HUGO WHERE? Part Three (For Paid Subscribers Only!)

I didn't get any outright understanding. The answer from everyone was simply “Leave!” On what?

So when a friend offered me to join him as a roommate in his apartment in Astoria, Queens, I jumped at it, as unready and unsteady as I was.

There was a hell of a lot of cross cutting during this tumultuous period.

Small publishers were flirting with doing HUGO. Eventually a friend took me around to the offices of Fantagraphics, and they took interest. Editor Kim Thompson and I met for dinner. I signed the contract right then and then. The advance was $500 in advance, and more would eventually come in royalties...if things worked out. Never, ever depend on that. Desperately, in anguish, I asked Thompson whether I could make a living on this book, and he said maybe a meager one. I knew nothing about life, and didn't want to know. The more I knew, the more defeated I'd feel. Someone compared me to the cartoon Owl thrown out of his father's house, getting up and strolling up the road singing “I Love to Sing-A, About the Moon-a and A-Juna-and-A-Spring-a...” The Fantagraphics folk later said my ambition was “frightening”. I don't doubt it. I couldn't afford to have any doubt, I had to get out of that house, and I couldn't do any job unless it was a cartoonist. I truly, sincerely believed that there were customers longing for what I had to offer. In 1982, the comic book field was still wide enough for a variety of genres. But I didn't know the world of comic book readers at all.

The kind of books I was patterning my work after were considered trash. It makes me mad that people are out-lauding each other about Jim Tyer and Dan Gordon; when I was showing it to people in 1982, it was, I swear, “Do you really like this?”

An issue of FUNNY FUNNIES (a 1943 book I had paid one dollar for.) “Was this really worth the money?”

About an early issue of Dan Gordon's COOKIE: “What is this from 1914?”

An issue of HI-JINX: “If this was mine, I'd throw it away.”

And now it's all called “genius”, is hip to know, and even reprinted in expensive volumes. The sad irony is that if an artist that is still breathing doing the same work, nobody cares.