I neither personally knew nor was I a fan of the recently departed comic-book artist and creator Michael Turner, but I found myself affected by news of his death just the same considering that at 37, he was barely four years older than me. There's something particularly perturbing about people going well before what appears to be their time. It wasn't a year ago that Mike Wieringo, another comic book artist, a health nut and a vegetarian, suddenly died of a heart attack. Turner, in comparison, had been battling with cancer for the better part of a decade, if not longer, so his may have been a little less of a shock, but is no less tragic.
Whether it's the fact that I suffered my own recent loss, or the fact that young death simply doesn't feel right, I find myself mourning these deaths even though these people, Wieringo and Turner didn't have anything to do with me or vice versa. As a collector of comic books (once and possibly someday again) it's always sad to see the talent pool shrink, especially in the case of Wieringo, as I followed his last regular series, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, until his departure in issue 11 or so.
My wife tells me that people have been dying young since the beginning of time, to which I replied that precisely what saddens me is how, in this day and age, with so much medical technology at people's disposal, they can't seem to eradicate things like disease and the death of young people.
If there's any comfort I can take it's that these guys lived and died doing what they loved; they were comic-book creators, and both of them had stuff in the pipeline right up until the time of their death. They were, in that sense, at least able to live life on their own terms.
And who knows, with no end to the oil price rise in sight, maybe they're the lucky ones...
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