Nobody was paying attention

Hey,

today, I’m sharing with you a few stories of success from writers.

No conclusion, no moral, no nothing. Just some stories that have made me smile in the past, and that helped me keep making art when no one was reading:

ROBIN WOOD.

I’m almost sure you have never heard of Robin Wood.

He was born in 1944 in a poor rural community of Scottish immigrants in the Paraguayan jungle.

As a young man in Buenos Aires, he worked for a very, very low salary as a day laborer at a factory, but was obsessed with reading and art.

Once, a friend encouraged him to submit a story to a popular comics magazine, which he did. He never received a response, so he forgot about the matter.

That is, until one day he came late to the factory, and the owner didn’t let him in.

As he was a day laborer, he told the owner, “If I don’t work today, I won’t eat,” to which the owner basically answered that he didn’t care.

Wood, wandering through the streets under heavy rain with no money for the bus ticket, suddenly saw in a newsstand the comics magazine to which he had submitted a story: his name was on it.

So he presented himself in his worn, dirty, and soaked factory clothes at the offices of the publisher.

The editors recognized his name, told him they had been trying to contact him to write more for them, and paid him for the story a sum that equaled more than five months of what he earned at the factory.

Robin Wood is now known mostly in Latin America for being the creator of the comic Nippur de Lagash, which he wrote for more than 30 years as a nomad, living in many countries around the world as he wrote the scripts and sent them by mail to the publisher.

ALAN MOORE.

In 1970, Alan Moore, the genius behind the graphic novel From Hell and the novel Jerusalem, was expelled from high school.

He was apparently dealing LSD, so, you know, it’s not that he was unfairly treated.

But Moore says the headmaster contacted all the high schools in the area to make sure no other institution would accept him.

So the man had to work at low-wage jobs, like cleaning bathrooms and skinning sheep, before he had the chance to start his writing career in the British comics industry.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ.

In 1966, Gabriel García Márquez had to pawn his heater to send the manuscript of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude from Mexico City to a publishing house in Buenos Aires.

However, with the money he had, he could only afford to send not the complete novel but only half of it.

When García Márquez was leaving the post office, his wife, who was very, very angry, said “Now the only thing left is for the novel to be bad.”

-
PS: The Flight of The Condor. The Complete Saga. Written and drawn over seven years when which no one was paying attention.