You Are Here is a graphic novel written and illustrated by Kyle Baker and released by DC Comics under their Vertigo Comics label in 1998.
You Are Here provides examples of:
- A Deadly Affair: During his days as a criminal, Noel slept with the wife of a gentleman called Vaughan Dreyfuss. Vaughan reacted by murdering said wife, chopping her into many pieces. Then, after spending only a year in jail thanks to a good lawyer, bad evidence, worse cops, and prison overpopulation he wrote a book called Yes, I Did It and I'll Kill Again, and appears on a news show swearing that he will kill Noel.
- All-Loving Hero: Helen starts out this way. By the end of the story, she's willing to make an exception for Noel.
- Amicable Exes: Averted. By the end of the story, Noel's getting along better with Helen's new husband than Helen herself.
- An Aesop: What a person does (or has done) is just as important as who a person is on the inside.
- Apologetic Attacker: Noel apologizes for both sleeping with Vaughan's wife and for killing him before shooting Vaughan in the head.
- Be Yourself: A lot of Noel's trouble come about because he lied to Helen about who he was. By the end of the novel, Noel has accepted his past as a criminal, but hasn't let it control his future. He appears to be genuinely happy and at ease for the first time as well.
- Bittersweet Ending: Oscar has been killed by Vaughan, Helen falls very very much out of love with Noel and marries someone else, but he can still see their son twice a month via court order. He is also heavily implied to hook up with Tracy (who was previously shown to genuinely be interested in him) and ends up with a lucrative job painting covers of romance novels. And, of course, he's no longer being stalked by a vengeful serial killer, which is always nice.
- City Mouse: Noel Coleman is a Manhattan artist who bought a house in upstate New York after hitting it big. He's used to The Big Rotten Apple.
- Country Mouse: Helen is from upstate New York, which is basically Arcadia. She's used to friendly neighbors, open doors and nature's beauty.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Noel doesn't know his father and was born to a crackhead mother, and went on to a life of crime before becoming a successful painter.
- Dark Secret: Noel's relationship with Helen is predicated entirely upon lies he spun in order to present the false image of being a flower painter who doesn't drink or smoke and absolutely does not have a past as a career criminal.
- Friend to All Living Things: Helen talks to wild animals and successfully treats them like pets, which explains this to her mother as making sure who you are is more important than what you are or what you're doing. Her mother calls her a nut.
- Genre Mashup: Screwball Comedy meets City Noir, and neither escapes unscathed.
- Gonk: Oscar's face is drawn more like a wacky cartoon character or caricature than anyone else.
- Granola Girl: Helen has elements of this, being a Wide-Eyed Idealist Friend to All Living Things who made her own job where she "lets her clients' core essence shine" and "dissolves distortion in their auric field so that they can stabilize their authentic cores". She also only eats salads and health food.
- I Have Your Wife: In order to flush out Oscar, Vaughan stalks Helen and manages to isolate her on a ferry.
- I Love the Dead: While interrogating Oscar, Vaughan implies that he's willing to torture Tracy to death and bang her corpse and that doing so is a lot of fun. One assumes he did this with his wife (his only other known victim) after murdering her.
- Imperiled in Pregnancy: Helen is in a very early pregnancy during the story. She ends up menaced by a murderer who's out for Noel as well as some fairly dangerous action.
- Indy Ploy: Whatever Noel's other faults might be, he thinks quickly on his feet and improvises extremely well under pressure.
- Interrupted Intimacy: Noel comes back home after a year to find out the hard way that his best friend Oscar's been using his apartment for hookups.
- Jerkass: Helen's mom doesn't have any redeeming qualities, belittles her and has an acidic relationship with Noel.
- Kavorka Man: Oscar is a short fireplug of a man with a cartoony face, who not only has a beautiful girlfriend, but also regularly cheats on her. He clearly hits the gym a lot, which probably helps.
- Ladykiller in Love: Noel, who apparently has a checkered past romantically as well as legally, said a bunch of BS and pretended to have the same interests as to get Helen in the sack, then genuinely fell in love with her to the point of wanting to move up to Phonecia, marry her and start a family.
- Love Cannot Overcome: Helen and Noel are a happy couple at the beginning of the story. After everything Helen goes through thanks to his lies and his past as a criminal they're barely on speaking terms at the end, and only because he has a court order that allows them to see their baby son.
- Magic Feather: Tracy (Oscar's main squeeze) is a shy sex worker who becomes confident and chatty by putting on a pair of nigh-opaque sunglasses which block out the rest of the world around her. After she and Noel end up successfully defending themselves against a bachelor party gone rowdy, she ditches the glasses for good.
- Male Frontal Nudity: Thanks to Noel interrupting him while he was with a lady, we get to see Oscar in all his, uh, glory.
- The Missus and the Ex: As mentioned, Noel seems to get along with Helen's new husband just fine.
- Mistaken for Gay: Briefly. Oscar claims he's married when he's hooking up with ladies so that they don't call him or get mad when they see him with another woman. When Noel comes home and catches Oscar in flagrante delicto with a lady, she comes to the obvious conclusion, over Oscar's protests.
- Mistaken Identity: Oscar was being busted for possession and had to give the name of a dealer. Since two of the four cops arresting him were also his dealers and IA was on their necks, he had to come up with something to fool the other two. Noel's was the first name to come to mind, meaning that Noel has, technically, been wanted by the cops for about a year when he returns.
- Neck Snap: A non-fatal example. During their struggle, Noel manages to break Vaughan's neck, essentially rendering him helpless. He has to shoot Vaughan to kill him.
- Offscreen Romance: The story opens with Noel and Helen having been in a relationship for a year.
- Oh, Crap!: When speaking with Vaughan, whom she vaguely recognizes from having attempted to kill her and Noel before, Helen suddenly realizes who he is. Her eyes go wide and she goes silent for a moment, then she tries to excuse herself to the ladies room. Vaughan doesn't let her leave.
- Pretender Diss: Noel explains to Oscar and their bartender that the people who buy his paintings of his exploits in The Big Rotten Apple, are the kind of people who think movies like Pulp Fiction are real and describes them as voyeurs who buy books and pictures and videos about crime without getting their hands dirty.
- Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Noel and Helen, with the former being an ex-criminal with a lot of dark things in his past and the latter being a naive Granola Girl.
- Shoot the Dog: During the final confrontation, Noel has successfully rendered Vaughn a near-quadriplegic by breaking his neck and stolen the killer's gun. Helen begs him to spare Vaughan's life, believing that in his state he'll be no threat to them. Noel, however, points out that Vaughan has a bestselling book which will likely give him more than enough money to get himself patched up and/or send people after them. The gunshot that ends Vaughan's life is also the final nail in the coffin for Noel and Helen's relationship.
- Stealth Pun: Noel, an artist, painted over the sordid details of his past when describing his life to Helen.
- Take a Third Option: Instead of going through the door which Vaughn is watching, Noel goes over the side of the ferry and inches his way along to rescue Helen.
- Take That!: Oscar, Noel, and their bartender, as people familiar with the actual seamier side of life, take the piss out of Pulp Fiction (a relatively recent release in 1998) in one scene.
- Took A Level In Cynicism: At the end of the story, Helen has learned that Noel was lying to her about basically everything in their relationship, been held captive by a serial killer because of Noel's hidden past, and then watched Noel execute that serial killer before her eyes. Noel tries to salvage things between them by pointing out that she herself said that you have to look past everything and that a person isn't what they say, do, or look like and all that matters is who they are inside. Helen wearily calls that naïve intellectual bullshit. Cue the Sun.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Helen starts the story as a particularly naïve one of these. Not so much at the end.
- With Friends Like These...: Oscar is the kind of friend that'll get you into and out of trouble with equal frequency.
- Would Hit a Girl: Vaughan socks Helen in the face when she tries to get away from him.
