I have always wanted to write. Professionally, anways. They say that if you write, then you're a writer. So I guess I am a writer, just not a published one outside of a few school journals and one small magazine when I was seventeen. It was a start. And then I started college and all those things kind of went on the backburner. But it was always in the back of my mind. It was always there, just waiting for me to have time to do so.
When I was younger, I read whatever I could get my hands on. I read
The Gunslinger by Stephen King when I was thirteen, and I always say that book (along with Bad Religion) made me the person I am today. But I read alot: from modern stuff to that classical literature you are supposed to read when you're a teenager that make you feel really smart and superior to other people around you. On top of this uncanny ability to carry a book everywhere I went, I was also a bit of a geek. I loved
Star Trek and
Babylon 5 and Quentin Tarantino movies and Akira Kurosawa films. And punk rock. I become engulfed in this lifestyle that is very harsh and difficult to be a part of in a town like the one I grew up in. But it taught me reality and rebellion and I tried to keep those things in mind as I grew up. As all my friends moved on from being little punkers to being psuedo-emo kids (this was before the days of hardcore emo kids) who listened to their techno music and wore their hair all greasy and too long for the style they tried to use, I stuck with my punk and realized I had to embrace the geek within me. I loved these dorky things and I was in band and incredibly middle class and it all totally worked for me. I wasn't popular in that way you want to be in junior high school, but by ninth grade I didn't care and seemed to be pissed off at the world.
And then I rediscovered comic books. Everyone reads comics as a kid. I loved Superman and Batman and X-Men and basically the stuff that were cartoons on television. I would make my mom buy me books from the only store in town that carried them. I tried to stay up with what was going on, from
Reign of the Supermen to
Final Night to
Maximum Carnage to
Spawn and all of those glorious early 1990s books from Marvel and DC and the bastard stepchild companies that came out of the disgruntled employees who used to work for them. And then one day, for whatever reason, I stopped. The magical comic book store closed, and I didn't like the other one that had opened up in town. I dropped out of that world completely.
It was 1998. I would have been fifteen, at the height of discovery of new worlds of music and literature and just living life the only way I knew how. I had developed this affinity for Kevin Smith films, and I heard word, from whatever sources, that he was going to be writing
Daredevil. I knew of the character, but he used to be this second tier superhero that I didn't know that much about. But it was Kevin Smith. I was fifteen. It required my attention. I tried to understand the state the comic book world had found itself in when I re-entered it. Marvel had gone bankrupt, after putting all their weight on massive company crossover and special variant covers that sold for outrageous amounts. DC was still kicking strong, as well. And I've always been a DC kid. So I read
Daredevil and loved it. Say what you might about Kevin Smith, but he knows how to tell a good story. That storyline is still one of my favorites. It reads like an idependent comics, but it's backed by two of the best storytellers in comics still today.
What makes you expand interests, to become engrossed with it? With comics, it's always about nostalgia.
Daredevil ran incredibly late for the eight issues that Smith wrote them, taking a little over a year to come out. So drawing on my childhood memories I decided to pick up
Batman, with a story from Brian K. Vaughan called
Close Before Striking. That story is nothing short of genius. But you don't just read
Batman. You have to read
Detective Comics,
Gotham Knights, and maybe even
Legends of the Dark Knight as well. All of those have always been good. Most of the time even great. What compliments Batman better than Superman, though? And he has four books. I also read
Young Justice and
Supergirl when I found out Peter David wrote them both, because I've always been a fan of his work. That was a prety hefty pull list each month. Where it spiraled out of control was with David Mack.
David Mack wrote the second storyarc in the second volume of
Daredevil. Entitled
Parts of Hole, it is something completly out of left field and is pure brilliance. That lead me to discover
Kabuki, Mack's creator-owned book, which lead to discover the plethora of awesome creator owned Image books.
Rising Stars and
Midnight Nation from J. Michael Straczynski,
Powers and the Jinx-world books from Brian Michael Bendis. Then both of these writers started working for Marvel with
Amazing Spider-Man,
Supreme Powers, and back to the book that started all of this,
Daredevil. Marvel was doing these amazing things, and DC was quick to follow with books like
Green Arrow,
Green Lantern, and the Batman spinoff books like
Birds of Prey and
Nightwing. It's this entire medium of storytelling that not everybody respects, and it's hard to remember that. The highest selling book only sells 100,000 copies at the most. That's just amazing to me. How can more people not love stuff like this?
And through all of this, these people have taught me how to write. Brian Bendis has taught me how to tell a story. Joe Straczynski has told me the importance of the characters. Peter David always reminds me that not everything has to be serious all the time, and the a little comedy never hurt anybody. These are things that I will always remember, and things that I use when I write. Or try to write. One day my own comic will be published. I've written two issues and plotted far ahead of that. But the power of art was not bestowed upon me. So I have a very good friend who will draw it, when we both have the time to properly devote to it. Because you don't want to do it wrong, if you're going to do. I learned that from all the bad comics out there.
And in the end, I'm still a kid on Wednesdays.
