Window #2
What’s your general behavior towards bums? Or is “homeless people” the preferred term? Drifters? Vagrants? Whatever the word is, anybody who has spent any amount of time working or living in a big city has developed some sort of strategy by now. Do you give them your spare change? Stare straight ahead and ignore them completely, no matter what they say or do? Take them on a case by case basis, so that you end up only giving money to the most needy/most accomplished con artists? I was always a sucker for them when I worked in downtown Columbus, or at least often a sucker. I’m bringing all this up because the first story in this installment of Window is a detailed account of a time that Dave was accosted on the street by a homeless man. He had some warning, as he could hear and see the guy yelling at other people as they passed him, but Dave hoped to scoot past him. No such luck, and the man is soon following Dave on his way to work, yelling and cursing the whole way, but all while telling a story that makes him at least a little sympathetic. Dave finally decides to give him $5 (as by this point the guy has already had his arm around Dave a few times and Dave is getting a little freaked out by the whole thing), but the guy still doesn’t get the hint and ends up following Dave all the way to the train station. He even gives Dave his number and asks Dave to call him sometime, which saves Dave the embarrassment of having to come up with a fake name and address of his own. The other story in this deals with Dave trying to get the names of a couple of new students down and being unable to understand what one of the small kids is getting at when she just has to go to the bathroom. Don’t worry, I didn’t spoil the whole thing, there are still plenty of nuggets in here for you to uncover when you rent it from my comic rental store in the future, or if you manage to find it for sale somewhere. As always it’s well worth a look, and he does seem to have a knack for excellent closing panels…
