REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #56 - August 2008 [spoilers]

Tom Russell milos_parker at yahoo.com
Mon Sep 15 23:34:33 PDT 2008


On Sep 15, 11:15 pm, Saxon Brenton <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:
> [REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #56 - August 2008 [spoilers]

Hurray!

>      Running late.  

Even when it's running late,
EoMR is worth the wait.

>      Things continue in this manner throughout issue 17, with Martin
> at a loss over how to short circuit Derek's growing alienation,
> until he finally decides to take a different approach. Throughout
> her hospitalisation Erika has been slipping into depression and
> suicide attempts, and Martin intuits that her self-hatred is somehow
> compounding Derek's.

I hadn't really thought of it that way, but there's probably some
truth to it.  The basic idea I was operating with was that Derek was
angry-- and sometimes rightfully so-- at a number of people for a
number of reasons, but that anger was threatening to swallow him up,
so to speak.  Martin recognizes this, and he recognizes this in
himself; he's never really let go of his anger over what happened to
him as a child.  And, if one wants to get all Freudian about it-- Lord
knows I don't-- you could trace a lot of his problems-- such as his
trouble finding a balance between two extremes, the way he bottles
things up, the problems he has with women-- to that incident and that
anger and the way he's never really dealt with it head-on.

By forgiving Erika, Martin's letting go of some of that anger-- and
since he knows that Erika's going to want to share that with Derek, he
hopes that Derek will do the same.  In this case, Martin's teaching
him by example-- something he hasn't done a whole lot of.  It's really
been more, "don't do what I'm doing, do it better, I made some
mistakes".

Now, two things.  First of all, there's the question of whether Martin
thinks Derek knows exactly what went down between him and Erika.  I
don't really have an answer for that.  But I think that Martin would
think that either way, Derek might take note of Martin forgiving Erika
and letting go of some of that anger-- whatever the reason for it. (Of
course, we know that Derek does know.)

Secondly, while Derek won't be a towering inferno of rage when Jolt
City starts up again, don't expect him to be a snowflake, either.
He's still going to have these issues, and he's still going to be
struggling to control them.  Just as Martin, despite his growth over
the last seventeen issues, is still going to be Martin.  I tried to
hint at this a bit in the last few scenes-- the "one day at a time"
bits-- to try to mitigate some of the neatness of the ending.  I may
not have succeeded in that case.


==Tom



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