MY GUILTY PLEASURE

I WAS AS SURPRISED as anyone when I became obsessed with comics again last year, at the advanced age of forty-five. As a kid, I loved reading G.I. Joe and The Amazing Spider-Man.

- JASON GURIEL

I loved the way they materialized like magic on the newsstand every month, and I loved the fantastical contents: microclimates conjured with pencils, brushes, and Dr. Martin's dyes. Later, as teenagers in the '90s, my friends and I selfpublished our own comics, xeroxing pages drawn on Bristol board and hawking them downtown.

In time, my passion slipped from panels to poems. The feat of minting similes as magical as Jane Kenyon's description of wind-stirred leaves"they show their light undersides, / turning all at once / like a school of fish"-captivated me.

No rulers or lettering guides required.

But after finishing work on a nearly 400-page novel in rhyming couplets, I felt restless. One of my old friends, his house now free of kids, had started drawing comics again. He got me thinking about the artists I used to love; a Google search got me to Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg's YouTube channel.