Alan Moore quote:
“This stuff that you are dealing with – words, language, writing – this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive. Don’t doubt that for a moment. As far as I know, the last figures I heard quoted, nine out of every ten writers will have mental problems at some point during their life. Sixty percent of that ninety percent – which I think works out at roughly fifty percent of all writers – will have their lives altered and affected – seriously affected – by those mental problems. I think what that translates to is – nine out of ten crack up, five out of ten go mad. It’s like, miners get black lung, writers go bonkers. This is a real occupational hazard.” *
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In 1966 my grandfather bought a piece of land up north on Lake Simcoe and built a cottage. It is the place where my father and two uncles would spend the better part of their summers. Over the years, on the wooden shelf across from the original bathroom, a collection of books accumulated. There were fiction novels, readers digest books, and paperbacks reprinting newspaper daily strips. It was those paperbacks, to my knowledge, that were my first exposure to comics. This would have been around the year 1981. I would read, and re-read these books all summer. And I didn’t realize how much these books effected me, until looking back at them for this Archeology Project. It hit me how much of those books I took with me. The earliest influence in, what I perceive as a cartoon, can be directly linked to these books.
