I was fortunate enough to have met Harvey Kurtzman, in 1990, at the Dallas Fantasy Fair. He told me how much he appreciated what I was doing, which I took, not as any indication that he had read anything I had written, but as him expressing his pride in a younger generation of comics writers and artists. That there were bright young creators out there who cared about comics as an art form mattered to Harvey Kurtzman. He’d invested his life in the crazy belief that comics were art, and not anything to apologize for, and that investment reaped its dividends in the lives it influenced, in those of us who believed it too, and acted accordingly.

WHEN, AS A young man, my dream of getting to make comics started to become a reality, I started to meet comics people. These were the people whom I had looked up to in my teens, in my twenties, as gods upon the earth. These were the names that I conjured with. I would read everything I could about them when I was growing up, in a time when there was precious little about them to read, and even less of what they had done still in print.

And now I was to meet them.

And I discovered, to my surprise, that quite a lot of them were cranky old Jews. Or wannabe cranky old Jews—they seemed to be enjoying themselves too much to be properly cranky, and not all of them were actually Jewish.

And now, approaching my midforties, eighteen years after writing my first comic, I find myself heading down the conveyor belt towards cranky old Jewhood. I’m at the age where they start to give you lifetime achievement awards, and you rather wish they wouldn’t, because it may be some kind of a hint that it’s time for you to sit down and shut up.

It is the prerogative, however, of those who are one day to be cranky old Jews to give advice to the generations that will follow them. And while some of you are my contemporaries, and others are my seniors, I shall advise anyway. My first piece of advice is this:

Ignore all advice.

In my experience, most interesting art gets made by people who don’t know the rules, and have no idea that certain things simply aren’t done: so they do them. Transgress. Break things. Have too much fun.

Two: Read outside of comics. Learn from places that aren’t comics. Don’t do what anyone else is doing. Steal from places where people aren’t looking. Go outside. Many years ago, when it was almost unheard of for foreigners to write American comics, people used to ask why British writers were different. I had no idea. I did notice that when I spoke socially to people like Alan Moore, or to Grant Morrison, we mostly weren’t talking about comics. We were talking about avant-garde forms of poetry, about nonfiction writers, about weird things we’d found. Grant Morrison discovered a long-forgotten Victorian children’s author named Lucy Clifford, who wound up influencing both his Doom Patrol and, much later, my Coraline. We loved comics, but they weren’t all we knew. There’s a whole cool world out there. Use it.