Hunt - Part 1. A Graphic Novel by Matthew H. Smyth, is a story of loss, a man who has lost everything, his family, his career, his self belief. He is a shell off a man going through life in a cloud, a daze. Having gradually closed himself from the world he lives in a type of self inflicted limbo, caught between worlds that he has separated and distanced himself from. Leaving himself to roam between these worlds without anyone really knowing him and he not having to commit to any real relationships, or so he would have himself believe.
His life has been split into two, the past life, happy with a beautiful wife, children everything he wanted, everything he worked for in life, but as perfect as it all was, and as is with life a storm was brewing in the distance, a storm that would eventually tear him and his family a part. His new life is a seedy underbelly of society, a world of alleys, drunks, low lives, a world he was once so proud to look down on has now taken him in and made him one of their own.
Hunt is a story of how a man can seem to have it all and how it can al be taken away, in what can seem like a blink of an eye, but when examined really it had been coming a long time before, but are we aware of what is to come, do we bury our heads in the sand and ignore the warning signs, the small twists and turns in our lives that can send us down a spiralling out of control path that will engulf us entirely. Rose tinted glasses can help keep secrets, but once the smoke clears what are we left with, our own decisions and how they affect the people around us, the people we hold dearest to us. Can the people we love also turn their backs, in what they might tell themselves is the best thing for us, sweep it under the carpet, let it go when things get out of their control, or out of their understanding, perhaps we don't even understand the world we inhabit.
Graphite - Detective Fox.
Life can take us down strange and often dangerous paths, but it is how we deal with the situations that we find ourselves in that defines us, fight or flight, do we go with our instincts, gut feeling or we do act on reason and logic, or do we turn our back on situations and self medicate? Drink our problems away ultimately creating new problems. Drugs and a new world, a world we can discover or even revisit and fall into a routine and loss ourselves deeper and deeper within a world we build up and only let in who we decided and keep the rest at arms distance, put up a smoke screen to hide ourselves and our world behind.
How far will we go into our world, is there a time when the wall must come crashing down and we expose ourselves, can we pull ourselves back from the brink? Perhaps but the path is littered with holes and unless we keep a close eye on where the path is going we can always fall back into a new hole, a deeper and darker hole. The harder we hit the harder it is to get back up, but we can also find a light to guide us through the dark paths, help us avoid the holes and ultimately save us from ourselves.
This story is based around experiences that I had in my teenage and early twenties, not all of it but a sense of losing ones self and hiding certain aspects of your life from people, creating personas that mask what your life has spiralled into. A world away from what I was only a year or two before hand, but it's a slippery slope and before you even know it you are somewhere you never thought you would be, and the years pass and the life you once knew seems like a distant memory. A place which sucks you down and you push the people who are really good for you away, but ultimately it is only yourself who can be honest with yourself and pick which direction you want your life to go in. Even when you think you are out you can get pulled back in. You begin to question what life has come down too, and if its real, in a sense that this can't really be what this is all about and you have a guilt that starts to take over, this can be a good or bad thing, it can stop the ride, or it can speed up the ride, you think if you go faster it won't catch up with you, but which way is the ride going?
When you answer that question you can find probably much to your dismay that you are deeper than when the ride started and the ride has stopped and now its just a routine, a new way of life. And this is what I want to show in this story. Not everyone will have had my experience but I'm sure that everyone has had times in their lives when the ride has got out of control, and they need someone or something to stop it and tell them "Hey, it's just a ride."
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