Goodbye, baby rabbits

The saddest comics I ever read when I was a kid were the last issues of Master of Kung Fu and Ghost Rider. Even though monthly comic books were always stopping and starting, the end of both long-running series gave me something of a mild existential shock at the time, because I didn't think comics could end like that. There every month, and then just... gone.

Both series, which started in the 80s, had long and memorable runs. Shang-Chi and Johnny Blaze got involved in all sorts of diabolical schemes. There comics were often stylish and beautiful, and both characters had strong designs that are still being riffed on today.

But there was something about the finality of these last issues that really hit home. That there would be no more regular stories about these strange heroes, with Shang-Chi confronting his awful heritage and overcoming it, and Johnny riding off into the sunset with his girl, free of the demon within.

Nothing last forever, not even Marvel heroes. When their four-colour adventures were coming out month after month, a definitive ending to the serialisation was a shock to my young system.

(Luckily, I never read the last issue of Power Man and Iron Fist until I was much, much older. The way Dany Rand goes out is still shocking in its casual brutality, and would have been properly traumatizing if I'd read it at the time.) 

It's a feeling that only really builds up through that serialisation of fiction. It never really happens in the same way with movies (unless it's part of a long series), but I have felt the same way about the endings of the long-running TV show of my youth, like the winsome melancholy of the final episode of Happy Days, and the unspoken theme that the days of happiness were now fucking over; or the strangeness of the final episode of M*A*S*H, which made me cry like nothing else.

The greatest TV show of all time is, of course, Doctor Who, and it is always coming to some kind of end when the Doctor dies and regenerates, but this also comes with his own rebirth and renewal, and the joy of the new. I got used to that a young age.

I have also, over time, got used to long-running comics and TV shows coming to an end on a regular basis, and so many of them are unmemorable and mawkish, but I do occasionally feel it when a TV show reaches its multi-year run, and this group of actors and creators part ways.

There might be reunions and reboots, but sometimes something is just totally over, and I feel its loss, as much as I missed Johnny and Shang-Chi when they walked off the comic stage.