Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda????

So over this past weekend I realized something.... even though comics, graphic novels, and animated cartoons are fiction... the characters in those stories still have some pretty disheartening lives. If I could make some sort of fictionalized version of my life I think I would, actually I know I would, make it 100% more interesting than my current life, but I don't think I would fix everything wrong with my life. I mean, yes, I would like it if I wasn't stressed out all the time over school and work, and it would be amazing if my boyfriend didn't live an hour and half a way, but thus is life, and we must just live it. The same goes for the aforementioned characters. The way their authors wrote them was meant to be a parallel to actual reality. For example, in Watchmen it's obvious that Sally Jupiter hates being the age she is (and as a personal theory, I think she also resents her daughter for being that golden age where "women are beautiful and sexy...." uh, that idea while physical is a mental perspective as well....), but while she cannot physically change that about herself, the question I wonder is if a person in "reality" were in that same position, would they change their age? their lives? their endings?

I've noticed in the few short weeks I've been in Graphic Novel class that anything and everything can and will occur in graphic novels. But, and again I say but! would those characters, if they could, go back and change their lives to make them easier or better? The answer to this question I think can actually be answered in two ways: Bruce Wayne and Dr. Manhattan.

In the case of Bruce Wayne, we see a middle-aged man who more than anything wants to change his past, right? Not quite... Bruce Wayne does in fact wish, as all of us would, that his parents never died, and mentions, if not indirectly, that he wishes he could have stopped that bullet.... but my question is this: if his author's made him to wish so heartily to change his past, why didn't they just let him? I mean, the man is a gazillionaire! he could've bought a time machine, or had that pansy Superman (sorry, personal feelings!!!) run around the earth and turn back time.. the point is that the authors utilize these impressive personages to imitate and embellish reality, not to alienate the readers by making them second-guess what their lives have been like.

In Dr. Manhattan's case, we have an entity (can't quite say person) that has the power to go back in time and change his past with nothing stopping him... or at least as far as I've read nothing is stopping him. However, because Dr. Manhattan is lacking in the "human empathy department," he does not actually go back to change anything (again, as far as I've read anyway). One can deduce that this is because he obviously doesn't care enough about his old human nature to actually want to change this, and (assumably) because as readers we are supposed to empathize with the desire to go back and change our pasts, and again make life so much better, but realize that while it is physically impossible for us, that decision is not meant to be up to us, let alone supernatural beings......

Now all of this may seem like ramblings, but I will admit that I'm tired, and thus it may not make complete sense, and plus as a blog it doesn't have to be anything but my thoughts about Graphic Novels! So for now, I bid adieu, and promise to blog again sometime soon!