You have to look carefully for it, but on Enid Coleslaw’s bookshelf in Ghost World, Clowes draws an Archie comic (upper right corner). While Clowes was in art school in the early 1980s, a teacher told him that if his style were “more
sophisticated and not this ‘Betty and Veronica’ kind of thing, [he] might
really go places.”
Your abuser’s past trauma and mental health problems do not excuse their treatment of you. The validity of both your experiences are not mutually exclusive. Abuse doesn’t take place inside a vacuum, and the shit they went through/are going through does not minimize the pain they’ve caused you.
