There was a period of time during junior high and high school when I was convinced music wouldn’t be a part of my life. I couldn’t afford to get a guitar or a keyboard, I didn’t have the outsize personality the other rock kids had, and I found it terribly difficult to put across my ambitions to even the few people I entrusted with my goals. I focused more on the possibility of going into comics. Just as some of my earliest recollections are of songs, I also have an undiminished affinity for Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang. In those high school years my attention was fixed on the artist Al Williamson, whose superrealistic, detailed style was so perfect in the notorious EC science-fiction comics of the late ’50s and early ’60s. In my mind, his work on Marvel’s adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back and his subsequent work on the Star Wars newspaper strip are the epitome of great comic book art.

In the past month I’ve been rooting through the boxes in my attic, looking at the stuff I’ve squirreled away up there over the years. I came upon a small cache of drawings, paintings, and such, gave them a once-over, and decided maybe it was a good idea to bring them downstairs and get some quality scans together, just to have a decent record of their existence. I doodle from time to time, but my dreams of being in the business of comics are long gone. This is partly due to the quality of what’s out there, specifically the writing. In the past two decades Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller have made that once unimaginable leap from the “funny books” to honest-to-God literature, and they didn’t even have to change their addresses. With the often funny but deeply felt Bone saga, Jeff Smith made a brilliant epic out of something that might have been relegated to a goofy kids’-comic limbo at one time. And then there’s Jon J. Muth’s insanely awesome adaptation of Fritz Lang’s M. Each example not only deserves space on the snootiest of bookshelves, but some deserve to kick a few warhorses off those shelves just for breathing room.

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