As I was walking I passed a person with his head back and a handkerchief pressed against his nose, trying to staunch the blood. He had a nosebleed.
As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.
At some point, I stumbled across a reference to a mission the United States sent to Antartica in 1941, just before the war began.
Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.
Dali kept coming up in my research. I was reading a lot of The New Yorker magazines from that time, week after week after week of incredibly detailed snapshots of the city from each year that I was writing about.
Dali worked his way into the book because he seemed to have worked his way into New York City during those years.
Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.
Having chosen to set the book during this period, from the first day I was writing, I knew I was going to have to do something about World War Two.
He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I'd been working really hard trying to come up with something.
How was I to do that? If I wrote about them in the same language that I was using to write about Joe and Sammy, it would give the comics characters the same level of familiarity.
I completely lost interest in comics. I sold my collection. I didn't go back to them for fifteen years - until after Wonder Boys.
I didn't know what to do, so I got up and I went for a walk down the boardwalk where I was living, along the Balboa Peninsula, trying not to think about it.
I didn't want to go to places that have been written about so many times by people so much more qualified than I, like James Jones and Norman Mailer who lived through it. I was always searching for my own theater of war.
I do see it as forming a continuum with the earlier books. It shares some of the same themes, in particular that of the friendship between a gay man and a straight man.
I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
I have a deadline. I'm glad. I think that will help me get it done.
I hope it will appeal to people who haven't read the other books or people who thought they wouldn't be interested in them.
I like giving readers an opportunity to get a hold of me in that way and to read things I've written which might disappear otherwise.
I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.
I love tinkering with the web site. I'm a Mac user, and it's fun for me to create a web page with HTML, but I have two kids and a lot of work to do, so it's rare that I can steal the four or five hours it takes to pack together a good addition to the site.
I probably should just say 'Thank you,' take the compliment, and leave it at that, but the truth is that it was hard-going.
I started to feel that I had a large problem: my comic book characters didn't exist, and none of my readers would have seen them. The Escapist existed only within the covers of this book.
I thought it worked as a movie pretty well. I got lucky. I got a really good director, a good script, great music, and a really nice look - the cinematographer was brilliant. But it was a tough sell. It was hard for them to find a target audience.
I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.
I was a big comics reader when I was a kid, from about six to fifteen. I collected them, I read them, I even created my own characters in comics.
I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear.
I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude.
I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.
I'm such a devoted web user, myself, that it feels important to me to have a presence, to be a part of that whole collective enterprise.
If I'm published in Vogue, say, or in The New York Times Sunday magazine, once it disappears from the beauty salons and doctors' offices, it's gone forever.
If you put yourself out there and you're lucky, it comes to you. You find it, and you know right away that's it.
In case any of the Axis powers made a grab for the Antarctic, the United States wanted to have a foothold.
It grew very organically. I allowed all these streams to enter the book because they felt as though they needed to.
It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that's what interested me.
It just clicked: if the character had a nosebleed, it would be like a 'losing the virginity' thing, physical evidence like blood on the sheets. That was exactly the kind of image I'd been looking for.
It probably reaches deep down into my childhood history as a geek, being interested in comic books and getting nowhere with girls. Those two things going hand-in-hand.
It was a little scary because a similar thing had happened with Fountain City, the failed novel, all sorts of disparate themes running together; in that book I trusted my instincts but it didn't work. I couldn't get it to hang together.
It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections.
It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late.
It's about comic books, and in my greatly enlarged recent experience it's become clear that women have a very negative attitude toward comic books. They didn't grow up reading them, for the most part.
It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well.
Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That's how I feel about it.
Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.
Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.
My agent lived in New York for over twenty years and like most people who are adopted New Yorkers she's very passionate about the city. Also, she has a particular interest in this period, especially of golden age Hollywood films.
People keep saying, 'Oh, you're getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.' I guess it does, but mostly it's just a relief.
So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.
That makes Joe pretty unusual among comic book artists of his time, though there were a couple, the foremost among them being Will Eisner, a brilliant artist and a very talented storyteller.
That was all very nice of them. They didn't have to do anything because I wasn't officially involved at all.
That was the flash: I was going to write about comic book creators in the 1940s.
That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.
The 'Talk of the Town' was really that in the 1940s: it was all about New York, it was only about New York, and it was about people.
The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.
The Superman story is one of the underlying threads of the story, coming from another planet, leaving his parents and his world that got blown up behind.
The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.
There was a Jewish element to all that, and the creators of all these golden age comic books, many of them were Jewish kids.
Those things tend not to get reprinted. It's nice to be able to give them another chance at life by putting them on the web.
What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.
When I started working the Houdini vein, very quickly I realized that escapism is always a charge leveled against comics: why would one want to waste time reading them? It all belonged together.
When I started writing about the golem, I trusted that it belonged in the book just as I trusted that escape artistry belonged.
With the Antarctic section, the same is true, but I didn't examine closely why. What were the thematic links or why did all this stuff belong together?
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