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.
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.
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at
6:13 AM
7 Comments
