Depth

Living The Childhood Dream

In fifth grade, we—as in, the entire fifth grade class of students—were asked to draft a short statement or paragraph, visualizing in words where we saw ourselves ten years from that date. The year was 1993, and Larry Hama & Marc Silvestri were at the height of their run on the ongoing Wolverine series at Marvel Comics. Though that run would shortly be coming to an end, it was pure rocket fuel for the naive little eleven or twelve year old that I was, who had shown an early aptitude for drawing and wanted more than anything to take over pencils on Wolverine when my time came.

In ten years, I will be a penciller on Wolverine comics.

I wish I still had the yearbook from that year. Posted next to my awkward, forgot-to-tell-my-parents-it-was-photo-day-because-I-had-undiagnosed-ADHD photograph was an image of the little sheet of white paper on which I had dutifully committed, in indelible Sharpie, the above line of text, along with a rather crude image of Wolvie’s gloved, clawed hand punching through a shattering surface of indeterminate substance (similar to some of the insert shots of Wolverine punch-clawing through set walls in Wolverine #50)

Ten Years Later…

Ten years later, I was a drunken, 21 year old wreck. Though I was still nominally “making comics,” my hopes and dreams of working on Wolverine had long since receded into the eaves to clear the stage for no small amount of adult responsibility and attendant clinical depression. There’s a very long story in there somewhere, and perhaps one day I shall tell it in full, but for now I’ll spare you, and point our time machine a few more years ahead into the future…

Twenty Eight Years Later…

In the first half of 2021, I got contacted by my friend and doppelgänger, writer Grant Stoye, querying my interest in drawing a one page comic he had written. I’d recently been cut from a 64 page samurai comic I’d contracted to draw for Story Worlds Media (another long and fucked up story I’d like to tell in full someday) and had both the time and temerity to issue a resounding YASSS! And, as it happens, the one pager was a Wolverine story.

Now, there is a very fine line between fan art and copyright infringement. For most of my professional career, I’ve danced around and across this line without serious consequence. Indeed, my fan art Rocketeer pages have landed me more paid work than anything else in my portfolio, before or since their creation. But, before I show you this one page wonder, I find it incumbent upon me to express, again, that I was not paid for this work, and neither was it created in order to derive profit of any kind. That said, here’s the story:

For Those Still Reading

I’ve called Grant my doppelgänger. Here’s why: We look similar enough to pass for half brothers, probable cousins. We were born about three days apart in the same year, and our senses of humors align perfectly down to the last sandwich bag full of wet farts. And we’re always amazed to discover more parallels and similarities every time we chat it up, which is nowhere near half as much as I should like, and much less than it should be.

What Grant had presented me with here, in this one page story, was the opportunity to come full circle and engage in a little childhood wish fulfillment. I had a duty to say yes to this piece, and I am so glad that I did. I had a blast making it, for one, and it helped put legs on a very funny, and poignant moment in Wolverine’s fictional life. I love comics of this kind. Often, they begin as mere exercises for the writer, but they graduate to the level of poetry, as I believe this one would have done no matter the artist involved.

I talked a little about this in my recent post regarding The Lion & The Unicorn , and the use of poetry, original or existing, as a springboard for storytelling creativity. I was not in the writer’s room when Grant drafted this swift little ditty, but I like to imagine a writer at the top of their form, synthesizing through a bare minimum of words and images, something that says more in aggregate than its component parts could ever do singly. Comics is, I believe, more a calling than say, a trade or a career path one decides to embark upon. For one, it’s near enough impossible to get rich doing it that few ever really make it past the early, exploratory phase. I’ve been hanging onto the bull, as it were, for more than five years now and but for my parallel career as a professor, I should have been bucked off into the shitty mud of financial insolvency almost from the get-go. I wasn’t, though. Because of the support of family and friends, people like Grant, and in no small part because of the crippling fear that I would fold up and die like a fly caught between two panes of sun heated glass, I have and continue to hold the course. It’s a bit easier for me, as an artist, since it usually falls to the writer to pay for prom when it comes to page rates and project management. Just the same, I am also a writer, and have put countless unpaid hours into crafting stories that my DNA has me wired up to tell, no matter the pain or personal cost.

In my experience, there is no making it, or breaking into comics. I hate myself for saying it, but going back to advice I read in so many books and articles on filmmaking in my own, personal Dark Ages, it all comes down to making comics. That’s it. Make. Comics. In the filmmaking books it was movies, of course, but if you want to write Wolverine, don’t just sit around waiting for Marvel to reach out to you with an offer, write some fucking Wolverine! If you want to draw Wolverine? Same thing: Draw Wolverine! And, if you want to give up, but are terrified by the chasm of infinite and incalculable emptiness that yawns before your quivering feet? Then, don’t give up. That chasm presents a choice, and, given the options of making art that no one is likely to see or tumbling headlong into existential freefall, I feel like this is something of a no brainer:

Make. Comics.

J. Schiek is a comic book artist, writer and art professor currently teaching at North Idaho College. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Ringo Award Nominated Yule by Grant Stoye. His first solo comic, Hush Ronin, will hit comic book shops on January 23, 2023, from Band of Bards.