Do A Little Song, Do a Little Dance. . .

Get your dead love out of the underworld fast. OK, so it doesn't rhyme well. Even Etrigan has a clunker now and again.

Discussion topic for the day: The story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The basic outline is Eurydice dies, Orpheus travels to the Underworld and convinces Hades and Persephone to give him a chance to get Eurydice out. All he has to do is play his lute and sing, and she'll follow. If they both make it all the way out of the Underworld, they can live together again. But he can't look back to check on her even once until they're both out. If he does, she goes back to the Underworld, and he's out of luck. Naturally, he gets out, but forgets she has to make it out as well, turns around, and well, easy come, easy go.

I know this story has been aped at least once, in that Formerly Known as the Justice League (or I Can't Believe It's Not Justice League), where they tried to get Tora* out, except Fire couldn't help herself and turned around, and there was crying to follow. So I'm sure it's been homaged/copied in other media** as well. But in any of those stories, did the protagonist actually get the person they cared about out of the underworld, or do they always screw it up?

I was thinking that in a comic, you could have some fun with it. Have the protagonist see their love when they show up petitioning to lead them out, but once the terms are agreed to, never show the story's Eurydice until it ends one way or the other. Not in outline or anything. The whole thing to me seems to be a test of faith. If you keep singing or playing your instrument, or talking to them, they'll follow you, and if you go far enough, you'll be reunited in the world of the living. But you only have the word of whomever runs that particular Underworld that will actually happen. But what else can you do. You can't fight the ruler of the Realm of the Dead, you have to play by their rules. So you trust that if you do, things will work out.

By not showing whether Eurydice is actually still back there, and perhaps by throwing in some denizens of the underworld who mock our protagonist for actually believing Hades/Devil/Whoever, you introduce doubt in the minds of the reader, as well as the main character. Maybe you draw the book from first-person perspective, so that we see what the character does, so that when they turn, if they turn, it's as if we're turning as well. We've become too worried to go any farther without checking. Just a peek, it can't possibly hurt. Or it actually works out, and we get to be the protagonist turning to see that we have been reunited with the one we journeyed to some dank realm to retrieve, and everything will be joyous and happy.

Any stories where it actually works out that way? Doesn't have to be in comics, I've just been thinking of it in terms of how it could be presented in a comic. And I'm a bit of a sap when it comes to love, so I'd like to see it actually turn out well.

* I only skimmed through a copy of the trade in my comic store, so I'm not clear on the details, but what was Tora doing in hell? Of all characters, she's one of the last ones I can see winding up there.

** Did you see that post on Comics Should Be Good, where Curran used "mediums" as the plural of "medium" and the comment thread devolved into how that's not proper, and it's supposed to be "media", but other people argued "mediums" is fine, and on and on? I was tempted to make a comment, and use the term "irregardless", because I know that gets the Parsing Police up in arms. I have to tell you though, my dictionary says it works just as well as "regardless". Granted, there's no reason to make yourself write two extra letters, but there is the fun one can derive from tweaking the Grammatical Gendarmerie. But I couldn't come up with a comment relevant to the subject of the post, so I didn't do it.