When I was young, I had little patience for stuff scholastic. I was a late bloomer, when it came to literacy, and I would have stayed behind, likely, were it not for comic books. Specifically, the X-Men book, in the years the titles were largely helmed by writer, Chris Claremont, and the young, vibrant artists; Marc Silvesteri and Jim Lee. The artists have, since, become obviously comfortable and their work lacks the luster and imagination it once had. Many have said the same of the writer. Then, however, was a different time. In the years between 1988 and 1990, I was exposed to some of the most ripping yarns I'd ever read and the stories, themselves, were informed by a visually artistic vision that operated so unanimously with the script that the end result was a kind of storytelling that was inseparable from motion pictures, in its unique and crystalline presentation. Movies, even before I had heard of the concept being explored and expressed by others, were practically the same as comic books and the two media were in a band apart from all other forms of storytelling. The correlation between the two gripped me and informed my dreams. I knew what I wanted to do. Regardless of what I told my elders, when asked what I wanted to “grow up to be” was, I wanted to make comics and I wanted to make movies. That was it and it was all there was, inside. I liked doing other things, but I didn't care about them, whenever what I came to know as visual storytelling was on my mind. I liked girls. I liked them a lot and continue to do so. I, however, never tried to secure myself a girlfriend through all of high school. I never went on a single date until I was twenty and I have yet to go on any date more than once.
While my body was too paralyzed by the difficulty of cracking-into the world of comics or movies, my mind was too captivated for anything else to matter that much. It continues to be. The prospect of a long term relationship is something frightening. How could something that requires so much time and devotion do anything but obscure the path to my own goals?
I'm 28 years old and I've been a lot closer to having a girlfriend than I have been to directing my own movie or publishing my own comic book, but the warmth of the sun is far more intense than that of the moon and I am more fixated on my goals than I ever have been.
Amid all of the comic books, I continued to watch movies. As comic books informed my tastes, it seemed the what I was reading and what I was watching became increasingly similar. I would pick comic books from the news stands, while finding whatever movies most resembled Godzilla, at the video rental store my mom worked in. Sure, in attempts to feel more adult, I read more self-proclaimed independent comics and saw more self-proclaimed independent movies, in my late teens and early twenties. I liked some of them, too. My forays into the intellectual stimulating realms of each medium, however, just left me more cynical towards authors and sensitive towards pretense.
What, it turns out, would be the style of storytelling I was most drawn to was the styles of storytelling that first attracted me to movies and comics in the first place.
Around the same time my mom stopped working at the local video rental place, as a second job, my dad started to make more money and we joined the suburban masses as cable television finally became something I could experience outside of Grandma's house. Fledgling stations, TBS and TNT showed almost nothing but low-budget monster, slasher, science fiction, western, mystery and other b-movies every night and weekend. By the time I was in junior high (middle-school, if you insist), Joe Bob Briggs' “Monstervision” was being broadcast every Saturday night on TNT. I would stay up late, in my room, with a blanket draped over my 13” TV/VCR so nobody could see the flickering blue light under my door at 3am. I simultaneously watched and taped the show, every week, so as to have archive copies of anything I happened to like. I liked a lot of it.
Joe Bob's show eventually went off the air and TNT began to slowly shift it's programming agenda to more “legitimate” domains. I never forgot his show, however. Even as I began to dip my toes into snobbier fare, I still looked back on his show with a pretty severe fondness.
As I explored the world of independent comics and film, almost ten years ago, I also found myself exploring other semi-obscurities. George A Romero, Sam Rami, Sergio Leone, John Landis, John Carpenter, George Miller and David Cronenberg began to become meaningful names to me. As time grew on, these people, especially Romero, became major influences on my storytelling style. From their movies, I also came to acquaintance with the works of many other directors who have inspired and encouraged me, my work and my style. Directors like John Waters, Frank Henenlotter, Dario Argento, Larry Cohen, Kathryn Bigelow, Stuart Gordon, James Gunn and many others.
These directors and their movies helped inform my taste and my vision. The stories I write would not be the same without them, nor would the way I want to tell them.
As February, 2011, comes to a close, I am not only closer to the end of my unemployment benefits. I am closer to making my first movie. I couldn't be there without G_d, losing my job or without Joe Bob Briggs.
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