Tuesday, February 24, 2015

RIP Chris Barat

Terrible news.

There have been times when I’ve pondered, in an abstract way, the fact that many Disney-comics fellow travelers are considerably older than me and therefore at some point it was almost inevitable that I’d see something like the above—but I certainly never expected it so soon.  Far too soon.

Unfortunately, I never met Chris in person; I knew him exclusively through blog posts/comments.  I hope, therefore, that it won’t be considered presumptuous if I say that I considered him a friend—and, from all I could gather, an eminently decent human being.  As you may be aware, I can be a bit dogmatic about my politics; his were the opposite of mine, and in the ordinary course of online events I would tend to make ALL KINDS of assumptions about a person, few of them good, based on that.  But I simply could not do that with Chris.  Everything I ever saw from him put the lie to my Manichean worldview.  You can’t ask for much more than that.

His absence leaves a large hole in this community, as I will be reminded every time I read an IDW Disney comic, think “I should check to see what Chris thinks about this,” and then remember, oh yeah.  You will be missed, sir.

UPDATE: in his memory, you could do a lot worse than reading or rereading "The Great Paint Robbery," a...somewhat incoherent story that nonetheless benefits from some very nice art and, more to the point here, Chris's lively localization.