Hey, everyone.
If it's cool with you, I'm just going to draw for a little bit.
(Laughter)
Story has always helped me understand the human experience.
Growing up,
I took solace in the books that I would read,
and those book characters that I met offered me friendship.
Characters like Ralph S. Mouse
from Beverly Cleary's "The Mouse and the Motorcycle."
Snoopy, Garfield.
They offered me companionship as I dealt with the trauma
of my mother's lifelong struggle with an opioid addiction,
the fact that I didn’t know who or where my birth father was.
Story has also helped me understand my family's history.
My grandfather, who raised me,
would hold court in the living room,
regaling me with stories of life during the Great Depression.
And telling me all about his parents
who had emigrated from Poland.
Now, my great grandparents died many years before I was ever born.
But through these stories that were shared
in our home
I always felt like I knew them.
Now creating my own stories,
that offered me an escape portal.
You see, it was a home that was filled with so much dysfunction.
My grandparents drank a lot.
There was a lot of yelling,
a lot of chaos,
and I controlled none of it.
From the pages of my comics,
I was the one calling the shots.
Creating my own worlds, creating my own characters.
Sharing them with my friends and family members.
I thrived off that creativity.
Now my mother was an incredibly talented artist.
And even though she spent a majority of my childhood incarcerated,
she spent her time drawing cartoons
and mailing them to me.
And these cartoons that arrived from prison from my mom,
it was her way of, you know,
it was her way of letting me know that she loved me
and letting me know just what I was capable of.
Now bearing witness to the stories of others
helped me put life into perspective.
When I was a teenager,
I volunteered at a camp for children with cancer.
And I spent several summers after that working there as well.
And of all the kids I met over the years,
the kid that sticks out the most in my memory is Eric.
Eric was the very first kid that I was charged to care for.
I was 16 years old.
He was four
and had recently been diagnosed with leukemia.
Now ...
Despite his thinning hair,
despite the shunt in his chest,
this boy wielded a Power Rangers sword
and went after life with so much energy
and an ear-to-ear grin.
Now, in my years of working with kids with critical illnesses at camp,
I was often lauded, but that just always felt
unnecessary and backwards,
because it just felt like such a selfish endeavor.
I was given a front-row seat
to some of the most remarkable stories in human history.
Eric died
shortly before his sixth birthday.
Twenty-five years ago.
You know, there isn't a day that I don't think about him,
there isn't a day that I don't think what he meant to me
or what he was able to do with his short life.
And I do remain in touch with his family.
When I visit his grave site,
I don't bring flowers.
I bring a Power Rangers action figure.
I've recently completed a graphic memoir recounting my time working at camp.
And working with this population.
And that time with Eric.
Now, creating a graphic memoir is a daunting experience.
There is, of course, the physical labor of a book
that is hundreds of pages long.
That has multiple panels of art on every single page.
But it's the emotional toll that is the most difficult to deal with.
I'm face-to-face with these loved ones that I've missed.
I'm in that room again and often for the first time
dealing with stuff I had never dealt with at the time.
Now I went into this process knowing full well
how intense this experience would be.
I'd previously created a graphic memoir
called "Hey, Kiddo,"
about my own childhood and my mother's addictions.
So I know what you're all thinking.
Books for kids about a parent with heroin addiction,
pediatric cancer.
And yes, I'm just chasing all of the hot trends in children's literature.
(Laughter)
But when I was working on "Hey, Kiddo,"
even though the most important people in my life had since passed --
my grandfather, my mother --
production on that book
brought me closer to them.
And the same now has happened
with Eric
via "Sunshine."
We all have loss in our lives, and we all have pain in our life,
and that can be so incredibly difficult.
And I know all too well that ...
No matter how much I talk about these people,
no matter how much I write about them,
no matter how much I draw them,
there is nothing that I'm going to do
that's going to bring them back to this Earth.
I miss them.
But I take solace in knowing that their stories are being shared
and that they are being remembered,
because my grandfather was right.
Stories keep people alive and real to us.
Thank you.
(Applause)