Who I Am and Why I'm Here

I hate talking about myself. Always have. Maybe it’s the writer in me--trained to people-watch in the hopes of picking up some passing tidbit of verisimilitude--but I’ve always preferred to be the fly on the wall, the eavesdropper, the man behind the scenes who hears everything but says nothing. A ghost. A cipher. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve walked up to someone to say hello only to have them jump straight up into the air and out of their boots like a Saturday morning cartoon character. It’s probably an energy thing—some invisible manifestation of my desire to remain incognito. I swear I’m not trying to scare anyone when it happens, but I’d be lying if I said I minded.

Boo.

It must be an energy thing, because my lumbering frame and lumberjack beard aren’t exactly conducive to stealth operations. (And yes, if I had a superpower it would be invisibility. Fireballs are cool and all, but in a world without supervillains robbing banks in Times Square, what purpose would pyrokinesis serve other than to accidentally send some poor innocent bystanders to the burn unit?

And as for flying, well...don’t tell anyone, but I’m afraid of heights.

It wasn’t until my post-teens that I realized I wasn’t weird, necessarily—though I wouldn’t rule it out—just…anti-social. Which I suppose is by definition weird, considering I live in a society, and not some desert island manor with solar panels and a lifetime supply of junk food. (A guy can dream.)

But with the advent of social media, video games, and online shopping, it seems inevitable that the world should come around to my hermetic way of thinking.
 
All of this is a roundabout way of admitting that writing a blog post such as this doesn’t come easy. If I had my druthers I’d be the isolated genius typing the hours away in some undisclosed location, never giving interviews and letting my faithful readers come to their own conclusions about who I am and what my work means.

But alas, as much as I’d like to imagine myself as a benign Thomas Pynchon or a prolific JD Salinger, I’m really just a nerd with an overactive imagination who’s trying to find a way to get paid to transmute the screaming voices in his head into ink on paper in the hopes of achieving a good night’s sleep.

Ahem.

And lest I come across as a curmudgeon before I’ve even earned my first gray hair, know that I love my fans. Even if I haven’t met them yet. Even if they don’t exist yet. And in that one-day future when I’ve built up an audience, I look forward to treating them with love and respect, appreciation and understanding. Because make no mistake about it: a writer’s work truly is a window into their soul, and if people find my soul entertaining, well, they’re A-OK in my book.

Know that whether it’s through crudely-drawn doodles, clumsy purple prose, or even an awkward introductory blog post, every word, every line, everything I do comes straight from the heart.

Now then. I suppose an origin is in order.

In the second grade, five years into an unpaid art career producing unsold works of crayon on computer paper—and after crash course introduction into the realities of art critique when my kindergarten teacher didn’t appreciate my violent drawings of dragons burning my neighborhood to the ground—the teacher gave us an assignment that was right up my alley:

Today, class, we’re going to draw.

And while the subject matter wasn’t exactly my bread and butter—life drawing a potted plant was a far cry from the bloody-fanged monstrosities by young hand was used to creating—I still viewed it as a chance to show my skills. Because by that time I had made note of the doodles of my peers, and knew I was pretty good, at least by elementary standards.

So when everyone else’s flower ended up looking like a circle on a stick with some lines poking out in all directions, my humble sketch appeared to be a horticultural wet dream of interlacing vines and dew-kissed petals that made Georgia O’Keeffe smile down upon me from heaven in comparison.

At least that’s how I felt at the time, pretentious little art snob that I was.

And yet, my teacher and classmates seemed to agree, and their praise made enough of an impression to have me writing about it all these years later.  

But the thing about my drawings was, for me they were always just a vehicle to tell stories. My mother must have watched a lot of movies while I was incubating in the womb (as a matter of fact, I know she did) because from the moment I was able to form my first coherent thought, my mind has always been churning out concepts and characters, dialogue and drama—and while I picked up some aesthetic influences along the way thanks to daytime cartoons and the grocery store spinner rack, nurture had nothing on my imaginative nature. 

My childhood was spent filling notebooks with drawings and stapling loose leaf together to make comic books that mostly remained unread, and the trend continued until around my early teens, when something strange happened. 

Suddenly I felt the urge to put the pen down and leave the pencil unsharpened. The stories were still there, but the art? Slowly but surely that fell by the wayside, until at some point I had to ask myself what exactly did I want to do with all these ideas? Did I want to be a novelist? A screenwriter? God forbid a poet? Why not all of the above? It was only when a small comic book shop opened mere walking distance from my high school—in the era when Hugh Jackman was calling people “bub” on the big screen and Toby McGuire was teaching millennials about great responsibility—that I fell headfirst into the cinematic superhero renaissance and rediscovered my first love: 

  

Comics.

It was a magical time when comics became more than just characters like the X-Men and the Hulk, Batman and Superman—they became stories written and drawn by real people. And I wanted to be one of those people. I knew I could never be a John Romita Jr or a Todd McFarlane—my original artistic idols. Too much time had passed since I let my passion for art devolve into merely a passing hobby—but I could be an Alan Moore. A Grant Morrison. A Garth Ennis.

Because the stories were still there. They never left.

I could be a comic book writer.

That was the plan, anyway.   

Jump cut to a decade later, and after some twists and turns—a story for a another time—I’m back in the thick of it, writing comics, working with incredible artists (shout-out to my friend Jeremiah Schiek, whose amazing art you can check out here: jschiek.com) and loving every minute of it.

Oh, and get this: I even started drawing again. (Insert cheap plug for my comics AMERICANNIBALS! and NIGHT OF THE SLEEPWALKERS, both of which you can read by clicking the tabs above.)

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I figured I owed it to anyone who gives my work chance to at least attempt an introduction to who I am and why I’m here. I am not be the most forthcoming creator, but I promise I’m friendly. 

And if you have any questions, well, you know where to find me. I’ll try my best to tell the truth. 

That’s a writer’s job, isn’t it?  

Michael Derrick, July 2018
Austin, TX