After Mid-Nite

My twelve-year-old cousin Paul is the coolest person I've ever met; I'm holding a drawing of Doctor Mid-Nite in my hands as Paul explains the superhero's origin; I've never been more awestruck.

Paul has drawn Doctor Mid-Nite, inked and colored him, and then cut him out along the outlines, resulting in this miraculous artifact. Likewise, here's the Red Tornado, and Hourman, and several more-- one by one, Paul gives them to me while declaiming the relative virtues of each: their lives are blighted with adversity and peril, but they're imbued with strange talents, and they persist against all odds-- they confront their challenges, they endure, and eventually they triumph.

Beautifully rendered, carefully freed from the bonds of the paper by my cousin's meticulous hand, I come to learn that these small but potent avatars hold back the darkest night; given to me for no reason I can account for until many years later, when I'm an adult and dating an Asian girl...

In the course of those years, I'll become sufficiently enthralled by the world of comic books from whence Paul's creations have emerged to have taught myself how to draw by going panel for panel into my own attempts at comics, and from there I'll spend much of my life trying to make sense of the world by making pictures of a more personal and revelatory nature.

It's when I get interested in Chinese astrology that I finally get wise to the math in all of this-- Paul was born in the year of the Monkey, I was born in the year of the Rat; so when Paul was twelve years old, I was four.

When I was four years old, my father had died; the loss would echo throughout my life, but one thing I never associated with that bewildering year are these cut-out superheroes my cousin Paul made for me; nor the love of comics that resulted from that; nor the life I've spent in visual art that unquestionably has its origins right there alongside Doctor Mid-Nite.

I'd known my whole life that one of the coolest people I'd ever met had been that way even when he was twelve years old; it wasn't until recently that I came to understand that he was also among the kindest.