40 years

Let's raise a jar!

I think this might be a long one, so I hope a few of you will indulge me!

I used to write these kind of long, freeform posts quite a bit around a decade ago. Times were different. Back then you could say what you actually felt and believed about almost anything without it spiraling into a binary barking match. There were, of course, always moments when somebody would take offense and reply in furious ALL CAPS, but for the most part you could have a proper debate, with real points of view, nuance, and open minds. Or at the very least least you weren’t automatically blocked for sharing differing world views. But things changed, lines were drawn, and the trolls formed tribes with generals and attack dogs. Shutting people down became a blood sport, and, well, life gets ever-shorter, and I had work to do. It was no longer worth it. So I stopped.

But I digress. This post isn’t about that. It’s about a decade of incredible change for me.

My birthday, which just passed (May 2nd,) marks ten years since my first Wonder Woman pages were previewed, to the day. I had thought my mainstream career was dead in the water, never to return. But then Diana came into my life, and everything changed.

By a coincidence of fate, this year also marks my 40th year as a professional in the comics industry. 40 years of learning. 40 years of reaching, and yearning. Of incredible highs, and soul-crushing lows. Of excitement and dread in equal quantities. Of intense doubt, brutal introspection, poverty, loss, and finally rebirth - literally within a title that carried that as part of its name:

Wonder Woman: Rebirth. (What are the chances?)

When that book was gifted into my care, alongside the wonderful Nicola Scott and writer Greg Rucka, I had not drawn a monthly series for some four or five years. I had thought those days were behind me, and had been casting around for different kinds of roles. But in that time out from drawing something gathered within me. From never wanting to draw again, very slowly - even imperceptibly - the desire to draw returned. And that desire changed ineffably into something else, something much more powerful.

It became a NEED.

By the time I picked up my brushes and pens again to draw Wonder Woman the desire to create had been so dammed up that when the gates opened the creativity came flooding out. And I knew I had to take it seriously, as if my life depended on it. I cut out many things to make sure I had total focus.

Never miss a deadline.

Be easy to work with.

Be as damn good as you humanly can be under those constraints.

And don’t aim to be just good. Shoot for greatness, even if you fear you can never achieve it.

And that was my mantra for the last decade. In everything. I haven’t counted up the number of issues I’ve drawn in that time, the number of pages. I’m never truly convinced such things matter. Some achieve greatness with massive output, others through much less work by dint of the genius of their artwork. But I do know that either way, since I started Wonder Woman, I have not stopped working. It has been back to back, one piece of work to the next, with some overlaps. I’ve worked to the point of almost breaking myself on that wheel because I had not, and still have not lost that desire to grow, to reach, to be better, to be brave, and yes, bold. I still feel like a kid starting out, (though I confess my body is finally starting to creak a little.) I’m giddy with the possibilities.

I’m still hungry. Starving in fact.

Like it or not, our art is and will always be a kind of projection of ourselves, if we’re honest. It is a manipulation and secretion of what we have learned and experienced. All artists are actors. We play every role we represent via pigment, word or tune. We emote within our creations. Internalized performance repurposed and translated into our chosen mediums. We are laid bare and invite a response we may not always like. We are puppeteers, world-builders, conductors and directors, technicians and wild vagabonds, poets, pagans, prophets and profiteers, mad, damned and holy. The mightiest sagas fed through our senses and fingers, and the pin-point dashing of marks across paper, spat out through machineries across the globe.

This is folly, what we try to do. And yet it IS what we do. A process vastly more complex than it seems, both smaller and bigger than we ever understood it to be.

But we are also far from important, except on that small scale - where the creator connects with their reader, or listener or watcher. And that’s ok. Our own industry shrinks every year as far as any truly large-scale mega-star reach goes, while it grows ever-bigger in terms of those who choose to converse in this language. We can’t know if that will change, but for now it’s what we have.

Which is all to say - for 40 years I have worked in comics. And in that time some of you have been with me every step of the way. I could say that with some certainty I’ve loved comics for some 53 or 54 years, and there are a precious few who have been with me through all of that time too! Some have only just found me. Others have been won-over. A great many other former readers have fallen along the way. But this dialogue we have shared has meant more to me that you could know.

We work alone. For vast numbers of minutes, hours, days, months and years, we are alone. Hoping our efforts land with somebody. Hoping we are, in some way, understood. That the work is validated. Worth it. Otherwise why put yourself through that terrible isolation? But then that’s it - it’s not isolation, it’s a long-form conversation, in which the questions posed take a great deal of time to be asked. And again, the answers aren’t always what we might hope them to be, when at last they come.

Which is to say - thank you. Again. for being with me on this crazy fucking journey.

I hope my best is yet to come. I strongly believe I can do more, and do better. That’s the engine that drives me. You, dear friends, are the fuel, without which I am going nowhere at all.

Here’s to the next decade!

My very first page of Diana for Wonder Woman: Rebirth #0