It’s a pretty widely known fact that, while the storyline of Secrets is almost entirely fictitious, the characters and their personalities are very much based on people I actually know or knew at one point. Even the roaches are based on the actual cockroaches I used to live with in college.
People who know me are some of the last people to actually get into or read the comic. I think it goes like this: if you are just visiting this website from off the net, you don’t know me from Jack. So you don’t have to factor what you know of me into your preconceptions of what the comic is going to be like. You judge it without any sort of bias. However if you actually know me, you think, “Pssht… its Joel. That guy can’t do crap. His comics can’t be that good. I’m not going to waste my time.� Or at least I suspect that’s what my friends and family think about me. That’s the sort of thing they say to my face, anyway.
However, when a friend of family member happens to, through curiosity or coercion or, most frequently, bribery, sits down and reads the comic, I inevitably get the question “So who’s the girl?�
The question presupposes that the mysterious Girl that occasionally shows up and does something enigmatic within the comic is based on a person I actually know. So here’s the full truth behind that:
One of my first crushes in life was Alice. You know, from the Lewis Carol novels. Reading those stories as an eleven or twelve-year-old, I used to fantasize about entering the story, taking her hand, and leading the poor little English girl through the mazes and confusion, comforting her tears and giving her someone normal to talk to. I think this is the sort of protective instinct that is inbuilt into most guys. More than just getting together with a girl, guys want someone they can be a protector and hero to.
I have the strong desire to protect the sad, alone girls summoning the inner strength to get through what it is they have to.
When I was playing Star Wars Galaxies I met a girl named Keisha. She was a new player, or n00b in the language you people understand. She needed help completing a mission. And then another, and another. It got so that every time I was in, I would find her, getting her tail kicked, and I would ride in on my white speeder, whip out my lightning cannon, and stand in the gap over her incapacitated body fighting off wave after wave of enemy units until she recovered and I could take her wounded body to medical facilities. I was her knight in shining armor, or bounty hunter in heavy compact armor. Now I know you girls are all burying your heads in your hands and mourning the utter geekery of it all, but how different is this than the flights of fantasy you take into romance novels? Maybe the epic fantasy story are a guys version of the romance novel. Maybe we like being the Luke Skywalker or Han Solo rescuing the Princess Leia as much as ya’ll like be the Scarlet O’Hare doing whatever the heck it was she did.
But, at the risk of revealing the truly hopeless depths of my nerditory nature, like Geordi LaForge, I knew when to turn the computer off and come back to reality. The appearance of The Girl is based on how Keisha looked in-game, minus the Star Warsy clothing which I chose to replace with a shamelessly traditional schoolgirl outfit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2005 at 1:48 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.