“Our revels now are ended…”
That quote, from The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1, is familiar to most, if not all, fans of Dark Shadows. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when there were no VCRs or DVRs and you could only watch a show once, and that when the TV station decided to play it, many fans of the Gothic soap opera listened ad nauseum to the show’s soundtrack LP. It featured music from the show, with narrations over a lot of it by Jonathan Frid and David Selby, the two most prominent stars. The last track on the album is Jonathan Frid reading Prospero’s soliloquy from The Tempest about actors and dreams. It’s a moody piece, and a fitting capstone to, well, pretty much anything.
Lara Parker ends her novel with the last sentence: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
I mentioned recently that I’ve been reading comic books since 1974. I mostly preferred super-hero comics, and I’m not entirely sure why, although it’s clear that most readers do. I think, for me it’s because they allow an escape from reality, they generally allow for exciting, colorful imagery, and they have that sense of romantic heroism that is lacking in, say, sword and sorcery stories. I’ll probably explore what I mean by “romantic heroism” in a totally separate article. Suffice to say here that I use it to mean that the characters in the story have a sense of right and wrong, are working toward a just goal, and portray an ideal of people as they should be, not merely as they are. Superman is a person as we’d like to believe people could be. Conan the Barbarian, on the other hand, has little to advertise him as a hero. He can get away with running around in a loin cloth and he wields a mean sword. That’s true of lots of real people, so Conan did nothing for me. (Red Sonja, on the other hand… Pretty girls need no excuse. I’m sexist that way. Sue me.)