Excerpt from Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I'd been so full of promise, so amazed to have graduated from the backwater of fanzines and college newspapers to mainstream publishing. I had an appointment with destiny, I'd barely started, then I blinked and it was over. Nobody writing to beg for a blurb, no more mysterious checks arriving in the mail, no agent's letterhead clipped to the check, no more calls from my publisher, not even to say go fuck yourself. What I missed most of all, had lost or forgotten, was the making of comics, triangulating the pain of existence through these bouts of belligerence, shame, suspicion, and euphoria, writerly noodlings and decipherable images organized into an all-encompassing environment. No more bragging, no more swagger, no more tasteless personal revelations. Cartoonists still made comics, and I hated them to the core of my filthy soul, and prayed for the return of 1996, when everything that would happen was about to happen, when I'd try to imagine how far I'd go.

If you've experienced precocious success, you know it's rare. At first it seems like there must be some mistake, but you get used to it in a hurry; you're sure it'll always be this way. You travel, and meet famous cartoonists; they praise you, you chat like old friends and get to know them personally, you get sick of their whining and quickly lose respect for anyone on earth who struggles or complains. You come to expect fan mail, strangers popping up to kiss your ass, a certain deference or tone of voice. You start to think that anyone making comics who is without a national reputation, or miserable or obscure and lacking attention from jerkoffs in Hollywood, is a fucking moron.

I wrote on the board, Plumber, Hitler, moneybags, "Let's just take a couple minutes here—" hayseed, hottie, hobbit,

"—to sketch these—"

lunch lady, Nabokov, beer wench, "—keep the pencil moving—" Sasquatch, sous-chef, snowman.

Then I walked around, trying not to look accusingly or even curiously at anyone, offering praise, encouraging spontaneity, saying positive stuff.

"Love it" . . . "Yes!" . . . "Lusty!" . . . "Good!"

The whole idea of this doodling was to lower the anxiety level in the room, to lighten the mood, to give them a feeling of poise and excitement, to discover in any character the autonomous core—

"Maybe another minute to wind up the one you're on—"

—to raise the body temp and get the molecules bubbling. Then I went to the board and drew a snowman with a grin made of coal, and an indent where the nose should be, and this huge honking carrot, slightly bent, sticking out below the equator, you know where. Underneath the snowman I wrote, "Hungry?"

They laughed.

"Humor arises from the surprising juxtaposition of text and image."

I drew a rabbit with a worried face, staring at the carrot. Then I erased the rabbit and put the carrot back where it belonged. I drew Satan in an overcoat, with a scarf around his neck, leaning on the snowman, complaining on the phone that the thermostat was broken. Then I got rid of Satan and drew a second snowman saying to the first, "Why does everything smell like carrots?"

"When you look at a comic, do you read the words first? Or look at the drawing?" We went around the room and shared our thoughts.

Then I broke them into groups, and for the next twenty minutes they made a racket, shouting, telling tales, arms flapping. They exchanged ideas, offered feedback and helpful insights, discussed, dissected, and ripped each other to shreds. In an email I'd sent out a month earlier, I'd asked them to bring along notes, a script, and some art, exhorting them to bravely mine their personal experiences for therapeutic and artistic gains, in order to come up with the one important story they'd develop this week. Rebecca had in mind a moment inside an ambulance, her younger self in a paramedic's uniform, leaning heavily over an old man, working to restart his heart, failing to, panic setting in. Sarah wanted to do something light and fun about her job in a bookstore. Brandon, in the white polo, made notes on his first gay pride weekend, bleaching his hair, snorting amyl nitrate, realizing, in the end, If you've seen one drag queen, you've seen ten thousand. They had four days to turn their thumbnails into finished pencil drawings, which they'd then ink and letter, scan and reproduce, and present to the world by Tuesday afternoon, in time for open studio.

Excerpted from Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.