Webcomic Weekly, all about the comics you can find on the Internet. Sometimes long, sometimes short, always available, always just magnificent. This week, Jamie Smart and parents…
For the longest time, Jamie Smart’s been writing and drawing comics that make us all laugh. Whether it’s Bunny Vs Monkey, Looshkin, Battlesuit Bea, Megalomaniacs, Fish Head Steve, Count Von Poo, or Max & Chaffy for kids of all ages, or the likes of Bear, Corporate Skull, Kochi Wanaba with a more adult sensibility, he’s been full of the gags all along. Although having said that, Kochi Wanaba wasn’t so much gag-filled and weird-filled, brilliant, strange, confusing-filled. But be that as it may, one outlier to ruin my flow. Dammit.
Anyway, Jamie Smart. Brilliant comic maker and cartoonist. Full of all the comedy. Except Jamie Smart’s also as human and as full of grief and sadness as you or I.
Sadly, Jamie’s mum passed away in April, for which he has our sympathies. And for her passing, he did this…
And that’s just so beautiful, so perfect, such a perfect expression of his feelings for her.
And, as he notes in his post:
When my dad passed away I drew a comic about my relationship with him. 13 years later and it was my mum’s funeral today, so I wanted to draw something to honour her too. Goodbye mum, love you very much x.
Which made me remember the post he did about his dad’s passing and how that resonated so hard with me as well.
That was 2010 and we were just getting the diagnosis of my Mum’s Alzheimer’s. I didn’t have the greatest of relationships with either Mum or Dad, but hey, still Mum and Dad. And reading that from Jamie really hit me in the gut. The frustrations, the distance, the lack of time, the never going to get the chance again moments.
And now I’m at the stage when my Dad is on the way as well. Not Alzheimer’s this time, just old age, ill health, but there’s still that strange countdown to death that has to be dealt with.
So as Jamie loses his Mum, I’m doing it in reverse… Mum first, then Dad. And I know just what he’s feeling because of his four pages of perfectly realised comics about parents and children, about life and death. It’s simply brilliant and sad and heartbreaking and just true.
Anyway, thanks to Jamie for these, they give us all solace in what we’ve lost and perhaps, just perhaps, if you still have them around, maybe it will convince you to pick up the phone and say thank you, I love you. You never know, it could be the last time.
Webcomic Weekly, all about the comics you can find on the Internet. Sometimes long, sometimes short, always available, always justCOMICONRead More