As an artist, study other artists to see what they do, then look at life and see how it does something.

As a writer, read other writers, good writers, even writers who don’t write the kind of stuff you like, and see how they do what they do. And then forget about fiction, and forget about comics, and read everything else. Learn.

7. Be you. Don’t try to be someone else more commercial. Don’t try to be that other guy.

This is about art. It may be about commerce too, but for all our description of ourselves as an industry, we’re also an art form. We may have come into the field because of talent, but we’re also here because we’re artists. We are creators. When we begin, separately or together, there’s a blank piece of paper. When we are done, we are giving people dreams and magic and journeys into minds and lives that they have never lived. And we must not forget that.

I don’t want to sound like an inspirational speaker here. “Be you. Be the best you that you can be.” But this is really important. It’s something that we mostly lose track of when we start, because when we start in comics we’re kids, and we have no idea who we are or what our voices are, as artists or as writers.

Young artists want to be Rob Liefeld, or Bernie Wrightson, or Frank Miller, just as young writers want to be Alan Moore, or Chris Claremont, or, well, Frank Miller. You’ve seen their portfolios. You’ve read the scripts.

We all swipe when we start. We trace, we copy, we emulate. But the most important thing is to get to the place where you’re telling your own stories, painting your own pictures, doing the stuff that no one else could have done but you.

Dave McKean, when he was much younger, as a recent art school graduate, took his portfolio to New York, and showed it to the head of an advertising agency. The guy looked at one of Dave’s paintings—“That’s a really good Bob Peak,” he said. “But why would I want to hire you? If I have something I want done like that, I phone Bob Peak.”

You may be able to draw kind of like Rob Liefeld, but the day may come, may have already come, when no one wants a bargain-basement Rob Liefeld clone anymore. Learn to draw like you.

And, as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help telling, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world.

It’s the point I think of in writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you’re doing.