1974—1989
From my childhood through my early teens, I wrote and drew purely as a hobby. In hindsight, it might seem like I was deeply devoted to honing my craft, or that I was trying to log my proverbial “10,000 hours” of experience. But really I was doing it as a way to avoid boredom, loneliness, and anxiety.
My parents divorced when I was two years old. In the ensuing years, I moved to a lot of new houses, new towns, and new schools. My life was deeply affected by my parents’ respective remarriages, divorces, and everything in between, and I had an overwhelming feeling of transiency and powerlessness. Writing and drawing were one of the main sources of consistency for me. Unlike a lot of hobbies, they didn’t require expensive equipment, instruction, or other participants.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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It’s a pretty obvious insight, but I don’t think it was coincidental that I was drawn to an art form that allowed me to translate the chaos of life into neatly organized boxes.
1990—2007
In my late teens and 20s, I wrote and drew for extremely embarrassing reasons: to become well-known, to garner acclaim, and to meet someone and maybe fall in love. I’m sure that a lot of art has been created for such reasons, but I shudder to think of myself then. I can’t bear to look at anything I wrote and drew in those years. I’m sure I’d see layers of dishonesty in the work—or aesthetic decisions that were guided by ego and desperate striving.
This was also the period in which I tried, with great difficulty, to find my own voice or style. I had learned to make comics by copying the work of my artistic heroes—particularly Jaime Hernandez and Dan Clowes. To my surprise, people were suddenly pointing out that influence in a critical way. At the end of this period, I wrote and drew Shortcomings, my first “graphic novel.” That felt like a small step toward addressing flaws that I (and my critics) saw in my prior work. Despite the polarized response the book received, I was happy to have finally produced something that seemed like it could only have come from me.
2008—2019
At this point, I was writing and drawing because it was my job. I moved across the country, got married, became a parent twice over, and settled in one of the most expensive cities in the world. It felt unexpected and antithetical to how I had worked before, but suddenly I was thinking about writing and drawing as a means to an end (i.e., money). Fortunately, no one was beating down my door with horrible, lucrative offers—no opportunity for me to “sell out,” something I would’ve totally welcomed then.
To be honest, I think some of my strongest work came out of this period, so maybe—contrary to what I’ve always believed—I actually do well under pressure. But there was no denying that what had started out as a pure hobby had evolved into something else in my life.
2020—2025
Things have gotten a little easier lately, as my kids are now older, busier, and less interested in spending time with me. I’ve been doing less with comics and have been focusing mainly on screenplays and a stage play. My motivations for writing are now some strange amalgam of all the reasons described above. I’m definitely enjoying writing more than I have since, probably, my teen years. I have so far omitted one other reason I write. The truth is I’ve always written as a means of communication. It hasn’t always been clear to me who I was trying to communicate with. For a long time, it was a hypothetical or unknown audience—people I’d never met and likely would never know. But in recent years, I think I’ve narrowed my target audience down to a small, specific group of people, and I feel like I’m burying secret messages that might make sense to my loved ones at some point down the line.•
