Robert MacLean

Innocence Unprotected: A Prose Comic Book Robert MacLean

When I was a kid, and my parents took me to visit my aunt, I'd hide out in my cousin's room and read her "love comics," which left an impression on me.

A scholar lost in chivalric dreams falls for a 'knight' who is anything but noble.
Pia is a professor of medieval literature-brilliant, plain, lonely.
Determined to avoid the fate of the unlived life, she can never quite find love.
The guy in the next office, bookish mousy Ron, is in love with her but afraid of his rich wife.
Her mentor Allan, a senior T. S. Eliot scholar, is gay and, since the death of his lover, in the same predicament.
Her older colleagues see her as naïve, and in class she gets so wrapped up in knightly romances that her students-those who don't adore her-ridicule her.
A new professor is given an office by hers-Graham, a rogue who can't keep a job. Because his salary is diverted into support payments he lives in his office, showers at the gym and borrows money from Pia.
When he meets Cathy, the bored young wife of Vic, an alcoholic senior professor, he wastes no time, nailing her in the library, in his office, in Vic's office, in Vic's car-carrying on their affair even as he moves in with Pia.
Allan sleeps with his student Sandy. When he breaks off the affair Sandy commits a theatrical suicide at the class party and enters the world of T. S. Eliot, invisibly visiting painful scenes in the lives of those he has left behind.
Pia's attempts to save Allan's career are sabotaged by Ron. Jo-Ella-a student, orphan and part-time stripper-having slept with both Graham and Ron, is now pregnant. She tells each of them, devastating their lives, but tells neither
about the other.
When Vic comes home and finds Graham having Cathy on the floor, he hangs himself.
Pia, emotionally connected with everyone, does her best to keep them going.