Mort

"You put your hand on top of mine

You're talking fast but talking blind

And I can't bring myself to meet your eyes"

 

Missy Higgins - Cooling of the Embers

 

 

The comic PvP Online started as jokes about Ultima Online, branched out into other games and the usual Star Wars / Trek gamut of geek humor of twenty years ago and I wasn't particularly bothered by the fact I didn't play or watch most of the stuff it referenced because video game contrivances made excellent fodder while the many genres we now take for granted were still being established. I've barely skimmed the intervening fifteen years, and nothing I've seen makes me want to. Seems mostly to have coasted on its existing name recognition and remaining readers' brand loyalty. Unlike most of his early fans, I saw nothing fundamentally wrong with the shift away from games toward romance/office/domestic themes... except the author didn't particularly have anything to say on these topics. The mix of Dilbert and Who's the Boss was doing nothing for me. In the early 2000s Scott Kurtz was basically the Jay Leno of webcomics: a very small, simple repertoire of jokes thriving on brusque everyman congeniality instead of originality or wit. And, like Leno, his success depended on typos and flubs from the local press - or rather from the game industry. Such an entertainer's livelihood depends on the liveliness of the news cycle. As long as the universe (real or fictional) is feeding him punchlines, Kurtz is rather good at fleshing out endearing setups. When he turned to stale sources, he turned stale himself.

 

But this year he did something else.

Mort.

A short (~50-ish pages? so far) series centered on a father and son inspired by the author himself trying to deal with his father's severe illness. Normally such a shift in topic can't help but remind me of Kanye West milking his mother's death for audience sympathy for months after years on end, but there's no denying the death or suffering of those close to us has fuelled some of the most impressive expressivity in art throughout history. (Or least impressive as well; taking a family member in for life-threatening surgery kicked off A Murder Mystery - such as it is.)

Mort is beautiful. It lacks the blatant self-censorship of Kurtz' posturing as either the patron saint of webcomics or a social justice warrior over the past fifteen years. He didn't feel the need to replace his own father with a black lesbian whose pain would be more significant for being born a morally superior breed, or write the two men cowering in righteous fear of their female superiors in the natural order, being put in their place by women every single page. The few overtones of his usual routine fade before the real anguish of breaking down the social niceties blanketing our day-to-day lives, the relationships we took for granted. Even the initial gimmick of portraying death as an '80s sitcom wacky neighbour breaks down after a few pages in favor of the simple dark humor of swallowing your pride to help a loved one with basic physical needs. And it works. Beautifully. He's found a source of punchlines most wouldn't dare touch (especially knowing where they go) and he's writing excellent, laugh-the-pain-away setups.

I don't know if he'll continue, and given the emotionally charged subject matter certainly couldn't blame him for shelving this particular side project... but I hope it goes on, for the rest of our sakes, even at the cost of his own sanity. It's selfish of me, but in another decade I may very well find myself re-reading these strips as instructional material.

We all might.

 

Life's funny that way.