Malaysia

Malaysia appears at the end of Miranda’s life as the place where a piece of her artistic past returns with unusual force. On an empty beach on the coast, delirious, she repeatedly thinks of an image she had painstakingly drawn years earlier for Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit.

Miranda’s Final Image

The remembered panel shows Dr. Eleven visited by the ghost of Captain Lonagan, his mentor, who has recently been killed by an Undersea assassin. Miranda had discarded fifteen versions before she felt she had drawn the ghost correctly. In the image, Captain Lonagan is rendered in delicate watercolours as a translucent figure in the dim light of Dr. Eleven’s office.

The office is modeled closely on Leon Prevant’s administrative area in his Toronto office suite, down to the two staplers on the desk. Its window, however, looks out over the City, rocky islands, and bridges arching across harbours, rather than over Lake Ontario. Luli, a Pomeranian, sleeps in a corner of the panel. These precise details make the remembered image a constructed place as well as a figure from Miranda’s earlier work.

The Coast as a Point of Return

At the coast of Malaysia, the image does not remain a settled memory: Miranda drifts away from it and back toward it, then seems to slip through its frame. The scene links her final days to the labor of making the drawing, while the panel’s fictional office carries traces of the real Toronto office that helped shape it. Malaysia is thus presented not through a broader account of the country, but as the setting where Miranda’s last experience converges with an image she had revised repeatedly and kept in mind years later.