Writer and activist Elie Wiesel said, “With memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.”
Novelist Isabel Allende, on the other hand, believed, “A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I’m creating a form of fiction.”
After writing my memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life, I found myself landing somewhere between “honest” and “my version of events” with the discovery that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Memoir, of course, starts with memory. That’s what “memoir” means, from the Latin “memoria,” which means “memory” or “remembrance.” And while I can vouch for the sincerity of my memories, I can’t always count on its’ honesty. Playwright Tennessee Williams agreed, because “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” Novelist and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro summed it up best, observing, “Memory…can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily colored by the circumstances in which one remembers.”
I wrote the first draft of Panel by Panel relying almost exclusively on that “unreliable thing,” turning only when totally stymied by my own brain to secondary sources, from personal and family archives, to published versions and the internet. I’ve accumulated a lot of paper over the years, everything from letters written by my grandmother Ann in Brooklyn to her then fiancé Alfred, studying to be an electrician in Philadelphia in 1918, through the Depression-era paperwork of my parents’ childhoods, through to my own life, from elementary school report cards to the 1,400+ stories and books I’ve published and the hundreds more that I never showed to anyone.
Most of my life has been spent, one way or another, surrounded by comic books. Born in 1955, I was hooked on the four color form even before I could read the words that accompanied the pictures. For reasons that I only touch on in Panel by Panel, I was an isolated, unhappy kid (a second, what I call “my trauma memoir” is written, awaiting publication) and comic books and the associated worlds of science fiction and fantasy became my happy place of safety and, eventually, the road that led me to countless friendships (many of which endure 50 or more years on) and a career.
What astonished me was learning just how unreliable my certainty of people or events could be when I went back to fact/reality check my memory. For many years, for instance, I credited comic book editor Wally Green with an act of kindness during his rejection of the stories I had submitted to him as a wannabe writer that instead of shattering my fragile 19 year old ego sent me on my way with encouragement to try him again and feeling as though I had been treated like a professional. But it had actually been editor Paul Kuhn at Gold Key who showed me that kindness. I don’t know how Wally came to stand in for Paul in my memory (although both were seriously nice gentlemen), but a contemporary account of that meeting in a 1974 fanzine for the amateur press alliance NYAPA set me straight. In the same ‘zine, I wrote about another unsuccessful submission I made at the time, this one to Marvel, of which I still have no recollection.
In the Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper reporter observes, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend,” and that includes the little “legends” we build in our own memories. I’ve spent my life making up stories, so I was relieved to find second party confirmation of some of my little “legends” and to discover that even if I’m not particularly interesting, the people and experiences I’ve encountered in my comic book life were more than enough to fill a memoir of the good, the bad, and the ridiculous in the comic book business.
