Dr. Eleven comics

The Dr. Eleven comics are Miranda Carroll’s hand-drawn science-fiction series, an evolving work whose islands, bridges, and underwater shelters give form to imagined survival after catastrophe. They matter both as objects passed between Miranda and Arthur Leander and as stories that Kirsten Raymonde later treats as a possible alternative to the life she has lived.

Creation and changing focus

Miranda continued drawing throughout her travels, carrying a sketchbook for the hours she spent alone in hotel rooms at night. The comics were not a fixed project: over time, their center of attention shifted. Dr. Eleven had long been the hero, but Miranda had lately grown irritated with him and more interested in the Undersea. Her attention turned to the people living in underwater fallout shelters, holding on to the hope that the world they remembered might be restored. Miranda understood the Undersea as a kind of limbo and spent long hours sketching lives unfolding in underground rooms.

That change in focus makes the series more than an adventure organized around its named hero. The Undersea offers Miranda a way to draw out the uncertain life around him: not simply the escape from a damaged world, but the prolonged existence of people waiting below it. Her attention to their rooms and daily lives gives the imagined setting a human scale, while the possibility of restoration remains a hope rather than an accomplished outcome.

The first issues and their images

Miranda assembled the first two issues and paid to have a few copies printed. Their titles were Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit. During a visit with Arthur, she took copies of both issues from her handbag and gave them to him. The exchange joined a work she had made largely in private to a relationship in which Arthur had already noticed one of its images.

The first issue makes its world legible through a striking landscape: the sharp islands of the City, with streets and buildings terraced into rock and high bridges connecting them. Beneath the islands, in aquatic darkness, enormous airlock doors mark the route to the Undersea. Arthur opened the comic to a two-page spread of ocean and linked islands at twilight. Dr. Eleven stands on a rock with his Pomeranian beside him, while the accompanying line reads, “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.” The sentence places loss inside the landscape itself: the view is beautiful, but it is also a damaged home seen from within its aftermath.

Arthur recognized the image from a cover that had once hung on a studio wall in Los Angeles. He had compared it to an establishing shot in a movie, a description that emphasizes how the drawing introduces an entire world at a glance. As he turned the pages, he remembered Dr. Eleven’s space station, though he had forgotten that detail. He also asked whether the dog was still alive. Miranda told him that Luli had died a couple of years earlier. Arthur expressed sympathy and praised the comics again. His responses move between recognition of the art, a partial lapse of memory, and attention to the small personal detail carried into the fictional world.

Kirsten and the imagined escape

The comics also shape how Kirsten thinks about other possible lives. In a conversation with August about space travel, she asks whether it had been invented and connects what she has seen in pictures to her comic books. August distinguishes a journey to a grey moon from the intergalactic travel found in television fiction. Kirsten then imagines a parallel universe in which she and others boarded Station Eleven and escaped before the world ended. The comics supply a specific vehicle for that speculation: not merely travel to another planet, but departure before catastrophe.

Years later, Kirsten is looking for a copy while she and August search a living room before leaving with their belongings. She says she wants Dr. Eleven, though she would settle for Dear V.: An Unauthorized Portrait of Arthur Leander. The moment places the comics beside a different kind of book, one connected to Arthur’s life, but Kirsten names the comics first. Her search is part of a practical departure—she and August have suitcases, clothing, magazines, and other things they think may be useful—yet she pauses among the bookshelves to look for stories she wants to carry forward. The scene records the desire without confirming that she finds a copy.

Survival, memory, and possibility

Across Miranda’s changing drawings and Kirsten’s imagined parallel universe, the comics hold together two forms of escape. One is outward: the space station and the possibility of leaving a world before it ends. The other remains below the surface, in the Undersea, where people endure in shelters and hope for the return of a remembered world. Miranda’s growing interest in those inhabitants complicates the attraction of the heroic figure. The series can imagine departure, but it also lingers with people who remain in limbo.

The comics’ importance therefore lies not only in their speculative setting. Their images are portable, reproducible objects that preserve Miranda’s creative attention, prompt Arthur’s recognition, and offer Kirsten a language for imagining that history might have taken another course. The pictured world does not erase loss: its home is damaged, its shelters are provisional, and even the dog represented beside the hero is gone from Miranda’s life. Yet the work keeps those places and attachments available to be revisited, whether through a printed issue, a remembered image, or the possibility Kirsten voices of a different universe.