GRAPHIC NOVELS: You Never Forget Your First

Gunfights + Birthday Parties= No Cake

I never planned to share this. I thought putting it behind me was probably for the best. But as I was cleaning out a storage box of old DVDs I found the production files for my first graphic novel. 

It's mainly about growing up in a mill town in Northern New York post-Vietnam War. I'd told some of these stories to friends and colleagues that I worked with but they always seemed a little taken aback by some of the stories of my childhood.

Maybe at the time I thought they were interesting and kind of weird, but as I grew older I realized, that not everyone who lived in a similar environment had the same experience.

So I put together some sample pages and brought them to a San Diego Comicon in 2003. It was around the same time I was working on the Frank Frazetta documentary with my friend, Lance.

I stopped by the NBM Publishing booth where I talked with Terry Nantier. His company primarily imported French BDs on the cheap and then translated them more for the library and book markets. He saw my pages and really liked them.

He asked me to send him the story outline. Which...surprising to say, I was totally unprepared for. I didn't have any story per se...just a lot of vignettes. It took me a couple of weeks, but I did cobble something together about a guy who flies home and during the rough plane ride recounts his rough upbringing.

Here's a scene below from a friend's birthday party I went to down the road from me.

I'd spent several days drawing poster of a van for my friend. But in short order the party was invaded by his uncle, who was in a gun fight with my friend's grandfather.  I remember glass flying everywhere and buckshot slamming against the outside of the house that should have been condemned.  Luckily his grandfather took off in a truck and his uncle left to continue shooting at him.

His mother made us promise not to tell anyone, or we'd never be able to see our friend again. And I think we all kept that promise, too.

Thankfully the book is out of print, a first effort, and it’s hard not to grit my teeth at the stories I was thankful to not have to think about anymore. It was definitely cathartic and helped me move on with my life. Sometimes that’s what we need to do and luckily having a way to exorcise those demons is a blessing.

Scenes in your life stick with you. Some are good while others are traumatic. But if we can face that trauma and learn from it, we may be able to grow and move past it. If we’re lucky.

=s=