Miranda

Miranda is the artist behind the Dr. Eleven comics, whose imagined world carries traces of places, people, and moments from her own life. Through the comics’ images, Arthur Leander remembers the intensity of her work, while Clark Thompson eventually recognizes a gathering from his past in a scene she has transformed for the page.

Identity and Artistic Practice

Miranda’s preference was for drawing rather than writing dialogue. Arthur recalls watching her at a drafting table, bent over her work and absorbed enough not to notice him at first. The memory gives her creative practice a strikingly private quality: Arthur had seen her concentration directly, but only later, while discussing the comic with Tanya, did he understand how central the visual art had been to Miranda.

The pages also connect her creative life with a later career in shipping. In Clark’s recollection of a Los Angeles dinner party, Miranda leaves the gathering and walks out into the night; Clark follows because he is curious about her and wants to know her better. Years later, he remembers that she went into shipping, a fact that links the woman in the old gathering to the professional life he recalls after the world has changed.

The Comics and Their Making

The comics’ imagery bears the marks of sustained revision. For a scene in the second volume, Miranda discarded fifteen versions before she felt she had rendered the ghost of Captain Lonagan as she wanted. In the finished image, the recently killed mentor appears as a delicate, translucent figure in the dim light of Dr. Eleven’s office. Its administrative area closely reproduces Leon Prevant’s office suite in Toronto, including the two staplers on the desk, while the window replaces the view over Lake Ontario with the City’s rocky islands and harbor bridges. Luli, a Pomeranian, sleeps in a corner of the frame.

That scene’s carefully observed office details show Miranda turning familiar surroundings into material for an invented world. The comic does not simply reproduce a real office: it retains its arrangement and objects while shifting the view beyond its windows, making recognition and transformation part of the same image.

Memory and Afterlife

Clark encounters Miranda’s work again in the Museum of Civilization, reading the comics by candlelight. A dinner-party scene initially seems familiar; then its figures bring back a gathering he attended in Los Angeles before the collapse. A woman with square-framed glasses recalls travel in the Czech Republic, Elizabeth Colton sits at the far end of the table, and a shadowed man resembles Arthur. In Clark’s memory, the comic’s Dr. Eleven occupies the place held by Miranda in the real gathering. The image prompts him to remember Miranda’s departure and wonder what became of her.

The comic thus preserves more than its fictional adventures for Clark: its arrangement of people and details reopens a scene from a shared past. Miranda is absent from the drawn dinner party, her chair given to Dr. Eleven, yet that substitution helps Clark recognize the memory. Her work remains capable of bringing people and places back into view long after the gathering itself has passed.