Oh Brother!

I am currently working, as some of you know, on a story with the talented Johnny Luu. We are doing a reconstruction of his title “Hellstone” that he did a few years back. I have always asked Johnny about this title and have told him that I have been excited for the follow up to his first issue release. Little did I know that I would be writing it.

As I was sinking my teeth into his original concept I kept my eye out for things that realistically appealed to me. I try to be a realist when I write, and Hellstone is a Sci-Fi/ Horror story by nature so I had troubles at first. However this story included something that was very real to me and I felt many people could relate to. That is an element of sibling relationships.

I resolved that the relationship between the two brothers in Johnny’s original story would be an ongoing vehicle of growth and intensity in my rendition of Hellstone. Included in this is feelings of loss, love, and of course; rivalry.

While writing this script and reading Johnny’s original I began to really consider my relationship with my brother. Not that I haven’t done that before. During school while I was working on my Diploma of Social Work I greatly considered this relationship as we had a families class and as my brother and I dealt with our own crises.

I can recall wanting my brother gone. Man, I used to think this and feel this with such intensity. When kids I work with now (in group homes) say this sort of thing I am appalled, but honestly I know what this feeling is like and a lot of it stems from jealousy. Some may consider, especially in the case of the group home kids that this comes from a style of parenting that favors one child over the other. However in my situation I can honestly say that my jealousy came from my own selfishness. I couldn’t get enough attention in any arena.

That jealousy made way for my own lashings. And every time my brother made me cry in front of my friends, whether being nine years old and him doing it in front of an older girl I had a crush on or being fourteen and him doing this in front of all my D&D buddies, I felt the feeling even more. I wanted him gone. And likely, as I grew up this could have stemmed why we were never close and although we shared friends and a bathroom, we never spoke. I think at some point in my adolescence I wrote my brother off.

Finally my brother left town to go to college. No more sharing a bathroom or CDs or friends. It was all mine. As happy as I was, I quickly became a hermit in the basement of my parents house. My parents worried for me and I was often depressed. I had lots of girls who I grew close to come and go, however I think on some level I was trying to replace my brothers presence with something else, only to discover that the cultures were too different, and they would end in heartbreak for those girls.

I wanted out of that town so badly. It consumed me as I escaped through countless movies and reading poorly constructed comics (This was the mid nineties and all I had at my disposal was the single shelf at my mothers place of work; The Bassano IDA). Finally however I turned 18 and my brother was calling me to come to his home in Calgary to drink with his college buddies.

This gave me direction socially, something I hadn’t had since my brother left home. Again we started to share friends and I grew close with some of them. My brother was always excited to invite me and he never treated me as a tag along to go look at nude playing cards with the other kids from the street.

We are men now. My brother lives far away, because of his career and I deal with limitless stresses of the clients I work with in my career. My brother struggles with severe depression, something I discovered only a few years ago. I also have stuff on my plate; my career as I mentioned, but I also have a wife and a son. My ties with my home in Bassano are completely cut as I navigate my family through a life whose course I am unsure of. As I get deeper into my own life I can feel the close bond that I have with my brother, even though he lives in the next province and we see each other little.

When we get together now, it is like best friends. Those memories of aiming a pellet gun at my brothers head for making fun of my girlfriends flat chest are long behind me and seem so foreign. If you were to observe us now, you might even think I was lying about our youth. My brother smiles when we are together. Instead of sharing mutual friends, we are sharing a friendship with each other.

So, now it is back to Hellstone. I have so much I want to say about the dynamics of this relationship, I don’t know if I can fit it all into an issue or an arc. I can’t summarize the experience that easily. I think I can include the emotions accurately however, only because of their intensity. Tones of fear, rivalry, and humility will be included, sitting in a direct relation to love, devotion, and trust.

gord