I don’t yet know my full opinion of this book featured in the Guardian. Living with a Black Dog.  The book appears to be coming from a future when no one reads more than a few lines at once. These glimpses of the future are always attractive to me.

And of course it hearkens back to childhood – but a childhood made up entirely of adults going though something they don’t in the least bit understand.

And then there’s the dog: omnipresent, cute. Dog-as-mouse in one frame. Again, cute. A little too cute, adding to the overall creep of this book. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to buy it, but the more panels I saw, the less exciting it became. It became mundane, everyday, not at all futuristic but perfectly of its time.

I suppose the newness of seeing something like this made it feel futuristic but there’s always going to be something futuristic about a plague of mental illness. I think that’s what we’re heading for. Masses of the population diagnosed with some form of mental illness, correctly. Third world nations adding more and more to that total, until it becomes the next world-wide epidemic.

See here for a discussion of depression as an end-of-days scenario.

A litttle grim? Yes. But something that fascinates me notetheless — maybe because it’s so grim. I too have a dog curled inside my head.