with everything. Everything in your life has got to be somebody else’s fault,” she tells him.

She sent him the dead fetus (or did she?) after they broke up. I think Moore wants us to wonder if the kid is really Sylvia’s child. But the art and the cover of the book have left us little doubt about who the child actually is.

I had a conversation with a guy on the Alan Moore subreddit about the fetus. He made the point that it's not very realistic and we're supposed to feel a sense of horror toward Sylvia. But that's not the way I read it. I read it that we're supposed to be horrified by Timothy's reaction and seeming unconcern. That he would go from the fetus to creating an image of a car about to run down a woman suggests that he's maybe not an innocent character in this book. 

Anyway, right after the breakup, Timothy showed the car ad to Barry. And now we get to see that ad. The ad of a pack of cars chasing a woman like she’s the prey of a pack of wild animals. It’s a horrible ad filled with horrible intentions. And you can imagine it being successful.

Back at his hotel, he thinks about the kid trying to kill him (and notice his glasses are off), “I’m scared. It’s dark. I’m, out late, I want to go home, to Sheffield. I want to sleep and wake up and everything be all right.” Like a kid wanting to be made to feel safe.

Instead, he masturbates and thinks of men and women. Even his fantasies are conflicted about who and what he wants. And there's a definite connection to be made between the sperm he kills by masturbating and the dead fetus he killed by his indecision. Everything he produces is dead.

And then he curls up into a fetal position.

On the train to Sheffield the next morning, he’s deep in thought about the Flite ad. “Blue Jeans is it. Whatever the West means. To them, that’s what we associate Flite with.” He’s going to sell them America.

Meanwhile, the ticket taker comes up and asks for his ticket. But there’s a problem. Timothy only paid for a child’s fare. And then the train shoots into a dark tunnel. 

What did you think?

Shameless plug

One more project I'm working on: A friend and I have created a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

We successfully launched our first issue on kickstarter, which you can buy (PDF or physical copy) from here. It received plenty of rave reviews:

Jenn Marshall of Sirens of Sequentials said: “Miskatonic High is a fun story that balances everything you want in a good horror story. There is some gore, but not so much that you get overwhelmed. The jokes are funny, but they don’t make the story feel like a parody of something else. It was well thought out, and I cannot wait to see where it is going to go next.” Read the full review

The Pullbox called it “the bastard lovechild of John Hughes & H.P. Lovecraft.” (We’re pretty sure they meant that in a metaphorical way, because if that’s literal, well… ewww.) Read the full review

We're now Kickstartering issue two, which you can find here.