Seriously, think about the contrasts, though—we were speaking in class about juxtapositions, and the way that themes emerge in the contrasts. Consider the juxtaposition of the monster and the child. Or of the apparent humor in Seth’s My Day with the despair displayed inside the humor. Your ending about how you can take this and how you can’t points precisely to the idea of Lightness as expressed by Italo Calvino in that essay—the comic allows us to be in the presence of despair when we might ordinarily shun it. This seems like a slight thing, but is, if you consider it, incredibly powerful. Because to be in the presence of it allows us to experience the truth of it, without allegory, and thus to be in the presence of our meanings, our own truth.