Jerry’s glorification is one of the greatest scams Evan Dorkin slid into the comic like a Trojan horse.
Jerry Stokes is drawn with that sad little boy’s face, the one who stays quiet, the one who suffers in silence… therefore the readers can project their compassion onto it, avoiding seeing closely how -awful- the whole club is. (I personally don't like calling them that because I feel like I'm just repeating what everyone else in this fandom has been told to repeat, yeah, they're awful, who the fuck cares? They're fictional.) Moving on...
Jerry is an illusion of benevolence: Silence with a victim’s mask. But silence is also violence when it means to let others mistreat without intervening.
Jerry was not good. He’s passive, but not innocent. He stayed when he could’ve left, he stared when he could shout, he played fool when his friends were cruel towards anyone and themselves. And when he finally explodes he does it in hoarded grudge and out of pace. He never had real redemption, he had a miserable catharsis.
With this said, not even him was safe from Evan’s wrath. He doesn’t stand up for anyone, not even himself, with dignity.
Despite anything he says NOW...
And yeah, the Eltingville fandom raises him as “the only one who deserved to be saved”, when he doesn’t even bother to really apologize but everyone else expects the punches thrown to Bill in the epilogue serve as such. How convenient!
A quiet guy with an “I didn’t do it” face, that’s never in the way… many love him because they can project on him anything they want him to represent, without taking responsibility for what he truly is: A sidekick, a coward, a guy who’s as broken as the rest of his friends, but who wears a better mask.
Instead, Bill, Josh or Pete are confrontational, they burn, they steal, they fight, they scream. That’s why they get hanged: because they’re not given the chance to turn the other cheek, and Jerry is the fandom’s moral placebo. If you want to behead them, be fair then, and let 4 heads roll instead of just 3.
And listen, I don’t hate Jerry, I’m only starting to appreciate him in recent times but to me he has always been pretty indifferent. As a character I’ve never been able to connect with him as much as I do with the other three or two if we exclude Pete. But what I DO hate is that many people in the fandom are just like his worst traits; half-hearted and indulgent, unable to think for yourselves or to analyze this piece completely outside from Evan Dorkin’s words, as if it was a crime to think and respond with honesty over something that may, or may not, have made us feel like garbage.
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