The Fractal Hall Journal

Steve Gerber died four days ago. I’ve read many fine tributes to him over the past week, and I wish that I’d read enough of his work to be able to add my own. As it is, I’ve read maybe a handful of his Son of Satan and Howard the Duck issues, and enjoyed them very much.

I think he exemplifies the kind of creator who’s influence is felt beyond his own work, who’s art is important enough to so many people that his death is a poignant reminder that the loss of one of us diminishes us all.

The first artist who’s death effected me in an oddly personal manner was George Harrison. Because it’s an odd, almost laughable instinct that leads us to mourn, even in a small way, someone who we didn’t know personally. I think that one of the consequences, sometimes advantageous and sometimes not, of our kind of civilisation is that our lives can be influenced, even altered, by the lives and art of people we will never really know.

So we’re sad, because you cannot be touched by something, whether a song or a story, and then feel nothing when you realise that the author is gone and nothing quite like what they made will be made again. I felt the same way when I heard Mike Wieringo had died. He was a brilliant artist, and if it wasn’t for his and Mark Waid’s work on the Flash in the 90s I would have stopped reading comics a long time ago.

Not long ago, we lost a man called Ray Gravell. The website stats suggest that most of the Journal’s readers are outside of Britain, and even here it isn’t likely that most Brits would know who he was.

We don’t have an honours system in Wales. We don’t have a Royal Family. We don’t have knighthoods or medals, or anything that’s really specifically Welsh; all of the above, insofar as they relate to this country and its people, are British institutions. But if we did have something like that, something to denote the highest regard the Welsh as a people have for someone, then we’d have given it to Graf.

He was a sportsman, playing rugby for his country and his club, the Llanelli Scarlets. He was an actor, and a broadcaster. And he was a Welshman above all else. You only had to hear him speak about his homeland to understand the depth of his feeling towards it, and to his people. He represented the best of Wales, and I don’t write that lightly.

I’ve never known anyone to have a bad word to say about him. It almost felt like he belonged to Wales, and through Wales to the rest of us and in this case- in this one case in all the world- I’d say he did. And it’s like everyone’s got a story about Graf, even me. On more than one occasion, he said some kind things about my band, about how a song we wrote meant something important to him. I never got the chance to meet him, and I never got to thank him.

His memorial service at Stradey Park was, in effect, a state funeral.

Sorry, this post turned out more melancholy than I’d intended. Believe me, I’m far more in favour of celebrating a life than in mourning a loss. But sometimes some things need saying, sometimes we need to see the shape of our own sadness, to turn it round and over and to understand why we feel this way about people we don’t really know the first thing about.

We interact with each other in small, distant ways; and these echoes of big, important ways also carry a weight, however slight. In allowing others to effect us, it’s appropriate that we feel a commesurate sadness when we realise they’re gone.