A Bug's Life

After thirty issues of angst, horror and tragedy, the Sergio Aragonés page in the Orpheus book made me giggle.

Twenty year-old comics. They were one of the focal points of my social group; each month we would await the new issue and eagerly discuss it and pontificate. I'm reading this time with an eye to connections; keep your eyes open, Ethel X the incidental character in issue 3 might turn up 40 years later as Ethel Y in issue 17, married and name-changed and mother of some other person important to the plot, but we might not find out they are the same until issue 23. With a clever author, and a limited number of words per issue, nothing is wasted, he doesn't stick in a random Joe without thinking, so connections riddle the book. On the other hand, why choose this path? Why not instead create dozens, hundreds, millions of new named individuals who we meet once and never see again? Life is a lot more like that. And the author could celebrate the vastness of the world he has created. Maybe I'm beginning to find the scale of conectedness a little claustrophobic, that there are ultimately so few independent agents in the story.

The horror doesn't get to me as much. I'm older? It's a reread? I've seen so much more that it has less effect? When "my uncle used to rape me when I was a boy" is presented almost as prurient entertainment in magazines and tv shows, it has less ability to shock as it did the first time. And the pictures are just pictures now. I nearly stopped reading after issue 1 as the brain-splutching deaths were so gross.

44 to go.