NOTE: I’m deleting and repurposing the earlier entry, here.
(I don’t feel like I got it quite right at the time, so here’s this:)
Now, there’s sort of a hidden backstory here, in that after I got to the States, and after reading American comics, I was pretty much a long-time, loyal DC/Marvel fan until I noticed that they just… I dunno… kept recycling their content, and kept using their characters as resurrectionist puppets?
For example-- they’d make a huge song & dance about killing off a character, only to later bring them back perfectly intact via whatever bullshit excuse, some issues later? (sometimes even needing to create alternate worlds for them to exist in!)
Point is-- it pretty much hammered home the idea that all these characters were just licensed properties ™, and not representative of remotely approaching real characters.
Dense as I was, it did become clear as a comics reader that my needs just weren’t being met anymore, suggestible teenager as I was. That’s roughly around the time that I started exploring American-indie/alt comix, such as Cerebus the Aardvark, Love & Rockets, and several others.
What can I say? I just lost total interest in bullshit fantasy, and got WAY more interested in Euro and Alt / Indie stuff, and in truth, I’ve rarely looked back.
Now here’s the great Dave Cooper:
-----> https://imgur.com/a/dave-coopers-bizzaro-world-super-dumped-xi144QU <-----
EPILOGUE? Uh… I guess just that Euro-comics… at bare minimum, they suggest to me how your day went, and what little (but crazy) challenges you went through that day. That’s some real stuff, to me.
They’ve pretty much turned into stock characters, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it does make having a clean timeline pretty much impossible.
I mean… stock characters go back to… the age of Greek Tragedy, right? And that’s cool!
But I mean, either way… there has to be a compelling story, or way of relating, or something that rises us up and connects us, right?
EDIT: I’ve lightly edited in a clarification, above, hopefully that makes sense.