Just in time for Halloweeeeen
Seems like I'm getting back to my Sandman roots this month,
it was the first graphic novel series I read as a teenager!
It wasn't the very first graphic novel I'd ever read - that would be the formidable "The Dreamer" by Will Eisner, which forever changed my life - but it was the first series I'd read, and one that lasted an astounding 75 issues, and 10 collected volumes. (I think it was 10, right?)
I know that The Walking Dead past it's 100th issue, which is also a landmark, but I haven't the inclination to dedicate my eyes to that kind of gore anymore.
I know The Walking Dead is one of the best titles out there, in terms of character development and storytelling, but I just can't handle the bleakness.
THE B L E A K N E S S !
I'm already at my limit with the TV series - which I adore and am repulsed by simultaneously. I'm so emotionally invested in all the characters!!
It's the same reason I can't start watching the Sopranos or Mad Men - I'm too emotionally committed, I feel like they are real people, because I think of real people who have experienced these things.
I'm much more sensitive at 27 than I was at 17.
At 17 I could watch Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange and whathaveyou, and still maintain that "it was just a movie". I think because the human aspects of it were still foreign to me.
But like Mary Shelley writes:
"... it was the offspring from happy days, when death and grief were but words, and found no true echo in my heart."
The real-life experiences you have start to be recalled when you see them in a film or book, or even a painting.
At least they do for me.
So it's harder for me now, even as an adult, to open myself up to depressing material or horror stuff.
I guess I need to build up that barrier again.
I found this on Tumblr the other day, and it made me feel very happy to know that my other cranky-old-man-in-comics mentor, Alex Toth, felt similarly:
and the second...