What the hell happened to Pictures for Sad Children?
Not that I’m the kind of person so self-centered and arrogant that I’ll complain about so much as a webcomic taking a new direction I don’t particularly like, except… well, I kind of will. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about letting the guy do whatever he wants with his own works, what I’m getting at is more confusion over the changes being made.
I discovered John Campbell’s Pictures for Sad Children almost a year ago, which a number of my friends promptly hated me for. The so-called “comic” is a showcase of depressing, dark humor with characters incapable of getting anywhere in their miserable life (or afterlife) completely devoid of meaning. Being the cheery and life-loving fellow I am, I immediately fell in love with the comic’s nihilistic human condition and distressingly and nonchalantly terse diction and the defeatist “punchlines” coupled with it. I photoshopped a wallpaper from one of my personal favorites, and continue to use the original frame as my avatar wherever I find it fitting (as anyone who’s seen my Twitter can tell you).
However, over the past couple months, without any sort of explanation, Campbell has dropped the characters and story from Pictures for Sad Children and now each comic stands independent of the others, telling their own stories with their own characters. Again, it’s fine that he’s doing this, it’s his comic, and the comics are still poetically dismal and distressingly humorous, although they tend to lean far more towards the comic’s absurdest tendencies, but the experience feels somewhat muted, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why, when Campbell started selling a shirt (that if anybody feels like buying me because I have such a wonderful blog or anything…) reading “making one continuous mistake”. While each comic now creates its own, self-contained disaster of a human condition, before the story and its characters filled in the missing piece of the puzzle. With a continuity of their miserable existences, the dark humor became even more so. The tragedy didn’t end with each comic, but continued with the characters’ continuing existences, which couldn’t even be escaped from in death. Absolutely horrendous? Sure, but that’s what made it so brilliant. You could relate to the characters until you realized you couldn’t. That their lives were the perfectly imperfect versions of yours without any reprieve, which, whether Schadenfreude or the simple human magnetic pull to watch the nearest train wreck, creates an oddly blissful state of absorption, yet separation, from an overwhelmingly hollow existence.
And yes, I miss that. I’m absolutely insane.
