My Friend Passed Away So I'm Talking About Mort the Dead Teenager and Passion

Getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this...

In many aspects, this article was a long time coming. I didn't know exactly when to start my Mort piece but considering that a friend of mine whom I hadn't known for even a year but felt like several was fatally injured in a vehicular accident, it feels almost impossible to not talk about Mort. My friend (who I want to keep anonymous for her family and friends' sake) was a ginormous inspiration for my work in my classes. She was enthused to hear me talk about whatever I loved so much to her, and at one point we were considering a podcast of some kind (nothing really panned out).

I met her the day after I moved into my living quarters at my school. She sat at the table in the lobby, drawing. We talked for a little bit, and eventually it turned into a long night playing pinball and airing our grievances about our lives growing up. What she had dealt with as a kid and into adulthood was a very distinct experience of pain and misery, one that I don't believe I'll ever be able to comprehend. Her experience of genuineness, both due to her transition in adulthood to her struggles as a boy not sure he's in the right skin were unique and all the while daunting. She was strong as hell, and did what she could for others around her.

I owed her a tremendous debt due to her history, and she did just the same.

I've eaten out with her, gone to bars, even shared my 21st birthday with her. She is someone who has meant so much to me in such a short amount of time since when I met her that I can't even imagine what life would be like without her. In many ways, what happened over these last few days reminds me a lot of Mort, just in terms of plot coincidences and things that lined up really strangely. I think I'll get shit for "Boss Babying" a real and tragic situation, but, my friend, if she knew about what was to happen and the similarities, she'd have thought it was incredibly funny in a supremely fucked and esoteric way. I don't exactly remember if she had read the comic in its entirety, but she would have totally loved it.

This sorta behavior don't come from
nothin'! The boy ain't right!

Regardless, Mort the Dead Teenager as a comic has gotten me through some tough times. I read it for the first time during Covid in eleventh grade, and maybe because I was delirious from the unreal state of the world or maybe because I was 15 years old, the comic latched onto me like a tick and has been draining my blood for almost five whole years. It's become an inside joke with my in-person friends, to the point where I met a few of my longtime buddies talking about this thing. I've consistently wanted to do a project with it, but that's where the film degree has to save my ass. Please do not assume that me getting my degree is just a long, expensive, and convoluted way for me to work on a Mort thing, but I'm accepting of the interpretation. I think being made out to be psychotically insane about this comic is a funnier outcome than not, honestly.

Covid and its impact certainly changed the trajectory of me and millions of other people around the world who wanted to do one thing and now didn't have the time to. School was online for half the year, mask mandates were around after that, and then by high school graduation, I had fallen into depression because of my anxiety and the general atmosphere that was cultivated in the heat of disease. I sorta made it my mission to see out to something, whether making new friends to share what I liked with them or getting them involved in fun things to do regardless of our own lives. We're all from different creeds and worlds, so why not smash the bridges together from the river to the forest and let the sun shine as the trees clear out. Mort was kind of a conversation piece in the coffee table of life and still tends to be.

So, knowing I met my friend as she was drawing at a table, I showed her my work, mostly Mort art and other assorted pieces I'd done over the last year. Not to say it was a backbone or anything, but there was a passion for something that was hard to explain. Maybe the passion for life.

And passion drives: I've got all the issues of Mort framed and another set bagged up as reading copies. I've interviewed Hallgren alongside having an illustration of Mort from him. I've got an underproduced preview copy for buyers that's quite literally the scans of the manuscripts. I've hosted a convention panel about it. I've even cosplayed the poor bastard. I've poured time, money, and energy into this stupid comic. Scenarios float about in my head like bacteria in a green lake. I'm even considering talking to Hama over the summer as a small project for myself. It's a never-ending passion that started during a bad patch of life and rolled around like a hoopsnake towards an unknown destination. What's my endgame here? No idea. I just like the dead kid comic.

"Grandma never liked those Precious Moments
figures...always said they were too saccharine."

Mort, as a character, is undefined in the best possible sense. He's an underachiever and a dreamer who just wants what's best for everyone, and inadvertently fucks it up for himself and what could have been for his relations. He's none too bright but in search of sanctuary, and you can still love to see him wailed on, but he's emblematic of a larger problem in the universe: the Untimely Demise. He certainly didn't deserve it, but if his name and "dead" are in the title, his fate is sealed, and there's no way out.

He's trapped inside himself and his life that is beyond saving. To watch your family and friends suffer instead of accept your fate...I can't describe the existential pain and sadness to endure it. He's a character that's profoundly sad but also incredibly funny because he's as clueless as we are. And, if anything, maybe the most interesting thing about him other than this horrific struggle is the pressure felt on him past the point where he'd need it. He's a high-schooler who can't move past high school rather than an adult who can't move past it.

I can't help but feel bad for the guy and others like him, alive and not, who are stuck in this nowhere land of their own hellish creation. Covid was a huge proponent for these periods of time without job or enthusiasm, and for young people like me, we entered a state of inertness that was put upon by those who made the world we live in. We're going to go through it again sometime soon, but I'd rather focus on the world I want to make rather than something pre-defined by festering corpses of what could hardly be considered human.

Press F to do whatever it is you do
when you press it idk

As I face another tragedy in my life in uncertain circumstances, I've found it necessary to return to comfort. Even if it means facing grief in a strange and unexpected way, I know what I can do to help others and myself in particular...Mort as a comic parodies much of the concepts of a typical "teen" comic, whether from the scenario to the art style, it wants to be an anti-Archie in a way that's distinctly 1993. The only things Archie has to worry about are his grades and deciding between Betty and Veronica. Mort has his family, friends, and everlasting soul at stake, but he and us will never know what comes of it. Maybe I'll touch on the Fall of 1993 one of these days as a season that was strangely focused on "weird little dead guy" media to the point where I would suspect industrial espionage. Of course, it's a funny idea, but then specifically? What was the drive for it?

Osomatsu has been something I've wanted to come back to for a while, so expect something about that soon. This article was very spurred on by something that was out of my control, and I apologize if it read strange or out of place. My friend would have wanted me to write about my passions to get me out of a rut, even if it meant her not being able to see it. And I think that's a good mentality to have, to live as is and act on passion. We need more of that.