But like any creator, he’s also made things he didn’t intend.
Check it out below.
Legacy is now available in comic stores and bookstores from Dark Horse.
Credit: Venturelli/WireImage; Dark Horse Books
Here my sincere apologies go out to the writer Doug Coupland.
In 1994 when Kurt Cobain died, Coupland wrote an internationally published tribute to the singer.
The truth is you want to help.
It’s the writerly equivalent of taking food to the bereaved.
More recently when the phone rang at four a.m. it was theTimesin London.
The reporter told me that Wikipedia attributed the source of the insult to me, to my novelFight Club.
Had I coined the latest put-down?
I didn’t know.
It was four in the morning for f’s sake.
I said, maybe.
I said my guess was that the book and film might’ve started it.
Unable to fall asleep, I checked Wikipedia.
At the moment it said the term was tenuously attributed toFight Club.
Two hours after I’d spoken with the reporter, Wikipedia had been revised.
Around six a.m. it now said that I claimed full responsibility for the term snowflake in its current usage.
To set the record straight, I got blindsided.
Worse, after twenty-plus years in school, I wasn’t smart.
To be honest, I didn’t know anything about anything.
Instead of learning how to think I’d only learned how to game the system.
But the truth was that the system had gamed me.
My resume included my high school and college grade point averages, as if that fooled anyone.
It included my membership in various national honor societies.
My teachers had told me I was smart so now I repeated that mantra.
To set the record straight, I was an idiot.
Worse, I was an idiot who thought he was smart.
All of the praise had been a racket to move me through school on a layer of intoxicating grease.
Everyone saying, “You’re wonderful just the way you are.
You’re perfect.”
It keeps students from demanding too much from teachers.
And it feels good.
Art colleges and writing programs couldn’t exist without it.
Students are out the door with their diplomas before they have any inkling they’ve been shortchanged.
My generation had been given the snow job for as long as we’d been paying for education.
But when it came time for someone else to pay us… the world was no longer cheering.
My friends and I, we were just waking up to that cold fact.
In college, for example, I took a 400-level literature survey course.
The recollection makes me shudder.
No, but no, the little pen-and-ink pictures had been sufficient.
Another pat on the head and affirmation of my snowflake specialness.
31 is the age for creating a masterpiece.
“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” became my mantra for deprogramming myself.
For shedding those years of false praise.
That evil grease meant to skid me along toward my grave with the least amount of effort.
By then I had the job I had.
Not the epic writing career of which I’d dreamed.
Among my peers, some saw the truth and retreated back into the fantasy of their glowing academic records.
Others embraced our newly recognized stupidity and found a real teacher.
My use of the term “snowflake” never had anything to do with fragility or sensitivity.
It just meant that I wasn’t going to be dismissed as just another mass-produced “genius.”
Most of the time I haven’t a clue.
I’m still an idiot, but at least I know that much.
