I’m already all the way down here and I get winded easily.
And distracted. Where was I?
Oh yes! I was working at Comic City, and I’d agreed to meet Levi and Rebecca on the promise that he made comics and they were supposedly good or something. Which, the 90s being what they were, was so far from unlikely as to be downright Deathmate: Red. (Love you, Rob and Eric. But you know.)
Now I can’t throw stones here. I was an X-Men guy at the time. Heck, a big reason I got my job at the shop was because I was an X-Men guy (but also I could actually talk to people. Politely. That goes a long ways). But I was dreading someone coming in with a sketchbook full of Punisher-esque guys with giant guns and more giant codpieces punching one another with their gun-swords while pretending to save bikini-clad waifs of women who only existed to make the men’s muscles ripple even tighter beneath their armored tunics.
Actually, that sounds WAY cool! Do they make comics like that?!?
But that’s not what I got. What I got was this very sweet, soft-spoken, almost shy guy and his then-wife (with way more confidence in him than he seemed to have). And he introduces himself, shakes my hand, and sheepishly shows me some of his stuff.
And I was blown. straight. away.
I saw… I can’t even tell you what I saw. I mean, you’re reading some of it now. But this is very much the cracked door of Levi’s World yet. This is barely the beginning of what Levi does. Some of you, the long-time fans, you guys get what I’m saying here. You’ve experienced Levi who is the (sometimes self-proclaimed but never all that wrong about it) ‘heir apparent to Sergio Aragones.’ And yes, that’s some brass ones to make a claim like that, but I don’t do it lightly. Levi showed me a poster-sized sheet that he had drawn of all the characters from Levi’s World, and I mean ALL OF THEM. There was no white space on the page between them all. If there was a space, he put someone in it.
I asked him if I could get a copy of it to hang up in the shop (Mental Note: Before you offer precious wall space to a random artist, get your boss’s approval. Lesson learned). Levi basically went right over to the copy place and had one made for us, paid for it himself. And I had that thing up for weeks (again, before boss noticed) and I would stare at it all the time (like that guy in Mallrats). And I would constantly find new things that I’d missed. Little bits here and there.
My brain bought up real estate in Levi’s World that day. As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to live there.
