With superhero comics being the hip-hop analogue of the middle class New York Jew, it is no wonder I was culturally predisposed to the medium. One of my earliest childhood memories was my father reading my brother and I a Star Trek comic, only he read it with his own dialogue. Years before Howard Stern made his version of the character, my father read us this intergalactic adventure of Fart-Man. I also remember, as a 5 year old, the first time i picked out my first comic books, Devil Dinosaur, and after that, Howard the Duck (I hadn’t seen the movie yet). These were the first steps on my journey to my favorite comic book universe.

I was a voracious Marvel comics reader in the eighties and into the early 90’s. As the final decade of the millenium had begun, my tastes in literature, music, and comic books began its slow turn to more sophisticated themes and darker tones. The McFarlane/Liefeld/Lee era of Marvel drew me in fast with the hard hitting, action driven images, and as a naive youngster, I bought into the early days of Image comics. I was pulled in by flashy visuals, but left starved of depth and story.

One day, I was pushed to read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. IT CHANGED MY WORLD. I had always been interested in non-Abrahamic “pagan” mythology and here is a book in which EVERYTHING WAS TRUE. Every pantheon, every god, faery, and minor mythological creature was real in this story about...stories. I dropped everything else I was reading and just DEVOURED every Neil Gaiman story I could. When Sandman ended, I stopped reading anything new. It was about 4 years before I picked up a comic book again, because I could not fathom anything else provoking me in the same way.