Comic Errors : Never Meet Your Heroes
With unyielding, undying and unfounded respect for Michael Layne Turner, Master Artist (1971–2008)
This is a story about meeting my first Real Life hero, Michael Turner: comic book artist and a mentor to me through my early teens. He was the age I am now when he died, 13 years ago. He would be 50 this year. That’s the same age as a friend I’m living with at the moment whose birthday is weeks away. There are no coincidences.
I was 14 years old when I started working for Top Cow Productions in Santa Monica, about 10 minutes from the house I grew up in. It was my first job and I loved it, working as an unpaid intern for Renae Geerlings (one of the Hot editors at the time). “Landing” the gig was a dream. Here’s how it started:
When I was starting to grow pubic hair, the first thing I saw was breasts on comic book women. There was this one set of books, Witchblade, drawn by the now-dead great 90s playboy of comics, Michael Turner. He was a midwestern kid who happened to start drawing some backgrounds for then-CEO Marc Silvestri, so the stories I remember told. Apparently his pencil work was so good, Marc started asking him to do bigger series, full pages. Truth be told IMHO his early work was utter balls crap, and probably Mike had some good ‘habits’ in the dark rooms that helped my Mentor get going. How and why he wound up as The One I’d fixate on to the point of finding his home number in the phone book and imploring my father to call him and ask him to come to dinner with us, I might not ever know. There was something in his drawing or the Spirit that was hiding behind it, that drew me in. I didn’t often fan-goggles fixate to the point of nigh-stalkerism (at that time just called Geek Fanboy stuff), but somehow I just had to badger. “Did you call him?”
“Not yet. Just… are you sure he’s going to want to do this?” asked my dad.
“No. You’re supposed to be the guy who can ‘get stuff done.’ Or are you not up for the task?” I dared him.
“Ok ok I’ll call him again tomorrow,” he sighed and begrudgingly activated his Charm.
The next thing I hear we are going to a now-defunct Chinese Restaurant in Beverly Hills to meet Michael Turner for dinner. Holy.Shit. What I remember is my parents continually asking him dumb questions. I kicked them under the table with big eyes. Apparently I was just sitting there silent and stuttering, so they were trying to make conversation to fill the gaps. What they didn’t know was that our souls were chatting, deep. We didn’t need words. But they were too stupid to get that or just so frameworked by social mores… I just felt interrupted. Meanwhile, they could have asked some GOOD Questions, like “what’s Sarah Pezinni’s lackadaisical attitude all about? How is she not more chuffed and excited about wielding this amazing power called The Witchblade?” That would have led to some stellar conversations.
Instead I learned some of his biography and found out how much his blonde bouffant mother loved, held, and supported him through his career. The Witch of witch-blade unmasked! I could see her as a sort of silent pupetter. Maybe he didn’t even want to be drawing comics, but mamma was so keen to keep up appearances, he had to make her Proud. Or Else. I saw an aching, stressed and sort of bewildered young man as I would be, sitting in that chair at dinner. The rest of the conversation and dinner was a haze. I probably didn’t eat; the air was so electric.
My parents come from a time when People were People and Stories were Stories. Unlike us post-Star Wars Inter-9/11 tykes, they had a fine-line demarcation between one’s ‘own life’ and ‘fantasy’. We lived out through screens, whose contents would then manifest ad infinitum in shops in Real stores. Like The Bible and the Eucharist, we took Luke Skywalker into our Body by emblazoning his visage on our walls and tying tiny He’s to strings and hanging them up over our beds. “May The Force look Over you. Yoda is Good. He Smiles Upon all his Lambs.” To my parents, it was all ‘kid stuff’ maybe, or else they knew it was scary. Like, Super Fucked Up. But… what the hell? “Because The Bible.Society.Culture Tells Us So…”
For them, the juice of these sorts of interactions would be in historiographies, and they wanted to probably tell what ‘sort of person’ this Michael Turner was, to have made it This Far into their world. Fair enough, I just hope they were pleasant to him and didn’t grill him like a turkey melt. Enough must have gone ‘right’ during the conversation that dinner finished with an invitation for yours truly to come visit the actual studios in Santa Monica. I was imagining wall-to-wall cardboard cutouts, dart boards, disco lights and guys drawing and laughing smoking cigarettes, or chewing gum. I don’t remember who said what to elicit the invite, but I was So Excited.
What I do remember is how afterwards, Michael went to the bathroom and I followed, and we peed next to each other. His was a bold, extreme, and durationally exceptional pee. Comparatively, I was urinating like Casper next to Leviathan. Ah well, I thought, we all gotta recognize growth potential when we hear it. Maybe my true tutelage from M.T. would be to learn how to evacuate like a stallion, as my drawing never really did get ‘good’ for the few years I knew him.
The first time I showed up at Top Cow, I brought cookies my mom had baked. And then brownies, and then cookies & brownies. Turned out most of the guys in the studio were wicked stoners. Nothing could have ‘sold me’ as an asset better. By the third visit, I had practiced for a week on how to ask if they had any room for an Internship. I was 14 and desperate. And by the way I’d still bring cookies. Or brownies. Or both.
After a month or so, I’m certain the cookies stopped coming. Maybe after the last big batch of Lemon Squares, as if to say “change is upon us. Sup sweetly, for these shall be your last Offerings from the Kitchen of Mom, waaaay up in the wee hills of Beverwood.” Then I started to have more responsibility. I was ‘in charge’ eventually of opening up and reading the dozens and dozens of submissions we would receive from the ‘outside world’ wanting in. These would be large or small packets of art from aspiring artists trying to break in to the industry. Sort of like ‘graphic novel mixtapes’. I had to choose from 3 versions of our pre-scripted letters, which summarized effectively said:
A) Thanks for taking the time to submit. Don’t bother doing that again.
B) You are clearly talented and have a lot going for you but the passion’s not there. Comics may not be the right fit.
C) You’re real close buddy. Actually, draw a couple pages off of this sample script and you might get an invite.
An average week’s ratio of letters was about A: 70%, B:29%, C: 1%. I think maybe 2 actual humans received C and responded with artwork in the 3 years I did this job. I’ve never really considered the wisdom in this experience, but it is striking me now, in hindsight. I wonder if this says how hard it is to be an aspiring unique individual, and have to understand that the creative process is a part of a conversation. No one ought to have a direct say over the work you create, ultimately. However, if it’s going to be welcomed under the umbrella of a team, family, group of people or corporate, it’s gotta have some stamina and you need to understand how spiritualism (aka some notion of ‘pure artistry’) is not an ends, nor a means to an end. It’s part of a fabric and web of society, both fed by as well as nourishing of it.
Top Cow can say: “YOU stand a chance of being some sort of artist,” but it was clever enough to cull out the egoic drives by saying, “we would want to first know if you can function as part of a sort of connection web, which includes writers, inkers, colorists and letterers in the manifestation of a final thing called a Comic Book, alongside editors, publishers, printers and a Boss who says what’s Good and what is Trash. Can you be in a party?” But if you say that to someone who’s dying to get out of their own circumstances, they’ll piss themselves with glee and slap you in the face once they know it’s not a game. I was, and did, and here I stand. Here’s how I discovered this Fatal Flaw in the auspices of corporate mechanized Reality:
It was San Diego ComicCon 1998, and I was asked if I wanted to work behind the Top Cow Booth for the long weekend. I had been to ComicCon every summer for five years, and still remember fainting at the first one when Jeff Smith agreed to do a sketch for me of my favorite character. I could barely get out the words “…Red…Dragon…” as the lights spun and I hit the ground. My dad had to carry me out of the auditorium and fan me back to life. Takes a fan to heal a fan, I guess. I was 9 years old.
By the time I was in my early teens and hitting into puberty, my primary objective was to find as much of the Personal Euphoria associated with being in the driver’s seat of one’s own life. I was so used to being the smallest in my family, hiding in classrooms knowing I wasn’t a great student but able to trick my friends into seeing me as an idiot and letting me cheat, and sneaking all sorts of ‘off-color’ comics, music and books around the house so that my parents wouldn’t notice. And I couldn’t drive yet.
Give this kind of kid a Name Badge on ‘the inside’ of ANYTHING and watch the fireworks. For three and a half days I was so helpful, agreeable, present and enthusiastic, I ended up literally sprinting across a quarter-mile long auditorium full of thousands of geeks, weirdos, tubs of lard and screeching children to grab a stack of comics we’d run out of. Because…it was an emergency. NO.SALE.SHALL.BE.LOST! I was the -blade incarnate.
It wasn’t until I got back home, looked at my blistered feet, and felt the thinness of my body, that I had a chance to ask myself, “What the fuck was that all about?” Meanwhile on the Top Cow Forums, one of my most favorite social playgrounds online, everyone was buzzing about the Con and asking how it was. So I pondered. I pondered, looked back, and I was fucking tired. Exhausted. And I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I really had to show for it. I hadn’t been paid and no one offered. The ‘reward’ was designed to be the experience itself. After all, the Holofoil, One-off, unique comics were sort of ‘whatever’ now that I could get them at work. Signatures and all that jazz wasn’t really interesting anymore when I could just show up at work with something and find the guy and ask politely for whatever I wanted. I was gifted a handful of pages of original work, Mike Turner had done a couple fucking wild drawings of Sith Lords and Jack & Sally for me… it wasn’t about the ‘stuff’ anymore and I was actually feeling pissed off. Annoyed AF in today’s parlance.
I spent a week thinking about it, and then I wrote about it. I posted it to the forum on a Saturday afternoon late August, 1998. I named names, days and times. I revealed a lot about the other side of the curtain, almost as if trying to persuade people NOT to come work for us. Downplaying consciously or unconsciously the presumptions I would have had once on the outside, about what it would be like Inside. “Fucking awesome” for a start. No. Doubts.
Certain artists and staff would populate the boards consistently, which was part of what made them so wonderful to the fans. To us…to me, who was starting to understand that weird line between Insider and Outsider. That it was more of a change of pace, and orientation. Instead of looking at something from one angle, you’re suddenly next to that thing looking back out at the other ‘you’s looking at the thing next to you… and then the penny drops: you’re ‘part of’ what was once a Thing you didn’t have and always wanted: Fame. Fame isn’t a measure. It can be measured, but it’s subjective. If one day I meet the dude who invented the checkerboard patterns on my Vans… I’d be next to a famous person. But I don’t know his name and he doesn’t boast…so he’s belittled. He’s ‘small fry Famous”. I wasn’t ‘Fame-ous’, but I was to whatever extent it lived inside me as a theoretical frame at the time or since, inside the fame box. Woah Neo. Woah.
I’d written a few things for the forum before, but never anything so close to an exposé. I hadn’t ever dared that anywhere. Except for maybe when I told on my sisters to my Mother. Exposé-a-go-go in the tattle tailing. There was something exacting about it; got some fire burning or just felt good. It released endorphines. My conscious intentions for the writing I put on the Top Cow Forums was purely to ‘tell it like it was’ for myself. Secretly I might have wanted to gain some sympathy, alongside a sense of being known and/or seen, as I was feeling sorely overlooked as a result of how that weekend went down. And there’s a good chance that was actually my true sense of having stood behind that booth. “How could that possibly be?” I hear you asking, “When tons of fans came and asked you questions and you were SO liked by so many People?” Well, back then I would have not had a good answer and probably just felt embarrassed, ashamed and like these feelings mean I’m Greedy, Impossible To Please, or Blind. As an adult now I can say how it wasn’t about the ‘people’ out in the world I was interfacing with; because that’s what you’re doing when you’re Inside of a world talking to someone who wants something or needs something from it. Money allows materials to pass from one place to the other, but there’s always a Gatekeeper. And the Gatekeepers require recognition and acknowledgement for their Work, not for their station. The only ones that can offer or provide that are their Employers, Co-Workers and Staff aka peers. Equals. Not that you wouldn’t have been as valuable in your own terms as I was, but that my equals were Top Cow People for that time. If you were on the Other Side of the table to me then, your equals would be The Fans (to my Co-Workers) by comparison. Where you would want the thumbs up from a friend for nabbing that awesome signature on your First Issues, and feel successful in the storyline once you got that approval and shared that joy, I would want that from my Co-workers about a Job Well Done and how many people walked away happy after getting their signatures, books etc. I didn’t get that from my people. They were more like, “Ok here’s the next thing that needs doing.” Or “Oh man I just had juice with so and so and he said he wanted to read my script.” I was all Tasks and Obligatory Congratulations for those days. And thus, too, was I robbed of the chance to fully appreciate the joy others felt in their attainments from the Portal of Top Cow… because the litany of Next Things on Lists meant that One wasn’t special, somehow.
Alas. Politicking is tricky business. And the results of my Forum Post were catastrophic. The thing I wrote wound up being about three pages long and I only understood later through the eyes of the adults that it sounded as if I had been gerrymandered and abused. And it was true: my boundaries certainly had been elasticated as if by some force of Will not-my-own. I was called at home and asked to come in to the office on a Sunday by then-supreme-colorist Peter Steigerwald. I hadn’t received a personal call from any of them before. Peter was a formidable dude, with a heart of gold under glass. 6 foot 20 and probably 250lbs. A Hawaiian God whose wisdom hid and moved in Silence, and slithered as brilliant quips. Sometimes when he talked it was all punchlines. I liked him a LOT and he scared me, drinking so so many Red Bulls in the filthiest office on the lot. When I arrived he said, “lets get a coffee”.
Walking to Starbucks across the street, I was thinking to myself how badly I fucked up and this was it. I’m getting fired. He flicked his Zippo and did some tricks with it, in silence. My anxiety grew. When we finally sat down he asked me, “What was the problem you were wanting to solve?” I didn’t really understand.
I asked, “with the blog post?”
He nodded his head as if to say that Mentioning it by Name is Unnecessary.
“I just wanted to say how I was feeling, I guess. And tell people the truth.” I offered.
He looked at me, sizing me up, “You can’t do this sort of things nowadays. You Can’t. What’s another way you could have said what you were feeling?”
I got it now, I thought, and replied, “Well I could have come directly to someone with it, I guess, or said something about it in the moment.”
“Right. Yes. Why didn’t you?” He asked. Worried, “Was it about the money?”
“I guess because I didn’t want to stop working. I liked it for a while as I was doing it. It didn’t occur to me until after, seeing everything backwards, that I could say I felt taken advantage of. And that was not ok.” I said, parroting some of my parents’ guidance.
“You know what it means, right? You’re 14, and legally we have to pay you if you worked that long, or else we are breaking the law?” he asked.
“No. I had no idea,” and I didn’t. It wasn’t about this for me. But then it dawned on me: the post currently buzzing and marinating online, now with about a dozen shocked and sad people’s comments, along with some ‘ah, that’s how life is sweety,’s… this was a lawsuit waiting to happen. I had not meant it to be a threat, but saw how it was. The math in my mind went: lawsuit post — poster = no threat (I’m getting fired).
“I don’t know what will happen next,” Peter confided. “But what you’ve done is brave and stupid. I hope this works out well. If they make you an offer, I wonder if you’ll take it.” I saw his Inner Big Brother fight past what could have easily been misunderstood in me as either Entitled White Boy Bullshit or Ignorance Claiming Payday. I didn’t know it then, but its plain as day to me now. I miss having someone like that in my life, all of a sudden.
When we got back, Matt Hawkins asked me into his office. Matt was a relatively fresh face back then. I was there when he started and his was a character a little like DiCaprio’s in Wolf Of Wall Street. If I remember rightly, he was hired on the auspices of getting a TV deal done for the studio, to add “+ Media and Entertainment” to the afore lonely “comics” part of “Top Cow.” The first property he shopped and won was Witchblade; a couple seasons inked with TNT. It was a gritty, slow, contrasty and effects-poor rendition of the comic that won my heart in the first instance and made me a Top Cow SuperFan. I only ever brought myself to get through the first episode, and I fell asleep half way. I think I’d stopped working for them by that point. This is probably related.
Matt sits me down and says to me, “we read your post.” Frank Mastromauro and Vince Hernandez are there as well. They were overseeing my work at the ComicCon. “Firstly, Frank wants to say something.”
They were sorry, and didn’t understand why I hadn’t said anything, that I seemed happy and to be enjoying myself. That I’d even asked for some of the tougher jobs.
What I couldn’t explain then was how I was raised to be the Ultimate Mother’s Little Angel And Happiness, and the acting role I’d done for her was so good — too good — that I had tricked myself! And had even associated Happiness with a built notion around Endorphines. Which in this case were in actual fact when the ‘flight’ part of my flight/fight/freeze mechanism was switched on. It was probably thanks to flipping the switch to ‘on’ for Public Figure status the first time in my life. Heck, this may have been the single largest dose of Fame my entire family as a whole had ever tasted! I was breaking new ground personally, if not collectively. It was a buzz. And that buzz manifested as ‘happy and dutiful’ to these dudes over the course of those days.
I explained then how I hadn’t expected to feel this way, and how it felt as if it would have put my experience at risk. Imagining why I might have been silent out of fear. But I wasn’t, I just was operating on a different ‘Bypass Mode’ of neurosis. I didn’t have any benchmark to know ‘better,’ as those moments are deeply enthralling.
I think they got it, but seemed annoyed and sorrowful in the moment. Maybe just confused. I see this in my brother-in-law a lot when he’s trying to understand the difference between what I say ‘was,’ and how his ‘eyes’ interpreted it at the time. Self-inquiry. “Well, next time please say something! And know we never wanted to hurt or upset you, or work you to the bone.”
I accepted and thanked them. ‘…next time?’… what was happening here? Matt asked them to leave and then said the following, “Look, I know Pete explained what this means for the company so I won’t go into it. I have a check here for you. How much do you think would have been fair for the weekend’s work?” I thought to myself that a hundred bucks a day would be cool.
“$300? A hundred for each day, I think, seems right.” I was a little confused but rolled with it, I recall.
“OK then. Here’s $300. You have earned this, but keep it quiet. Don’t tell anyone about it, ok?” It wasn’t a ‘payoff,’ but also it was. Tricky dice. “And if you had wanted some money before-hand, there’s a good chance we could have worked something out.” And risk losing the initial offer? Yeah right, I thought. How would I have known whether it was my free labor or something actually special about me that landed me the gig in the first place?! Cookieboy.
“I also know you like working here. At least I think you do.” He said. I nodded in agreement. “Well, we can’t keep you here for the same hours you’ve been working, there’s not enough to make your payroll. If you come in an extra day a week, we’ll pay you $8/hour. How’s that sound?”
Woah Neo. Woah. From unpaid to paid intern just like that.
“Oh, and you’ll have a title, Submissions Editor. You’re already doing a lot of that work, so it’ll be all your responsibility from now on.” Woof again. From Paid Intern to Submissions editor just like that. And a couple hundred bucks a week meant something to me: Personal Choice.
I said, “Umm…I’d love that.” He handed me the check.
“I don’t think I need to say it, but if that post stays up it could still get us all in a lot of hot water.” He was still looking at me in the eyes.
“I’ll take it down this afternoon when I get home,” I agreed. And that was that.
“Cool, so Marc wants to say something to you too.” Silvestri. The CEO with the Red Ferrari licenceplate, “Topcow1”.
“Everything good?” Asks Marc as I sheepishly knock and enter into his massive corner office.
“Umm…hi, yeah all good,” I blunder sheepishly.
“Cool. You’re ok. And sorry to hear the weekend was rough on you. We had a lot riding on it and it takes its toll. Conventions are hard work! I hope you had at least a little fun?” He asked with my-dad-eque charms.
“It was,” I admitted. “I really liked a lot of it. Seeing fans like that from the other side of the table was cool.”
“Glad to hear it. You’re official now, I hear. Better work hard,” he tells me.
“Ok for sure,” I confirm. It’s a dream come true.
When I took the post down, I didn’t feel compromised or threatened. In some ways it felt like a massive relief. As if a cycle I hadn’t begun, but had seen as my job to fix, just got fixed.
Reflecting on it nowadays in the wake of #metoo, I see myself as a Star, fucked in the ass by her director. In the moment, it was neither right nor wrong (sex, intrinsically, is not a bad thing). If it comes about as a function of coercion, force, betrayal, threat, violence or disgust… even then it’s still sort of fine apparently, so long as there’s consent. (I mean, this is something people pay for). Being fucked in the ass as a youth by adults is just… a day at the office for The Greeks.
So I was wined, dined, and then butt-rammed. Proverbially of course, but it’s not different to the psyche. I got myself there. Gay sex is still nice to me. But I wanted a fucking CUDDLE! I woke up alone, tired, stressed and empty. It was not obvious that Top Cow actually cared about me, is the thing. They decided to say they did, and I just didn’t know it, and then proved it. That’s a win/win, I hope.
The next story I’m going to share is another version of this for moi. A repeat. Only difference is that in the next one I almost lost my actual body, wholesale. It’s a gruesome narrative and I’m not worried about the fallout, all of a sudden, as I’m certain it can’t complete yet and now understand why: it’s not yet been told, unpacked and unwound. No un-winding = no un-wounding.
The follow up could wind me up in the Courts of Justice, truly, and I’m not entirely sure yet which side I’ll be on. I suppose the only way out is through, sometimes. I have a best friend who has been showing me how it goes: 2–3 years of Saving what Little Face sustains on the other side of a lawsuit.
I am brave enough now to say as I was then: This was never my bag to hold. But I wound up with it around my neck. My next move: return to sender, with credit.
When Michael Turner released his masterpiece, Fathom, Top Cow sold 200,000 copies of a comic book for the first time. He became a millionaire and quite a formidable force. He told me once as I was watching him draw — the absolute best part of my role — how he had told himself he’d be a millionaire by 27, and nailed it by three months, or weeks… I can’t quite recall. But as he’d come in less and less frequently, I chose my moments carefully to come into his office and start a chat. I’d sit or stand near him for as long as I could just watching him draw lines on a page. I truly loved him, and that he let me watch, and talked to me about dumb fun stuff like movies and music and books. He was a true creative soul, caught in some webs I would not see then as I do now, and much to my great enduring shame, I judged the fuck out of him for leaving Top Cow and ‘stealing’ a group of creatives on his way out the door. Aspen Studios was a sign of something. At the time I read it as:turn-coat, disloyal, and self-serving. It was. But maybe for great reasons. I never allowed that part to be true also. But as Top Cow torpedoed its own foot off in the years that follow these stories, Aspen tried to open something up: True Living Fantasy.
There are only a few sorts of people that do what Mr Turner dared to in the end: assholes, whores and dreamers. Like me in more ways than I could have imagined, perhaps, we are become Makers, when all those pieces slide together. Makers. Gods. Worlds come and go, but the Makers…they never leave.
I know Mike’s still with me now. Wouldn’t let go of this shit. Maybe waiting for me to redeem him…or waiting for us all to let him off the hook for any and all mistakes. I love you Mike, still…I’m back in that room with you, watching you draw the fuck out of some bubbly boobs and weird hands.
Forever yours, Felix.
