I’ve been procrastinating. I’ve been delaying the inevitable. And it’s sense of impending doom that makes me quiver in the face of what comes next. I know that the project I set out to do this year is all but complete - there isn’t much more left to say, really. And I’m now faced with something I always disliked sensing about my favourite authors. You see, sometimes, though thankfully not very often, I’d be reading an ongoing story for years - and here I’m talking specifically about comics - and some time around the last third of that run, sometimes even earlier, it felt like the author had fallen out of love with the story they’d wanted to tell. Closing down the story seemed to become somewhat of a chore, it seemed like they’d derived little to no pleasure from having to do that part.
Works I find suffer a lot in that last third - at least in my not so humble opinion - were Terry Moore’s ‘Strangers in Paradise’, a book which I love the heck out of, but whose last third seemed so rushed, so hastily put together, that whenever I re-read it I’m always tempted to skip that part. Thankfully, Terry added a lot of story to the mythos, tying it all together neatly - but not much of the early genius was there.
Another one of my absolute favourites is Mike Mignola’s ‘Hellboy’, of which I had read everything up to the point where I stopped reading ‘modern’ comics altogether, and I’m not sure if Mike ever returned to that world or not. But the first few years of ‘Hellboy’ were so damn good, packed with so much furious kinetic energy and light-hearted fun against a backdrop of some heady and heavy dark stuff. Whenever a new issue of it came about, it went straight to the top of my to read pile. But eventually the story started to drag, and it was no longer fun. Not even entertaining, it just became beautiful boredom. It never really picked up again for me, but maybe if I read it again in the future that might change.
One other of my favourites is Jeff Smith’s ‘Bone’ - I still contend that the first 40 issues or so are nearly perfect comics. ‘Bone’ was love at first sight for me, I first came across it in an article in ‘Wizard’ magazine, and as soon as I could I started scooping the hardcovers reprints Cartoon Books was putting out. I loved - and still love - it to death, but the last couple of arcs as Jeff was wrapping up the story seemed so emotionally flat to me. None of the magic that had characterised those first five or six arcs was there. It was as if he couldn’t wait to finish the story. Subsequent re-readings have helped me maintain this notion, but maybe it was all on me - I do know I had very lofty expectations as to how the story would be ending, and maybe I shouldn’t have done that.
However, none of them compare to how Neil Gaiman handled wrapping up his ‘Sandman’ series - though after the last major arc ‘Kindly Ones’ there were still some single issues left, in the borders of the pages of the issues that comprised that arc, Neil would sometimes scribble about how he was ‘almost done now’ and how he had ‘only a little more to go’. Though me and him don’t seem to see eye to eye on a number of things these days, it’s unmistakable how important he was to my development. ‘Sandman’ was a true labour of love, and it also taught me that labours of love can sometimes be painful, and a relief to finally complete.
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