Lesson 1: Push the Wall, Defy the Code LESSON 1 PUSH THE WALL, DEFY THE CODE
Find Out What You’re Made Of and See Where You Can Go
How to start a story?
At the ending.
Know your ending.
I repeat: Know your ending.
Before you launch your ships, you’ve got to know where they’re going. Once you’ve locked in the conclusion, your every scene will be somehow aimed like a spearpoint at that ending. There. Now you can start. Tell whoever’s watching who the hero is, and then get that hero into trouble right quick. By getting your hero into trouble, he’ll show you who he is. And the odds have got to be against our heroes—that’s what made the story of the three hundred Spartans a source of lasting inspiration.
You’ll need your backstories, too, for all your characters and for your world. Some of it you can make up as you go along, sure, but the more preparation, the better. Retrofitting can be a clumsy trap.
So prepare carefully. Know where you’re going. Then start the action as late as possible—throw the poor reader into it at the last possible second. Embroider as you go—details will provide themselves.
But let’s not forget, your characters need an environment—a setting replete with atmosphere and obstacles to overcome and villains to defeat. A world that shapes them and hurls them into light and shadows. Take Sin City: Who is Marv without the grime and grift of Basin City? And the New York City underworld is the perfect incubator for Elektra’s transformation into Kingpin’s chief assassin. A place is often defined by those that inhabit it, the restless souls who wreak havoc on it, redeem it, or seek solace from it. Batman’s relentless pursuit of justice casts a light on Gotham’s darkest corners.
My comics often start as unformed masses of character, place, and language that form in my brain and make their way onto my drawing board. There’s nothing mystical about it. More than anything, it all begins with a hunger for a type of story (Crime? Horror? Romance?), then to character (Hero? Victim? Villain?)—then to world. And this world and this character must both reflect and define each other.
But for our purposes here, let’s start with a world. Vermont of my childhood. To quote the Bard, I came mewling and puking into life in Olney, MD, which, in 1957, was a community in transition, a small town in the sprawling Maryland farmland mutating into a DC suburban satellite in the post–World War II boom. After leaving Maryland, we spent a short time in the Berkshire mountain town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but it was Berlin, Vermont, where the world came into focus for me. I took shape on the drawing board of central Vermont, in its idyllic countryside where rivers and forests ramble and gather in the foothills of the Green Mountains. Mother Nature was kind to Vermont, that’s for sure. And Vermont was kind to me—I came into my own in the cupped hands of a natural wonderland.
Berlin is a half-hour walk over a mountain and a granite quarry from the spires and domes of Montpelier, Vermont’s capital, twenty minutes by bike. But most of my exploring was on the railroad tracks near my home, the cranky old “Dog River,” and the low mountain behind my parents’ house; all this I took to be my private fantasy land. In one of our lengthy conversations, Will Eisner told me that “Memory is impressionistic.” And he was certainly right about that. Will also said that to understand what drives your art and fuels your creative life, you’ve got to go back as far as you can. At the time, I took that to mean to journey back through human history to look at cave paintings and hieroglyphs, which I did, and it proved essential. But now I know that he also meant to investigate the primitive paintings of your own personal history, too: remember the people, the images, the colors, the moods, all those things that made their mark early on.
Autumn jumps to mind—just the mention of “fall” triggers remembering. A season of shortening days and colder nights, the first iron bite of winter in the air and raked leaves in crumply heaps. And one of Vermont’s calling cards is her fall leaves. But, seeing them for the first few times as a kid, those reds and golds seemed otherworldly. Some of the leaves laden with color, painted by a heavy hand. While others were brushed with a flick of the wrist. Bursts of colors, brighter because of their contrast with the long shadows that also come in that season. The forest floor of the woods near our house: the final resting place for moldy leaves and spider-legged, fallen limbs spotted with lichen and crawling with beetles and maggots. But mostly, those woods were as full of strangeness and miracles to me as an alien planet. Only a city kid would think that staring down a bullfrog is boring, or that crickets are quiet. Spend a night in the forest—there be monsters. These are the same woods where I would later crouch, dressed in my Superman pajamas, and spring out with arms stretched forward in imaginary flight to surprise my big brother, Steve.
Winter in Vermont arrives fast and harsh, and it stays forever. Blankets of white for months. Heavy slow-falling flakes quietly amassing by red barns and along narrow roads. And ice. Tons and tons of ice. The smudged mirror of a frozen pond. The red ball atop my oldest sister Anne’s stocking cap and the silver-buckled black snow boots of my sister Magaret as they set off into the white veil of a snowy morning after learning school was out for the day. And those icy trees. It was as if some great hand had gently pulled them from the ground, turned them upside down, dipped them into a glistening gel, and then lovingly returned them to the snowy fields and creek banks. Doing all this without making a sound or letting us see even a second of the work. It was the land of Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell, a land rich in arts and crafts and storytelling.
And then there’s Summer. A season that passes in a heavenly blur of cheery picnics and breathtaking exploration. It is here where the “city” of Montpelier takes form: stacked red brick buildings on wide streets—grand boulevards to me—and, along the curbs, hulking Ford Fairlanes and Pontiacs parked one in front of the other, clunky but big-engine-charged metal beasts at rest. I’m downtown with my parents and Steve, standing outside the Capitol Theater on State Street. We’re waiting in line for tickets to the Saturday matinee movie and the Capitol’s jutting, V-shaped awning is throwing a cape-like shadow on the sunbaked concrete.
The movie theater: that was another wonderland. The stories on the screen captivated me as much or more than the children’s books back at home on the shelf. How I loved exploring the other worlds captured in those vintage children’s books, which were passed down to us through the generations in my mother’s family. The stories cast a spell over me and I pored over the images, particularly the ones that featured Arthur Rackham’s watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings. They drew me in, took me on a journey, and lit up my imagination. So I started drawing as a very young child and immediately knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. One summer afternoon, I took a pile of typewriter paper that I had folded over, stapled, and drawn on to create a rudimentary comic and dropped it on the kitchen table in front of my mother. I then announced to her, “This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life.” I was five years old. Utterly in character, my mother, not missing a beat, said simply, “You can do anything you want to if you set your mind to it.”
Summer was also a time to roam free outside, from dawn to dusk, if I wanted. But I wasn’t a Boy Scout, I was too young to be one. I was just a tagalong kid. I loved being out by the water and in the woods, but in my own way—I didn’t like being told what to do or how to do it. The Boy Scout thing was a big deal back in the 1960s, but it just wasn’t for me. Camping was fun, but I made a lousy soldier-in-training. My father, Robert, was a carpenter and electrician by trade and the Army posted him in Greenland during World War II. He was good with his hands, and his training served us well when it came to camping in the woods, especially in the middle of a Vermont winter. He could start a fire in a blizzard. Dad was an Irishman’s Irishman. Raised in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, he was a strong, squarish fellow with a lantern jaw and craggy, Bifrost eyebrows that perched over piercing, icy sky-blue Viking eyes. Hell’s Kitchen and I seem to be destined for each other. My dad was a child there, and my career kickoff was Marvel’s Daredevil, featuring a hero from Hell’s Kitchen. And after manufacturing jobs fled Manhattan and freed up big, rough-hewn spaces perfect for artists, Hell’s Kitchen became my workplace and home.
When my dad wasn’t on a job, he volunteered as a “scouter,” a troop leader responsible for training the boys and guiding their camping trips and work projects. My oldest brother, also named Robert, was an Eagle Scout and born explorer. Though it was in the realm of the mind that he did most of his exploring: in music, opera, astronomy, physics, philosophy, history, and science fiction. But it was my brother Steve who was the truest scout of all, and the son who most carried on our father’s legacy as a carpenter—in fact, an architect—as well as an all-around handyman, able to repair or jury-rig any mechanical problem that comes along. Steve was and still is a gifted cartoonist and artist. When we were kids, I drew superhero adventures and Steve spun out World War I adventures with his Stevie Spad ™. Also, like Dad, Steve was and remains a man of good will and hard work. By the time I was ten, I was tagging along with my dad and my brothers on their scouting adventures, and I even helped with some of their community projects. Looking back now, it seems like I spent entire summers in their company.
We cleared paths in the woods, built foot bridges across creeks, pulled weeds in church parking lots, and built quirky bird houses for some of Berlin’s elderly crowd. I really enjoyed the latter, because I liked working with my hands—just like my father and brothers—and the old folks fascinated me. They so resembled some of the people and personalities that Norman Rockwell captured in his cartoons and illustrations. I did some of my first sketches after hanging out with these real-life American characters.
We hiked, pitched tents, and huddled around flint-and-steel-lit campfires. It was at Boy Scout camp when the world turned over for me. Someone handed me a well-worn copy of the paperback book Tales of the Incredible, and the hook was set for life. Not since I was a toddler watching Max and Dave Fleischer’s Superman cartoons had I been so transported.
A collection of eight magnificently illustrated sci-fi stories pulled from the pages of the legendary EC Comics, it worked a strange magic over me. Under a dome of stars and by the dancing fire light, the tiny mass-market book grew in my hands—I was mesmerized, every page was a revelation. The artwork was so involving—dragon-like aliens, astronauts, and their rocket ships on moonlike planets—and the stories were absorbing. At first it seemed like a long way from the world of Arthur Rackham, but as I looked deeper, I saw the similarities. Rackham’s images and the ones in Tales were just so alive. They seemed ready to jump off the page. I rose early from my tent the next morning so I could read more, and, when it was time to break camp, I rolled it up in my sleeping bag for the hike home. In a way, it’s been with me ever since. For the next few years, I read it over and over again, poring over the illustrations until the pages fell out.
