The title is advice given to Peter Gillis early on in his comics career from mentor Don McGregor. It was something Gillis could only learn for himself though, through bitter experience.
Like a lot of media, US comics are cyclical. Every decade at Marvel, fresh new talent tended to burst through to replace established creators. Peter Gillis came in on Jim Shooter's new wave of the late 70's. By the end of the 80's, that era was history, with many of his contemporaries either having moved on or been phased out. This New World ownership era with Tom DeFalco as editor in chief saw acrimonious departures of longtime core writers including Steve Englehart, Roger Stern and Chris Claremont. An increasing emphasis on editor driven crossover events, 'hot' young artists and the growing speculators market alienated longtime creators and fans alike (myself included). Gillis was a Chicago based freelancer watching "all this infighting" at the New York Marvel offices from a bemused distance. As he put it, "I had no idea what was going on... but I was still subject to it".
By the end of the 1980's the Chicago scene was dying, with First and Now on their last legs. Gillis' escape route DC wasn't proving too successful either, after Tailgunner Jo and Gammarauders were both swiftly cancelled. As PBG summed up the situation, "At Marvel I was dealing with actual antipathy, but DC was just chaotic." He had a few irons left in the fire, chiefly developing a fashionable anti-hero title Jacknife for his assigned DC editor Elliot Maggin. Gillis initially wanted the unavailable Klaus Janson on art. Maggin suggested up and coming Tim Sale, but Gillis wasn't convinced by his unique style. They settled on newcomer Kevin VanHook, who was eager to get started. This was to be a very PBG twist on the late 80's vigilante craze, considering the attention grabbing tagline "The first homeless superhero!". Gillis summarised the basic setup on his blog:
"...mean street superhero with a political bite to it. Jack was the son of a three-star general who was enrolled at VMI when the last choppers left Saigon and his father wrapped himself in the American Flag and blew his brains out rather than be witness to America losing a war. He was brought up by a powerful U.S. Senator, graduated top in his class at West Point and was on the fast track to a star when his superior tried to recruit him into a far-right secret society. He played along with him, then set fire to the man's mansion stole his dog and vanished off the face of the earth. When next we see him, he's in a homeless shelter, and in the words of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, "His mind is clear but his soul is mad..."
It sure sounds entertaining. The Jacknife series was greenlighted, but then editor Elliot Maggin suddenly disappeared without trace. No one Gillis quizzed at the Kafka-esque DC offices knew where to find him, or what was happening with his development slate. Maggin eventually resurfaced six months later somewhere on the West Coast, but it was too late for Jacknife. This proved to be the final straw for Peter Gillis, who walked away from the comic book industry in frustration in 1990.
The following year, Gillis came up with a pioneering and potentially revolutionary idea: downloadable PDF comics. As with Shatter, the idea was way ahead of its time and the nascent technology available, as this predated the invention of the world wide web and broadband. If successful, he would open the model to fellow professionals to sell their own online books. The idea also gave him an opportunity to work with Tom Artis once more, on a proof of concept comic called Pantheon, later retitled to the more distinctive Transfiniteers for copyright conflict reasons. There's little indication of what the story was about, other than PBG's quote that it was "explicitly made of stuff that Tom would enjoy drawing, deep and wide enough to create spinoffs and dizzying cosmological speculation." Delays securing funding slowed the project to a crawl, and coupled with the sharp decline of the comics industry in the early 90's, it was sadly ultimately abandoned.
Gillis instead put his Mac skills to good use and began a career in desktop and graphics publishing, which lasted two decades. He kept a hand in writing during these years, penning a sci-fi novel that failed to find a publisher. It took an irresistible offer to finally draw him back into the world of comics...
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