WTF

A few weeks back I read 1602.

I’m not sure if I should admit this in public, but I’ve not really read a lot of Gaiman stuff. And by “a lot” I mean “any”. My mate King Asok is always on at me to read Sandman. I’ve not read Good Omens, Gaiman’s novel with Terry Pratchet. Until recently, when I went to the world premiere of Gaiman and Dave “Arkham Asylum” MacKean’s Mirrormask at the Edinburgh Film Festival, my only exposure to Gaiman was when BBC2 broadcast Neverwhere, which I watched when I was 12 and far too young to understand what I was going on.

…

This article was going to be a critique-of-sort of 1602. But now it isn’t. Because in researching a link to information about the Neverwhere TV show for this post after I’d completed writing the above paragraph, I found out that it was first broadcast on 12th September 1996 - just before I turned 18 and went off to university.

My memory is extremely good. Not quite eidetic, like Batman’s, but well above average. My life is interesting and I have to cope with enough retconning in the DCU without needing to implant false memories into my head. I distinctly remember being alone in the house, curled up like I used to when I was a kid and watching the first episode and thinking “WTF?”.

On reflection, I think my brain has gone through the following process:

- I didn’t understand Neverwhere when I watched it
- I remember reacting to it the way I used to as a kid when reading/viewing something I felt I was - meant to understand but couldn’t.
- Ergo I must have been a kid.

I’m now concerned. How many more of my precious memories are false. Did I really read Dark Knight Returns in one sitting? Did I cry at the end of the Killing Joke? Am I really such a big Annex fan?

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll surmise briefly and stop before this becomes a Bone-like epic:

It is said that we humans are trying to find meaning in our life. I say that the pace of modern life doesn’t allow you to realise that you’re undergoing an important experience at the time you’re having it. We go back and make our lives have meaning, rather like comic book writers go rework past stories so they fit into the current world view, a process called retconning.

Batman – The Dark Knight Returns has had a profound impact on my life. Yet I couldn’t not have been aware of this when I put the book down and went straight to sleep. My brain has imbued the memory of the first reading with the resonance of subsequent readings and experiences. That is the beauty and prerogative of the mind, and allows us, with no hint of self-awareness or self-parody, to utter the immortal line “I loved you from moment we met.”