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Column:
Devolution the Column
Second Entry
By Matt Yocum
Published: 2007-04-12
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The events in our past often influence our lives today. There is
no doubt in my life that what’s happened to me in the past
reflects on who I am today. This includes where I was raised and the
values in that part of the country, how and where I was schooled, the
family that raised me, and many other things. This also includes
things that have happened to me, the good and the bad, things that
have left joyful imprints in my mind and things that have left scars,
both physical and emotional.
One of these emotional scars, an event that has seared itself
permanently into my life like a tattoo of pain, seems to resonate
throughout my fiction. Whether it’s in short stories or comics,
I find myself returning again and again to themes of loss. Grief is
something that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of stages, but
until you’ve gone through it in a deep and fundamental way, you
don’t really understand it.
Marvel Comics is exploring this right now through the recent death
of Captain America. Writer Jeph Loeb is dealing directly with it in
his comic miniseries Fallen Son, a story that follows how various
Marvel heroes are dealing with Cap’s loss, each focusing on a
different stage of grief.
I personally agree with the Kubler-Ross stages of grief:
Denial (this isn’t happening to me!)
Anger (why is this happening to me!)
Bargaining (I promise I’ll be a better person if…)
Depression (I don’t care anymore)
Acceptance (I’m ready for whatever comes)
What they don’t tell you, and what I discovered in real life,
is that after you’ve finished one of the stages and moved on,
any one of those stages can return, short and sharp but there just the
same. And some people, not everyone, but some people never deal with
their grief.
Before I even knew Marvel was planning their own grief-stricken
corner of the comics world, I had come up with my own tale, in this
case a little zombie comic tucked away in a house in Tennessee.
That’s what you find in Devolution: a tale of human grief and the
journey one married couple takes as they are confronted with something
horrific beyond their ability to imagine.
You’ll find in Devolution two people who are handling
grief in very different ways. Told in the style of television’s
hit show Lost, Devolution deals with the present horrors in the life
of Kristy and Rick in Tennessee and the past as they confronted
another type of evil in New Mexico.
Kristy and Rick are about to experience an ordeal unlike any they
could ever have known. If they thought the horrors they’d
encountered in the past were bad, they haven’t seen anything
yet.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment at DevolutionComic@gmail.com.
—CCdC—
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