Second Banana
How much trust should you place in an older sibling while growing up, especially if that sibling really seems to have their shit together? This is the story of Finn (Tessa’s older brother) taking her under his wing after their older brother left the house. He also left his comics, books and Dungeons and Dragons stuff, which enabled Finn to introduce her to all of it. I’m more than a little jealous of somebody who was able to grow up knowing about H.P. Lovecraft and all of the various monsters from D & D (crikey, the dreams she must have had as a kid), but let’s leave that aside. Tessa’s main problem was that she put total trust into Finn, who mostly didn’t abuse it, but it left her unable to tell when he was wrong (or possibly just messing with her). For example, he told her that putting a light bulb in your mouth would create a vacuum, causing it to explode, sending shards of glass careening down your throat. She believed this right up until college, but it sounds like the other things he taught her came together to make a decent trade-off. Her only regret was that Finn became more skeptical of supernatural things while he grew up and he passed that on to her, and it’s disheartening to see the world only as it is and not as it could be. Eh, she says it a lot better than I ever could, and I’m already getting a bit too far into spoiler territory. I’d just like to add that you’ll get a hell of a lot out of this book if you either had an older sibling who tried to teach you about the finer things in life or if you were that sibling. After all, they didn’t know everything, but they were extremely unlikely to let you in on that fact. There’s also a short piece on the end about the “Dyatlov Pass Incident,” which Emi Gennis actually covered in one of her recent comics. But hey, genuine mysteries like that are always rare and interesting, so it was good to see a different perspective on it. $3
