Sometimes, in our hours of desperation, hope comes from the most unexpected places.
Three years ago, when I was in the throes of deep depression, that place was Jim Starlin’s run on
Warlock, a comic published in the mid-70s, years before I was even born and one I’d been putting off reading for over a decade.
I don’t know why it took me so long to read what’s widely considered to be one of the seminal runs on any character, on any book, Marvel or otherwise. It becomes even more baffling that it took me so long considering Starlin’s
Warlock directly informed my tastes in comics when I was first becoming an actual fan.
Back in the early 90s it was Starlin’s
The Infinity Gauntlet miniseries that all but sealed my passion (i.e.- obsession) for all things super hero.
The scale and scope of
The Infinity Gauntlet was almost too much for middle school me to handle, and to this day it’s still the super hero epic I use to measure all others by.
Yet as much as I loved the series and everything tied to it, it would be years before I would actually learn that it was a direct sequel to a more personal, experimental work Starlin had done in the 1970s.
Once it did finally pop up on my radar when I was in college, I added it to the growing list of required comic book reading.
It would languish on that list for the next 14 years.
By mid 2011 I was coming to grips with the hard fact that I was depressed.
It had been slow boiling for months and I knew something was wrong. I was waking up in the night in absolute panic. I was eating less and less. I was losing weight at an unhealthy rate. Finally, after one bad day at work, it was like the fuse had finally reached the detonator and everything exploded. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. I lost more weight and I lost control of my emotions.
Still, despite knowing that I wasn’t well, I didn’t want to admit that I might be dealing with depression because depression meant mental illness and mental illness, as far as I’d been taught, meant weakness. In a show of personal strength, I decided to make a go at “just getting over it” making it all that much worse.
For the first time in my life I remember knowing what real suffering felt like.
Read more »![]()
.jpg)
