Bridging the Gap: Issue #1

Starting this week we’re launching a brand new annotations column in the spirit of MGA Study Hall (which I co-write) entitled Bridging the Gap, offering up annotations to help solve the mystery behind Jim McCann, Rodin Esquejo and Sonia Oback’s “Mind the Gap.”

The aim of this annotation column is to point out some of the cultural references and clues we’ve picked up on that may not be readily apparent to everything. As a note, this article features incredibly heavy spoilers for the issue, so if you haven’t read it yet we’d recommend looking elsewhere for the time being.

If you have read it, however, take a look beyond.

The Most Infectious Song Of All Time?

The comic opens up with the introduction of our first character Jo, whom the unconscious heroine Elle is calling (assumedly) seconds after her accident. We hear some music playing from a ringtone and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s one of the catchiest ballads of all time — Lionel Richie’s “Hello.” It’s a song about being in love with someone but also being too afraid to say something for whatever reason. The song is basically the forever alone anthem, although Wikipedia tells us that the shy guy anthem has actually helped several men propose. And if you’ve never seen it before, the music video for this song is quite fantastic.

In the context of this issue, though? Well, I’m not quite sure. However, when the lyrics are paired up against the image of a dream catcher in the first panel of the book, I’d venture a guess that a) dreams and b) repressed/unspoken feelings on behalf of Jo for lead character Elle are heavily in relation here.

Then again, why is she asleep at 4:42 in the afternoon? I would imagine that dream catcher bit is rather important.

The Curious Case of Cee-Lo Green and Suspicion Arouses

On the second page, we are given quite a lot of information that I’m not sure what we should do with yet. Here’s what we know:

The page introduces Dane, an oddly wet hoodie wearing guy with two phones for some reason. At least, it looks like he has two phones, as he throws one on the couch and makes reference to having a new one he doesn’t understand how to use yet. What’s odd about him being wet is that as he gets a call from Jo, he appears to be leaving his apartment. So what’s got him so worked up? And what was he doing “on the subway earlier”? (You see where I’m going with this, readers, right?)

Additionally, we hear that Dane’s ringtone is “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo Green, a popular song about anger towards a girl who left the singer for a guy with more money/toys (with the “fuck you” of the song being directed towards the guy). What’s odd about this is that it isn’t his ringtone for Jo, but rather a tone that he claims Elle changed.

So if we start putting two and two together, we have to ask ourselves: if Jo assumedly has unspoken romantic feelings for Elle (as implied by the “Hello” ringtone and photo that comes up when she called), why would Elle change Dane’s ringtone to “Fuck You”?

Oh, and before Jo can really let her suspicions about Elle be known, Dane replies with “already on it.” Curious, that.

A Family Divided

Within the next two pages, we meet Elle’s parents and brother. It’s an interesting divide here as only the father seems to care, and he’s the only busy one (he mentions having been in meetings at the office, though this obviously could be a lie). The mother and the brother, on the other hand, are hanging out at home and shopping respectively, and neither seem particularly worried about Ellis’ accident. However, unfortunately for Elle’s father, we meet him coming out of a subway. That doesn’t bode well.

Elle’s brother Edward Jr, on the other hand, has a shopping bag with a hoodie in it, which is important for the next section. He mentions he was shopping, but he also mentions that he was at a tailor — and last I checked, you can’t have a hoodie tailored, and you wouldn’t wear tailored apparel in the rain with no umbrella.

Random Fun Fact #1

Elle is brought to Saint Francis Hospital. Saint Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of animals and the environment.

I do not have a good connection between the two things at the moment, but it’s a fun fact to consider none the less.

A Somewhat Familiar Hoodie And An Unknown Voice

Look, I don’t want to insinuate too much, but that get-up does look pretty much exactly like what Dane was wearing, doesn’t it? Then again, that might just be the easy answer. It doesn’t seem like anything could be that simple.

The real question is: who told him to do what he did? And why? The caller does make specific reference to the phone in hand

Also: why are there gargoyles on a hospital? Seems rather unnecessarily menacing on a place of healing, doesn’t it?

Wait, Make That Two Hoodies

Here we meet Doctor Geller, a doctor “in between shifts” who gets called to pick up someone else’s slack when Elle is brought into the ER. Of course, what is not so friendly about her is how she’s sneaking into the hospital locker room in a hoodie similar to the one we saw the attacker wear, that she’s surprised when someone walks in on her and that she lies about taking a nap. Why would a doctor need to lie about napping?

You know, I’m reminded of Twin Peaks a little here. (Mild spoiler here for those who haven’t seen Twin Peaks before:) Remember how we spent the whole first season and half of the second season trying to figure out who killed Laura Palmer? And when we finally found out who it was, that just opened up a bigger mystery since the person who did it wasn’t the person who did it? I would guess we’re probably looking at something like that here.

Watch The Time

As Jim McCann annotates in the back of the issue, every page come with a timestamp hidden somewhere on the page in an incredibly well-placed little element of detail:

• Page 1, Jo – 4:42
• Page 2, Dane -4:50
• Page 3, Min – 4:52
• Page 4, Edward and Edward Jr – 4:53, 4:54
• Page 5, the Attacker – 5:02
• Page 6, Doctor Geller – 5:03

That’s a whole 21 minutes between when Elle calls Jo and Dr. Geller sneaks into the locker room. Assuming 4:42 is when the accident happened, that means it could’ve possibly taken Dane ten minutes to get home and switch phones and ten minutes to get to the hospital (assuming he’s the attacker), Edward and Edward Jr 9 and 8 minutes to get from their locations in the city to the hospital (assuming their the attacker), and one minute for Doctor Geller to get from where the Attacker was back into the hospital (assuming she is the attacker).

Of course, we’ll later see Dane arriving late (which we’ll discuss later) and the family all arriving at unknown times, so everything’s up in the air I suppose.

The Injuries

I’m sure someone with more knowledge of “medical stuff” than I could probably do something with this information, but this is what Elle comes in with:

• Superficial wounds; light bruising on the arm, small lacerations on her face and neck
• Cranial bleeding from blunt force head trauma
• Stabilized breathing but zero pupil and physical reflex

What does this translate to to me? Hit hard in the head and cut up a bit. Not fun either way.

Also of note: her attack happend on the subway platform at 50th Street, which is the Red line. However, Elle usually takes the Blue line to get to “the theater” (later referred to as the Vineyard, which could be a reference to the off-broadway theater in New York), so something is off about why she was there at all in the first place. We also later learn that both Dane and Jo work at the theater as well.

And All That’s Just The First Seven Pages

Seriously. We’ve gotten rather in depth at this point, but I want to stress: this sequence we just covered is the first seven pages of the book.

If we can glean all this varied information from the first seven pages, I can only wonder how difficult this column is going to be to do later on!

No Rain In Your Mind

The title of this section is a bit obnoxiously punny, but bear with me regardless.

As we see, it turns out that Elle is in a coma of sorts, and that within her coma there is some sort of shared dimension entitled “the Garden” because it’s full of vegetables (vegetables here being a reference to patients in a vegetative state, making the Garden a very tongue-in-cheek title and quite dark, honestly). The Garden is full of people like her who are trying to find their way back to their bodies (which is odd since we saw her find her body at the beginning of the issue, although it was surrounded by odd black mist), and in the Garden she meets Blake Robert Plangman or “Bobby”, the Cheshire Cat to her Alice, who acts as her guide throughout her visit. His key comment? “This, my dear, is all in your head.” According to Bobby, the people and place she sees are only there because she can’t fathom being alone in this situation, but later events seem to imply otherwise. More on that later, though.

Backing up a bit: that music she hears in the beginning? That’s “No Rain” by Blind Melon, a song with a famous video featuring a young girl in a bee costume that Elle proceeds to magically don. What’s interesting about this choice of song is not so much the fact that she dons the bee costume, but rather that the lyrics and Elle’s train of thought begin to intermingle, which really hits its mark when she says the line “I’ll always be there when you wake.” Rather apt, given her comatose position. Then again, what about Jo and that dream catcher of hers?

As for why Elle became the Bee Girl temporarily, I would imagine that this is a manifestation of her subconscious via that song being stuck in her head. That and her apparent want to be an actress herself (she works at a theater, after all), coupled with assumed frustration of moving past a specific role (after all, when “the theater” is mentioned, Dane says that “maybe props needed her to get something,” and the actors usually have little to do with the props department’s coordination). Elle doesn’t want to be the Bee Girl, assumedly meaning that whatever gave her five minutes of fame has held her back permanently.

By the way, Elle begins to say what happened to “the Bee Girl” after the video. For those curious, she’s trying to be an actress and was on Reno 911 and ER, but it’s a bit hard to stop being “the Bee Girl.”

Now, the room with the big fireplace, the chair and a disco ball? Not so sure on that one. The fireplace does somewhat resemble a stage in general (never mind the one we see later), and she peels apart reality like curtains so one would assume that this is a stage reference, and one could also probably assume that this general set-up is in reference to “the theater” that Jo and Dane discuss in the real world.  The reason we can safely assume this (you know, on top of all those other reasons) is because when Bobby asks her to define “the world”, she replies with “a stage” (a reference to Shakespeare’s As You Like It). But why a fireplace? And a disco ball? Not so sure.

During the sequence where Bobby discusses her new living situation with Elle, they reference Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (off the record Wish You Were Here, which is arguably their best record) before referencing “Money” (off the record Dark Side of the Moon).

It’s a clever sequence, because as soon as they mention “Money” the iconic prism cover appears behind Bobby, through which musical notation begins to fly out while Bobby explains the complexity of the 7/4 time signature the songs baseline uses.

There’s also a quick reference to “Memory” “The Way We Were” from the musical Cats. If we’re going off the assumption that Elle is a wannabe actress or even an actress who had a shot at the big time and failed/ended up with fifteen minutes of fame, it is possible a role as Grizabella was involved.

BROKEN

Bobby asks Elle what the last thing she remembers is, and what we’re given is an esoteric sequence in which Elle flies blank-eyed and emotionless in the void of this pseudo-reality, with quotes flying all around her. Let’s try and pick apart the important ones:

• You?! Why? – Assumedly Elle in reference to whoever her attacker is.
• tired of it all – I want to say this could be Elle, since we learn that she was at the wrong train stop. Assuming she really does know what put her in this coma deep down, this could be a reference to her no longer wanting any involvement in whatever experiments are allowing her to enter the Garden now.
• Can’t stop it now – I’m going to guess this was said by her attacker in reference to whatever has put her into this weird coma.
• IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING – This is part of a public awareness campaign that encourages you to contact local authority if you see something suspicious. It’s in a lot of subways.
• Beautiful daughter – This is either her mother or father. Considering her mother seems emotionless through the rest of the issue, it’s more likely the father. However, Elle does mention at one point that in her coma is the proudest look she’s ever seen from her mother. As dark as that comment is, you never know.
• LIAR – Assuming that whatever caused her accident revolved around a fight, this could be part of it.
• be watching over you – I’m reminded of the Prisoner, but I have no great guess of who is saying this. Possibly her attacker, possibly someone from before.
• I love you – This could be anyone, but let’s assume this is in relation to…
• We’re done. it’s over – Dane mentions in the real world that the last time he spoke to Elle, there conversation was not very good. This is possibly related to that.
• SAVIOR – It is possible to assume that Elle is a special figure of sorts, one who could be some kind of messiah-esque figure who could bring about something wonderful.
• KILLER – Conversely, she could bring about something terrible.
• MANIPULATE – Given the last two, lets assume this one is self-explanatory.

Back In The Real World

There are quite a few things that happen in the real world that offer up additional motives and character moments that can be used for theories later:

• We learn about Elle’s family, in that her father is over-bearing, her mother is strict an somewhat uncaring and her brother would rather be seeing anybody else right now. As we mentioned earlier, not the most functional family unit.
• Elle’s friend Jo, when she arrives, refers to Elle as “my beautiful girl,” which would further the theory that Jo is in love with Elle, secretly or not. We also learn that Elle’s father likes Jo quite a bit, but does not care for…
• Dane, who arrives late and in that suspicious hoodie. Turns out Dane, if you hadn’t already figured it out, is Elle’s boyfriend. Not only that, but Dane alludes to the last memory he and Elle (or “Peanut”, as he calls her, which reminds me of Rube’s nickname Georgia in Dead Like Me) was not a pleasant one. This line of dialogue would make it seem like he’s not her attacker, but might be a jerk regardless.
• Geller, one of our earlier suspects, listens in to Jo and Dane talk. She then proceeds to grab Elle’s file from the Nurse’s station to read in private, noticing some sort of odd “private” discrepancy before being startled by the nurse discovering her.
• Hammond, who was late before, now shows up to be a bit of an ass. Earlier he mentioned that Elle’s parents made some sort of contribution to the hospital so he has to oversee her case personally. Geller and Hammond spit venom at one another, with Geller insinuating that Hammond is lying about her medical situation for some unknown reason.
• Edward Junior, or just “Junior”, shows up to retrieve his phone, and has some short disagreeable words with Dane.
• Dane leaves to go to the theater, despite Jo mentioning that they’re “dark” on Tuesdays, thus making that quite suspicious.

Random Fun Fact #2

Jo mentions that “somethings rotten up here in the state of Denmark.” This is a quote from Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet, in which Horatio and Marcellus discuss the shifting political hierarchy after Hamlet’s uncle usurps the throne by killing his father and marrying Hamlet’s mother. Foreshadowing, perhaps? Did someone attack Elle to take some kind of power away from her?

Dr. Harold Crenshaw and that Weird Plastic Deer

At one point, we meet Dr. Harold Crenshaw, who has a Bishop (the chess piece kind) on his desk and gets a call from a blocked number. The phone call is in regards to Elle, although we don’t know to what capacity. We do know, however, that he already has a file on her. We don’t know what kind of doctor he is, but given how much he talks about emotions, I’d venture a guess he’s a therapist (there’s also a joke later about his head having “shrunk” a little). He also admonishes Miles a bit, saying “you have a pass on projecting your fears about Ellis Peterssen onto me,” which would make it reasonable to assume that whatever Crenshaw was doing with Elle was probably a bit shady in general.

As Crenshaw leaves, though, he is apparently bringing some kind of briefcase to whoever it was that called him. The briefcase has written on it the following sequence: “6363f304cdc185c5efaaa4efe00dcadd.” If you know what that correlates to, I’d love to hear it, but in the meantime I will assume Crenshaw has a cat who walked across the labeler.

However, when he spies a deer in the road, he swerves his car and (due in part to the bad weather) flips the car and has an accident. Our hoodied individual strolls up, grabs the plastic deer in the road, steals the case and Crenshaw’s bluetooth before chatting with “Harry”, a voice on the other end of the phone. Whatever was in the cat-labeled case, Harry and the attacker need for “upstairs” — whatever that means. One could assume that with the heavy references to the afterlife throughout the comic, “upstairs” could mean Heaven to an extent, but that would put an odd skew on the chain of events in this whole story. (Or maybe not; religious extremists do do odd things in the name of their lord.)

Random Fun Fact #3

This scene gives us a clear shot of the hoodied individuals phone. What is it? A white iPhone! (It’s the little details you have to watch out for, guys.) And who in the cast has a white iPhone? Jo and Junior (though at one point Junior’s phone appears blackish/gray). Oh, and Dane had one at the beginning of the issue, but he tossed it for some unknown reason.

No Name, Or, Gina Geller Startles Really Really Easily

One of the final scenes of the book sees Gina at home, trying to make sense of what she remembers of Hammond’s notes, which shows the inconsistency of the notes from earlier. She notes that the head trauma is minimal and that the toxic screen is missing from Elle’s report, which would seem to imply that she is in some kind of induced coma as opposed to one caused by blunt trauma. Just when she’s about to write down “test for propof-“, someone bursts into her apartment with a gun, causing a startled Geller to fall out of her seat.

Thank god Geller doesn’t have fainting goat syndrome.

Anyways. What’s the “propof” here? Anyone?

Update: A reader of this column, Jennifer de Guzman (Image’s PR and Marketing Director!), e-mailed me to let me know that “propof” could be in reference to propofol and the related propofol infusion syndrome. Propofol is a hypnotic drug and the related syndrome is something affects patients undergoing long-term treatment of the drug in high doses, which can lead to a litany of bad things like cardiac failure, rhabdomyolysis, metabloic acidosis, renal failure, hyerkalemia, hypertriglyceridemia and hepatomegaly — and is often fatal. So that’s not good.

Random Fun Fact #4

Jo’s big tearful farewell to Elle mentions that they usually watch movie marathons on Tuesdays, and that today they were supposed to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a 1953 Marilyn Monroe movie starring her and Jane Russell. It’s the movie (and play, truthfully) that “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” comes from.

The odd thing here is that Jo mentions that she and Elle would root for Rosalind Russell over Marilyn, but the film starred Jane Russell, not Rosalind. Perhaps Jo just doesn’t know the difference. (It’s an innocent enough mistake, unless I’m picking at the wrong reference.)

Back in the Mind

As the issue wraps up, we see Elle watching Jo from the Garden in which Bobby refers to her as both Clarence and George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life (you get the reference, I’m sure, but for the record, Clarence is George Bailey’s guardian angel who stops Bailey from committing suicide to see what life would be like if Bailey was never around).

Then we meet Estaban. Estaban is another resident of the Garden who has been searching for his body but finding himself unable to. When we meet him, he has decided to “move on,” which we can safely assume means die. Of course, when Elle goes to visit his comatose body, she finds herself sucked in, awakening in his body and shouting “What the fuck?!” in Spanish a whole .

So here’s the weird part: earlier Bobby said this was all in her mind, including the other people. If it’s all in her mind, what is she doing in someone else’s body? (You know, assuming McCann isn’t going to pull a Dallas on us.) I suppose that’s the question for the next issue!

So, to wrap —

Meet The Cast AGAIN

So, as a recap, here is our cast in order of appearance:

• Jo Wilson – Elle’s friend. Possibly in love with Elle. Unlikely to be the attacker.
• Dane Miller – Elle’s boyfriend. Or maybe they just broke up. Possibly her attacker.
• Min Peterson – Elle’s mother. “Tiger Mom.” Seems unmoved. Highly unlikely to be the attacker, but possibly the planner.
• Edward Peterssen – Elle’s father. Seems very moved, is an over-protective father. No apparent motivation for attacking, but is at the wrong place at the wrong time regardless.
• Edward Peterssen Jr – Elle’s brother. Would be moved, but has to text instead. Dislikes Dane. Possible attacker.
Continued below

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• “The Attacker” – One of the cast, identity unknown.
• Doctor Gina Geller – Doctor on call when Elle comes into the ER. Possibly her attacker as well, but not very likely.
• Nurse Megan Kyle – Just a nurse … or is she? (Note: she’s probably just a nurse.)
• Doctor Hammond – Late to the party due to “being with a patient.” Not very likely to be her attacker, but he has secrets and doesn’t have a great alibi either.
• Hunter – Briefly mentioned “sweaty nerd” who works at the theater. Possibly her attacker, I suppose.
• Harold Crenshaw – Doctor of some kind that has worked with Elle. Not likely to be her attacker.
• Miles – Crenshaw’s assistant.. Not likely to be her attacker.
• “Harry” – A mysterious voice on the other end of the phone that orders the Attacker around. Definitely involved.

McCann notes in the back of the issue that everyone is culpable here with the exception of Jo and Min. That makes me suspect both Jo and Min, but the evidence isn’t stacked up against them.

That’s all for the first issue! You’ve got to love that for $2.99 we’re given such a dense 46-page comic. Come back in a month and we’ll try our hand at issue #2.