Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple Page A

with our art spread out, praying that Matt Groening would come along and buy something. We were strong believers in noblesse oblige .
    For long stretches, nobody even glanced our way and the only time we got anyone was when the line for Todd McFarlane was so long that the occasional bearded man-child would shuffle a few steps off his path to deliver a disdainful glare or perhaps to use one of my originals as a coaster for his drink.
    It was during a soul-numbing moment of career introspection such as this that an anomalous young woman emerged from behind the crowd. She had good posture and wore a dress (an actual dress, not a Troll Queen dress). She was apparently a fan of Eightball because she recognized the pages I was selling. “ Ghost World ! That’s the cutest!” and “I can’t believe you’re selling Ugly Girls, it’s super-cute.” Cute wasn’t a word I usually heard in relation to my art ( Ew was number one, followed by Why? ). I saw her turn to survey the now-endless McFarlane line. “I suppose I should feel sorry for them,” she said. “What’s the point in that?” I responded. “They don’t even know they’re sad.” We discussed whether this gave us the right to hate them and agreed that it probably did. Then she picked up my whole portfolio and asked, “Would it be bad if I just bought everything? ” I told her that would be fine.
    She wrote me a check. ELEANOR FLOOD. NEW YORK, NY.
    The next time I saw her was nine years later. I was in New York for something and promised my sister I’d go see my nephew who was answering phones for a production company. She said, “You know the show. Looper Wash. The short about girls on ponies that played before Ice Age and now it’s a series on Fox?” I had no idea what she was talking about (thank God), so I just said, “What’s the address?”
    I went to a building in SoHo, which sounds impressive but surely was not, and walked up to the fourth floor. Apparently, everyone was in a screening down the hall because the place was deserted. In a corner office I saw a drawing board with a big mirror propped in front of it. That struck me as exactly the kind of egomaniacal, solipsistic self-focus I so admire in myself, so I went over to explore further.
    On the drawing board (along with viciously mean doodles of Fox executives, which instantly endeared this person to me) were colored-pencil illustrations. They were busy and “pretty,” full of soft tints and delicate expressions, which aren’t qualities I usually go for. But they were also disturbing, and not in the usual ironic Jughead-with-a-crack-pipe way. They were disturbingly sincere.
    I heard a bubbly voice. “Dan Clowes!” It was Eleanor Flood. Turns out she was the animation director at Looper Wash and my nephew had told her I was coming. She pulled out the portfolio of my art that she’d bought years before.
    “Do you want any of these back?” she said. “A lot of them are probably worth a fortune now. I feel bad. I could cry sometimes thinking of how little I paid for them.”
    I actually had cried thinking the same thing. I told her she could keep them.
    She saw me looking at her drawings. “I know,” she said. “Aren’t those super-cute?”
    Yes, they were, I said, studying them for an awkwardly long time. “The Minerva asked me to nominate,” I said. “Do you think I could submit these?”
    “But isn’t that for graphic novelists?” she asked.
    “Put these together and you’ve got a comic.” Even back then, I couldn’t bring myself to use the term graphic novel . She got what I meant.
    “Oh,” she said.
    Unlike many stories about childhood, The Flood Girls feels immediate and present-tense urgent. Though it’s dense with period detail, a nostalgia trip it is not. The vantage is frank and unsentimental. That Eleanor Flood is able to infuse these ominous, cryptic images with so much warmth is a rare trick, and I look forward to seeing