I was wandering in the library today, looking for something to relax with before going to class, and I was drawn to the comic book shelf, since there was a lot of interesting stuff that was possible to finish in two hours. I didn't read the blurb of The Wolf Man, so I thought this would be about the psychological condition where a person believes himself to be a werewolf. Turns out the story was far less interesting than that.

As the most prominent patient of Sigmund Freud, Sergei Pankejeff was used (anonymously) to prove the validity of psychoanalysis, so obviously psychology needs to be an interest at some level at least before attempting to read this, because beyond that the story has very little to offer. There are diversions to historical events and Pankejeff's family, but it didn't help that I don't hold Freud's theories in very high regard. Not only he decided that there should be a predetermined limited time period for Pankejeff's treatment, but he also made absolutely outrageously far-fetched conclusions based on dreams and childhood events (some of them, surprise surprise, supposedly never happened), and wrote that Pankejeff's illness was a fixation (seems to imply that his psychological problems were just a matter of the will).

Pankejeff himself admitted later that he doesn't believe to have been cured, and resented being the poster boy for psychoanalysis. The final frames of the comic represent that: it seems there has never been relief, and the darkness has remained in one form or another. In a way the ending is impressive in its understatedness, but everything before that is just psychology jargon with very little substantial content. The artwork, however, is strangely appealing. It consists mostly of simple sketches, but it's at its best when it has been broken into shadows, symbols, and vague forms. Even the broken mind can be beautiful.

"Rage is a child's form of seduction, provoking punishment to satisfy a sexual desire". Ugh.