Leonard Marcus’s dizzying array of achievements as a writer and historian in the field of children’s literature has made him a revered figure. The fact that he is also modest, discreet, low-key, and a nice guy in person adds to his being one of my heroes.

The thoughtfulness and appreciation that went into his latest collection of interviews, and his use of the phrase “Life Outside the Box” in his subtitle, inspire these thoughts from my own experience with the graphic novel as the author of Stitches.

I long had it in the back of my mind to write a memoir of my youth. For years I could only imagine this as an extended work of prose, which is to say that it was doomed never to become a book. Drawing, for me, is as natural as breathing, but prose, quite frankly, is hard. When I discovered the graphic novel form, it made my fingers itch to render my memoir in panels equating to frames in a movie. It gave me the opportunity to expand my visual storytelling from the necessarily tight strictures of the thirty-two-page picture book format in which I had long been working.

What, then, did I make? It’s not a picture book, not a film, and I certainly wouldn’t call it a comic. Rather, it shifts around among all these genres like a blob of mercury, and I felt that shifting motion while I worked. It was an exhilarating experience. I could not lay claim to having done anything truly new, but, to me, it felt fresh.

As Leonard recounts in his introduction, a war of words continues to rage over what this sort of book should be called and how it should be classified. I like to think of Stitches as “slow film,” but that term certainly doesn’t apply to every sequential visual narrative. Who knows what term will finally take hold? All I know is that it was thanks to this new form that my book was, at long last, born.

Deciding where to slot Stitches caused challenges (I once found it in the “Crafts” section of Barnes & Noble with the books on sewing.) and at least one major debate when it was nominated for a National Book Award in the young adult category. Some saw Stitches as written for adults, while others saw it as a perfect book for teens. It must have been difficult for my publisher, W. W. Norton, to know exactly where to place Stitches, and it became upsetting when self-appointed “authorities” online blasted it for having been first issued as an adult book, then repositioned in the young adult category to give it a better shot at an NBA. They thought this was covetous. It was! Everyone wants to win a National Book Award. But the dispute was not about the quality of my book; it was about pigeonholing.

We must not denigrate the taxonomists among us. (They are there to tell us which drawer to find our socks in. This is important. ) Nor should we ignore the concerns of marketing departments. What we must never do is listen to these folks while we draw and write. Art-making at its best is a confrontation with the mysterious and the irrational. If we listen to the people concerned mainly with classification or marketing, we end up not making honest and true works of art, but only product, rubber-stamped and made to fit into a prefab box that might as well be a casket.

In so many of the interviews in Comics Confidential, the artists, when asked what they were like as children, tell us that they were nerds. That is code for those who are born to a life perpetually outside the box. Those who grow up on the periphery of normality are like astronauts forever circling the earth in their own private capsules. It is a lonely life, but in fact, the view from up there is better, broader, and more all-encompassing than the average person’s. When nerds come to accept and appreciate their condition, when they begin using their typewriters, computers, and art supplies to pass the time in their dark passage, and when, above all, they take advantage of the view, they rule.

I applaud Leonard Marcus and all of the sweet people (some of them my friends) whom he has chosen to honor by interviewing them for this book. It’s like a homecoming for life-travelers who are forever in orbit, seeking new forms in which to express themselves.

David Small