It's a wide ocean

In autumn 1989 I had a friend with a seemingly unlimited comic collection, which he was kind enough to lend to me freely.

Amongst them were many copies of Deadline, and I was particularly taken with the Hugo Tate episode 'Waiting in Vain' from the October 1989 issue. I fell out with my friend and lost access to the collection, but I remembered the episode and would try and draw frames of it from memory over the years.

This year I belatedly read that there was a collected Hugo Tate, and got a copy off eBay which I read earlier this week. I realised I had misremembered the end of 'Waiting in Vain'. The sunset I thought I recalled is actually the sun emerging from clouds in the evening sky. The final frame is a photo that we see, not the person looking at the photo.

I thought nothing of the memory cheating, it happens with all kinds of revisited media, even with my own diaries where I've caught myself remembering things from quite the wrong year and in the wrong order.

With my new-found comic confidence I looked up the issue of Deadline in which WIV appeared, because I wanted to get an idea of when exactly I might have read it. And I made a shocking discovery. The final frame is different in the collected version.

The frame features a photo. In the collected version the photo is just of Mattie. In the original version in Deadline (October 1989) Hugo is in the photo too. I had had a vague idea that he ought to be there, but I gaslit myself into thinking that because I had misremembered other things about the episode, I must be wrong about that too. But I wasn't.

It's not been cropped either, it's been redrawn so that the background is there instead of him.

This is a very potent metaphor about memory and my own past, and the things I was going through in 1989, and the tellers of stories, and a seemingly harmless nostalgia trip ending with the abyss gazing.

Also I feel like my 1989 self has travelled forward through time to berate me for not believing her.