Split is my first graphic novel. You can download and read it on the "Comics" page of this site. My friends who have read it complained that it is a bit confusing, so here's a little delineation of plot, theme, and philosophicatin'.

Despite the rather quotidian nature of the events in Split, this comic is basically a speculative story. Our hero, Tom Genneros, is at work one day, when a coworker, Frank Gerhardt, comes in with a gun and begins to shoot people at random. After Frank corners Tom in the bathroom, the story splits in two--on the left hand pages we follow what would have happened had Tom been shot and then recovered. On the right hand pages, we follow what would have happened had Tom gotten the gun away from Frank and killed him instead.

I got interested in this idea, because I noticed that in most of the novels I read, and the movies and plays I saw, the act of violence was the resolution of the story, and if the main characters were alive at the end, we had a happy ending, while if the main characters were dead, we had a sad ending. But I was thinking that violence changes us, whether we´re the victims or the aggressors, and our lives don´t necessarily go back to the way they were simply because the threat is over. So I wanted to see what would happen if I put the act of violence at the beginning of the story as a catalyst, and not at the end, as a resolution. Also, I entered the work force in the late eighties, just as a wave of workplace violence was passing through the country. This was Reagan's America, a time when people in their twenties thought offices were glamorous and sexy. People wanted to work on Wall Street and be rebels, and it seemed to me that there was something essentially American about a combination of the office and gunplay.