A LIFE DIVIDED

On Having Feet In Two Camps

I dreamed last night that the game was almost up. That, at 58, I only had seven years left. Make or break. 65 would be when I retire. Not true, of course - health permitting - but it was a dream after all.

Yesterday I was given a reason to revisit PARADISE REX PRESS, INC. My love-letter to post-modernist literature, and still the bravest, most personal work of my career. And it remains, also, an ode to being forever torn. A working class lad educated amongst the elite. No longer fitting neatly into either camp. Stubbornly choosing a career in comics over the fine art realm my art teachers would have preferred, now yearning for a chance to indeed create work that’s of a more high-brow nature, while still, and yet, craving a true, defining mainstream mega-hit.

On the one hand, wanting to turn my back on anything to do with materialism, wealth, popularity and z-list fame in order to explore my own integrity. To be a true ‘Artist’, free of the shackles of conformity and editorial input. To make work - any kind of work - entirely for its own sake. To be fully authentic. As free as it is humanly possible to be.

On the other hand, still hoping for that fulfillment of that childhood dream, making comics that sell in great numbers within a medium that fully embraces my efforts, and celebrates them. Because, despite appearances, I still feel like an outsider. Not fully accepted by comics royalty, and the wags and purveyors and champions of it.

But I cannot afford the former of these - having responsibilities and family, and a roof to keep over our heads. And so indeed, it would take the latter to make the former even possible!

I was, in the dream, also returned to a meal in San Francisco at the time I was part of the tech sector, and co-founder of a start-up that was briefly worth multiple millions. At that time I was about to leave the company because of Wonder-Woman, and a (desperate, as it happened) need to return to storytelling and art. But at the meal one hugely successful investor said “You’ll be back. Once you get the start-up bug there’s no going back…”

He was horribly wrong in my case. I miss it not a jot, and viewing what it has become leaves me cold. (I heard all the performative egalitarian bullshit about transparency, fairness, how we were making the world a better place so very often and so insistently. It was a sector desperate to appear self-righteously progressive - as it should be. But I didn’t trust it then, and I certainly don’t now. It is, and always has been purely about money, and making a lot of it, over and over. It is about power, and it is an elite club. But I digress!)

But what the dream did was reveal the split. It reminded me that I am, and will likely forever be, torn.

Back in Derby - a place I cannot, it seems, ever truly escape. A place I once scorned, but always loved - I dreamed about the vast California skies, and dipping my fingers into the cool shimmering surface of a swimming pool once more. I could feel that water again. And I remembered, once, thinking - why would anybody leave this? What would bring you back? And why?

And yet… here I am. And, for the most part, happier. Much happier than I was in California. True, I was briefly intoxicated by those heady dreams of vast success. It was tangibly close. A breath away. A toss of the coin could have made me incredibly wealthy, but I’d have lost who I am in the shallows of that make-believe world. I know that now. I’d have been beaten by it. Drank the cool aid. Told myself that all the unbearable stress was worth it, for the flash car, the pool, the glorious house, the fancy schools, elite friends, and the art! (I would have surely bought a Frazetta - to mock me, and remind me of what I could never be, but also what I had given up.)

But here I am, back in Derby. Surrounded by my dearest friends and family. Still grafting. Still looking for the a make-or-break moment. But not the same kind anymore. Now all I look for is just enough. I never coveted objects. I’ve never been the jealous kind. But what I do long for is the creative freedom that ‘just enough’ affords a creative person.

I’m not stupid. I’m smart enough to know how blessed I am. How rich I am with regards to family and friends. How lucky I am to be surrounded by people who I love and who love me. How insanely rare it is to be able to make a sustained living doing what I do. How I have achieved, in ways great and small, every dream I ever had. How fortunate I am to have a number of loyal readers who support my efforts, whatever I do. True patrons. True fellow sailors on the same voyage with me, happy to let me take them wherever the muse’s winds blow, lifted by the “rising tide of creativity”, as Jack Katz was prone to say. So this isn’t a fishing trip, to extend the analogy. I’m not in need of compliments, or even understanding. I barely understand it myself! But rather it is a document of one creator’s ever-shifting, restless mind.

I don’t believe in destiny. Fate, if it exists, seems to have no endgame. I don’t know that I ‘deserve’ anything. I’ve never been entitled like that. But I do have ambition, and I do still have a burning fire in my belly. The problem is, with increasingly little time ahead, I struggle to know which course most befits me. Which will bring the greatest satisfaction and produce the very best work?

The work I remain most proud of - the most soul-bearing, deeply personal thing I ever committed to paper - is a novella with a print run of 500 copies. Most people would have zero interest in it. Many, I’m sure, would find it pretentious, or just not get it. But a few others - I count China Miéville and Grant Morrison amongst them - agree with my assessment.

The work that sold best was my Hulk run, which you may know was not a happy time. My longest two runs on single characters would be the work I did with Wonder Woman, and The Green Lantern. Both books have been overshadowed by former, and even contemporary runs, but they did well enough. I’m proud of them.

And recently there has been Conan. Another dream achieved, that is starting to feel somewhat like a full stop, (or period as US folk call them.)

And here I am, no closer to really knowing where to go next. I don’t know how to define myself anymore. Stan Lee reserved his real name for ‘The Great American Novel’ he never actually wrote. But he was Stan Fucking Lee!!! The grass is, as dead poets long ago noted, always greener over there, in that sunny glade. Comparison is ever the thief of happiness, we’re told. And yet we must find such engines to drive us. How will we know otherwise? If it is greener then maybe it’s worth going to that mythic other side in order to draw a comparison (no pun intended.)

Thank you, friends, for indulging what amounts to little more than a thought process. I feel like I’m at a crossroads. What comes next? Well, currently that’s anybody guess. But time, circumstances and luck will have a hand no doubt! By September I should have nothing left on my desk, and just a wide open road ahead of me, and then, I suppose, we’ll find out.