The saying goes, “Never meet your idols.” This is, presumably, because the people whom you admire the most will inevitably disappoint you with their mere humanity. But let me tell you, this was not the case with Neil Gaiman. When I gave him a Dr. Radium print after he spoke at my university, he invited me to lunch with him and some of the university faculty. He was gracious and charming, and he sat in a Japanese restaurant with the light from the window behind him glowing around his head like a halo. Seriously.

Me? I had unwittingly inspired the devotion of a small boy who was along with us, and spent most of lunch trying to juggle playing a game of Hangman with this boy and approximating intelligent adult conversation. Then, small boy finally gone, I found myself walking down the street next to Neil Gaiman.

You have to understand: Like 99% of comics-reading women my age with all-black wardrobes, I first fell in love with a comic when I read The Sandman. Neil Gaiman and his creation is, as my agonized thought balloon tells you, the reason I work in comics. (And not just because of the work itself — seeing women at the editing and art helms informed me of possibilities.)

So I was walking down the street with Neil Gaiman in a hero-worship-induced state of utter stupidity, and, yes, those are the words that escaped from my lips. And he was gracious and charming enough to still talk to me after that.

Oh god.

First, I apologize for the lateness of this column and for the fourth panel. Brian and I didn’t mean to get all autobio-comix-lurid on you, but we’re just reporting True Events, you know?

One of the uplifting mantras I have about working in comics is “Remember, to most people, comics do not matter.” In fact, if you Google my name, you’ll find a comment I posted on Heidi MacDonald’s Publishers Weekly column The Beat saying just this. (I am sorry for repeating myself, but that’s what you do with mantras, isn’t it?) In the spectrum of invocations of humility, it doesn’t rank with “memento mori” (”remember you are mortal”), which a slave whispered in the ear of Roman conquerers during their triumphs, but for my purposes, it does the job. And my purposes as a comics editor are these: 1. Make sure good comics get published. 2. Make sure people know about these comics.

So if I remind myself that for most people, comics are nowhere near their radius of consciousness, it makes me work harder. And it makes me kind of depressed.

Hello, Blog@Newsarama readers. This is the first of a new monthly feature, the new “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” a series of cartoons and short essays about life in independent comics. My life, specifically. I’m the editor-in-chief of the independent comics publisher Slave Labor Graphics (SLG, as we prefer). That company, founded by the gentleman pictured in panel two (images are courtesy of my husband, artist Brian Belew), has been around for more than twenty years. I’ve been around — at least as far as comics are concerned — for seven years. This is my introduction, my “origin story,” of sorts.

A lot of people ask me how to get a job in comics, and I really don’t have a helpful answer to that question. Though it was a relatively easy process for me, I didn’t get to the position I’m in now on purpose. I began as an editorial assistant at SLG, scanning art, laying out comics and writing press releases. By the sheer force of my showing up regularly and doing what I was supposed to, I was promoted to editor-in-chief a year and a half later. It occurs to me that the “in chief” part of my title is mostly an honorary formality, since I’m the only editor at the company, but it still looks impressive on a business card. What do I do? I help find new projects, work with artists to develop the those we are publishing, and, well, I still lay out comics and write press releases, too. I try not to scan artwork anymore — like everybody everywhere I hate scanning artwork — but sometimes it still falls to me.

My job in comics is some sort of cosmic rebalancing, I think. In a previous life, I must have made too much money in a soul-deadening industry, maybe in petrochemicals or a company that makes the little plastic things that keep pizzas from sticking to the top of the delivery box. But the joke’s on karma, if that’s the case. Sure, working in the comic book industry means you have an even chance of being poor, suffering from a defensive inferiority complex, and taking up the drink, but that’s probably true of any profession. At least I’m having fun. For now, anyway.

By the way, now that I’ve gotten to know Dan, the Oscar Wilde comment doesn’t exactly make sense, but it’s a lot less baffling than it was at the time.

(Lyrics in this cartoon are from the song by The Smiths from which I’ve taken the title.)