CSotD: Just read it, OK?
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Dylan Horrocks posted a link to this comic on Facebook, with the brief message "Read this comic by Pat Grant right now. Just read it, OK? Now. (you won't forget it, ever)"
I'm tempted to just say "I agree" and sign off, but I'll take things a little bit further. However, any substantive commentary on the piece would have to include massive spoilers, so I'll just make some insubstantial points, mostly about why I agree and not about the comic itself.
By happy coincidence ("happy" in this conversation simply meaning "lucky" as in the opposite of "hapless" and not in the sense of "joyous"), Johanna Draper Carlson has just blogged on the overall topic, beginning her commentary
I’ve come to realize that my favorite kind of webcomic are those in what
one might call the “confessional therapy” style. They’re the ones where
someone works through their insecurities and concerns in a way that
ends up being inspiring to the reader, along the lines of “if they can
get past this, my worries aren’t so bad, and I can survive them as
well.”
I don't entirely disagree, as long as the comic in question includes that element of working through things, but even then, there's a depressing element that only rarely, and in the right hands, ends up being inspiring.
My junior year in college, someone put me hip to a cinema appreciation class that screened a film in the engineering auditorium every Tuesday at 3, then met to discuss it Thursday at 3. You had to be in the class to go to the lecture portion, but anybody could slip into the screenings.
That was how I discovered "Jules et Jim" and "La Strada" and "Knife in Water" and "Breathless" and "The Blue Angel" and several other classics of that wonderful auteur movement, which, in its insistence that the creator's vision be foremost, is not too different from the distinction between webcomics and syndicated strips.
But then one Tuesday afternoon, I was sitting there watching "Rocco and his Brothers," which is a fine film, no knock on it, but I said to myself, "Why do I come here once a week to become depressed?"
I got up and left and stopped going. Probably missed some good, valuable flicks that way, but I couldn't take it anymore.
The problem, I think, was that the bulk of these films were kind of downers and lacked that element of, as Carlson says, "being inspiring."
I don't mean a happy ending. The happy ending of "Our Daily Bread," which was also screened in that film class, makes the whole thing kind of cloying and, well, dumb.
I mean in the sense of "Now I get it," which is the essential factor in the graphic novels "Maus," "Persepolis" and "Fun Home" as well as in Eric Rohmer's "Moral Tales."
They are tremendously introspective and muted, but that's quite different than the unrelenting "woe is me" tone of "Jimmy Corrigan," a book I admire for its draftsmanship but not for the way it raises Ken Kesey's question "Why should I take your bad trip?"
Pat Grant's piece is muted in tone but contains an element of "Now I get it" that, as Horrocks promises, is well worth the click.
And, if you'd like, we can have some discussion in the comments, where spoilers are only to be expected.
Consider it the Thursday portion of the class.
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