I am devastated.

Someone else has decided that the world is different from what I think it is, by which I am of course talking about comic books.

Or rather, some comics. I don't like comics that present the characters in black and white terms, which for me is pretty much what Marvel and DC do. Okay, so Batman's cutting edge because he's so fucking dark that you don't know what he's all about, and so there's much unpleasant past history in Wolverine or Phoenix. Nonetheless, the characters are inevitably on the side of right.

Consequently, the selection of comics that I'm interested in is limited. I pretty much only read Preacher, Transmetropolitan, and Poison Elves, and of those, the one I'm most impressed with, as anyone who follows the site knows, is Transmet. However, I've been on a Preacher kick lately, again as anyone who follows the site can tell.

So as I sit here, in my four-walled world, listening to come to silver, I'm a bit depressed. I was (stupidly, I admit) reading reviews of Preacher, including issues I haven't read (about two-thirds of the run) and I found out that, at the end of Preacher 66, the last issue of the series, all of the major characters wound up dead. I then went to Borders and looked at the issue in question, since I couldn't believe that my hopes and beliefs would be dashed like that. As it turned out...sort of. The major character in question, Cassidy, the picture on the silver page linked above, makes a deal with God that he will set up the other characters to die so that God can return to Heaven, which he has been chased out of by the power of the other main character, Jesse Custer, who is the body of a power known as Genesis, half-demon, half-angel, who coincidentally knows all the secrets of Heaven, including that God created the earth to be loved. It was the act of a megalomaniac, rather than that of a loving god, one who didn't care that we fought over who was right because all that meant was that these people believed in him and loved him enough to kill in his name. The exchange for the deal was that God would bring back Jesse Custer and Cassidy, both of whom would die to bring God back to Heaven.

I know it's naive, and I know that at my age I shouldn't believe that the fiction I read is anything other than fiction. But a big part of me has created a world that is entirely populated by fictional characters. I like the idea that if I go somewhere in Seattle, I might run into Thomas Black and Kathy Birchfield, joking and tailing a criminal, or that if I read the right paper or news site I'll be reading an article written by Spider Jerusalem, or that if I'm somewhere in the Southwest and I see a car get stolen, it could be Jesse Custer and Tulip in the car, and Cassidy won't be far behind.

I have defined my world around fiction.

Obviously not all fiction - no matter how hard I try, I can't believe in something like House of Leaves. No matter where I go in Virginia, I will not find the repository of some semi-demonic power, manifested as a house of infinite size - possibly larger than the world.

It's the characters I love that I believe in. And because I've grown to love them, it depresses me to realize that someone else has shaped the world in a way where - to take Preacher as an example - Cassidy will be a person, rather than a vampire, and although Tulip and Jesse get back together, they'll never know Cassidy is alive. Cassidy knows they're alive because he made the deal, but he's decided to stay away from them.

That's more wrong, from my point of view, than real people killing other real people I don't know is.

(Fishing around for point).

Maybe there is no point to this. This certainly isn't a rant - other people have the right to determine how the lives of their characters turn out. But to me, those characters are real. They are more real than lots and lots of important people I read about in the paper are. They have been created in a believable way, with a believable life, or maybe not, but at least it's consistent. I admire these people. I admire the strength they're given by their creators, and the weaknesses - as it turns out, Cassidy, beyond being a vampire, is an alcoholic and beats women. But, at the end of 66, he writes a letter to Jesse, saying that he knows there must be something good left in him, simply because if there wasn't, Jesse wouldn't have reached out to him or been his friend.

That's what I like. I crave the idea that someone is capable of seeing past, what to me are glaringly obvious flaws, and being my friend in that heroic way. I know I've got friends like that. I also like the idea that we could then go out and bend the world, as Michael Marshall Smith put it, to us, rather than bending to it. I don't want to be stuck in the sort of humdrum, Eastenders-watching life that I described in Bringing Out The Dead. I want to lead the heroic life of comic characters, where, despite - and perhaps because of - their flaws, they live lives of meaning and importance, if only in the pages of fiction. I want a different life than the one I see around me.

Fiction, to me, is not so much an escape as it is an aspiration.

Look at it this way. How many books have been written about Billy the Kid? Loads, I imagine, portraying him as everything from an evil killer who'd killed a man for every year he lived by the time he died, to the sort of portrayal found in Anything For Billy, where Larry McMurtry portrays him as a frightened kid who only killed anyone by accident and never with a gun, who was just looking for the same things we all look for - love, freedom, happiness.

Each author has created a version of the same person, who made the point that the author wanted to make, and in the process gave us a design for life. Or possibly a design for how not to live. But nonetheless, by our experiencing that author's vision, we have been affected. Or as Emily Bronte put it, "I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and have changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."

That's what each author does, whether with a fictional character or one ripped straight from reality. And as I say, I don't believe in all characters that I've read. I believe in the ones I want to believe in, and certainly that changes over time - I no longer believe in Ben, from It, or the X-Men, or Anne of Green Gables. But somewhere in my world, Honor Harrington is commanding a ship against the enemies of her world, and Paksenarrion is on a paladin's quest, and Ken Nott is broadcasting - or maybe just raving - on London stereos.

Those, more than Shawn Kemp or the Pope or Chairman Mao or any real person, is who I want to live like. I want to follow certain simple precepts - you stand by your friends, no matter how flawed, you fight for what you believe in, and at the end of it all, you hoist a drink with your mates. That's what it's about.

It's not about the money or the position. It's about the believability, and none of the people who are traditionally held up as role models have much in the way of believability. Hell, even in Preacher, John Wayne is one of the characters - but he's not someone I aspire to be like, because his life was, from all I know, quite conventional.

I want to be someone else. I want to be someone outside of convention, with my friends and my beliefs, living the best way I know how, which isn't either black and white, or disgustingly grey, or the color of static on a television screen. It's about nobility and flaws and truth and loyalty.

That's who I want to be when I'm being Spider Jerusalem.

Gimme all the Hell you got to spare,

Channon