Omar

My first reaction to In My Darkest Hour was to put it down in disgust at the overly sexualized females and the stereotypical horny male who has a hard time controlling his urges and so is constantly making women uncomfortable to the point of even violating one (with the mirror).  In my opinion anyone, whether or not they are bipolar, schizophrenic, sociopaths, etc who approaches women in the way that the Omar approaches them is disgusting.  My first impression is still reigning high, but unfortunately for my moral righteousness I decided to go back through and recheck my first reading.  The results are what follows.

I do not know where the line between reality and fantasy lies within this graphic novel and so it is particularly difficult for me to come to a conclusion as to whether or not I have any sympathy for Omar, or of his girlfriend for that matter.  We see a distortion of reality throughout. One example is towards the beginning when we see Omar looking for Lucinda, and there are several panels of him stretched horizontally so that he looks obese. He might be overweight, depending on his height , but not to the extent that these panels show.  Here we are seeing him through his own eyes, and the distortion that such a perspective brings with it.  The difficult aspect, however, is that there is no way of knowing, no indicator within the text, that, at any point, we are seeing something outside of Omar’s perspective.  In my first reading I assumed that only some of it was from Omar’s point of view, but after looking through it I’m not sure that any of it was from a third person point of view.

This graphic novel is not so subtly about sexual abuse, and as much as I want to dismiss Omar’s actions (again, looking up the girl’s skirt with a mirror) as being that of a self-centered male who sees women as little more than pieces of meat, it’s clear that the truth is that he does not understand the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior when it comes to approaching a female.  He’s not trying to overpower them or hurt them and for this I have to let go of my righteousness.

Finally, my dislike of Omar is because Omar does not like himself.  There must be some reason that Lucinda is with him, and we see pieces of the pain and disgust and confusion that Omar lives through with the “grotesque” images strewn throughout the novel.  We see his childhood abuse, his gross body, his strange dark dreams from which he awakes to Lucinda telling him everything is okay.  Some of the images, such as the female who’s breasts have been sewn on, who has what looks to be Jesus hanging out by her vag, whose face is made of pieces from different pictures, and who has something indecipherable happening to her mouth, remind me primarily of something I would find if I stumbled onto a serial killer’s art book.  But I think it’s important to remember that these are Omar’s eyes.  That image is the first hint that something else is going on here, that something along the lines of abuse have happened.  My first reaction is to think the artist was a little full of himself and that these images are unnecessary for the telling of the story (as Jay describes in his post), but now I think they’re there to show something outside the norm, something truly distorted and ugly and frightening, and it’s not Omar, at least not yet.  It’s his past, it’s the symptoms of childhood sexual abuse, it’s the extremely serious but rarely discussed psychological monsters that trauma can manifest.