In Memory: Barry Buchanan
A few years back I followed a link to a webcomic titled Don't Feed the Geek (Link to first page, posted back in 2007, gets better and non pixely from there). As you might expect from the title it's techie humor. That first page has a user asking the hapless IT guy, "I don't know my username or password but could you show me how to check my home email?"
I skimmed through the archives of the time and found this was chock full of humor I liked. Slice of life techie humor. Even the family scenes I found myself thinking, "If I'd ever found someone to marry and have kids with... yeah I could see this happening." Barry's faith worked into the strips as well -- but in a way that simply showed what he believed rather than trying to force you to to his point of view. In some ways this was inevitable, it was a slice of life strip based on his life and he did IT work for his local church.
I never met Barry in person, only read his comic and followed his twitter. I once had the pleasure of responding to a tweet and getting a reply saying he'd wondered if anyone would catch the joke he'd made.
One thing about webcomics (or anything) based on a persons actual life is that life has a way of coming in without concern for existing plans. Late in 2011 his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and this eventually showed up in the comic. Earlier there was a strip about joking that a relative's headache must be a brain tumor only to discover that yes, it was in fact a tumor. Then last year I remember noticing a shift in the quality of the art, which seemed odd as it didn't look as good and Barry had been putting work into improving. In early June the verdict came in, a trip to the ER became a trip to the intensive care unit with brain surgery and chemo on the schedule. But by the end of June he was back and posting online again including some new comics. While Barry reported the doctors were cautious it was in the next months starting to look promising. New pages of the comic coming up and skill slowly advancing. He even got to make some jokes about similarities in how chemo effected him and a few years earlier his wife. It seems he kept good humor and didn't let these troubles pull him down. The minister of his church mentioned having to visit the ER after a bout of kidney stones, and returning to work to find Barry checking in to ask how he was doing and sharing of his own experience with kidney stones, all this despite being in the middle of a fight for his very life.
But the doctor's had reason to be cautious. In May this year he announced a hiatus to allow for surgery and recovery. Late May and June were busy for me both at work and in my personal life. It was thinking about a list of webcomics I'd put together for a friend that got me thinking and realizing that I had not seen anything from Barry on twitter since early in the year and Google gave the grim news. Mercifully it appears that he did not have to suffer long. The hiatus was announced on May 20th and on June 4th cancer stole his life. Others lost far more, for me it's the lose of an interesting voice online, not nearly the loss his wife and children have faced. All the same it hurts. There must be more laughter in heaven since June and if there's an IT office up there it sure sounds like they've gained a hard worker.
I'll pray for your family Barry, after the laughter freely given it's the least I can do.
(This is a crossposting |
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