I am Pagliacci

When I was a kid, we didn’t have a Barnes and Noble, but we did have a Books a Million. This Books a Million had a tiny and unimpressive comics section, and mostly we went there to pay Magic the Gathering. Anyhoo, I remember seeing Watchmen on the shelf and noticing it about 1000 times and wanting to but not wanting to read it. It seemed scary and intimidating. It is, in its own way, but more than anything it speaks to both a time in my life as a reader and a time in our shared lives as a world, especially a world in which international standoffs over nuclear arms were a present and real possibility. But as I found this in a Little Free Library…I will return it, having read it through on a chilly Monday afternoon.

I don’t know that things are that much different today. Rather than nuclear arms being a real and constant threat (they’re still there and definitely still threatening, but annihilation seems off the table — if you’re American — and we just don’t talk about them the same way). But we do have climate change and unbridled capitalism, infighting and pollution, degradation of life and humanity, and it just doesn’t seem clear exactly why. Why are all these things still able to pull the world into what seems like the brink of everything? Or are they and my dealing with the collapse of the US empire (hopefully just the receding, I just bought a house) as a traumatic if generally inevitable and ok thing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little too much to try to process right now.

Anyway, this is the second time I have read this…I like it in general, feel like the story is more anemic than people allow, the art is grody, and the pirate stuff is silly.

 

(Photo: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/electricomics-alan-moore-interview)