J. Michael Straczynski - Becoming Superman: A Writer’s Journey from Poverty to Hollywood with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes

I properly met Joe Straczynski in, I believe, January of 1991. He was hosting the Hour 25 radio show on KPFK-FM Los Angeles, and Terry Pratchett and I were on the show that night, to talk about our book Good Omens. Before Joe arrived, the station boss came and warned Terry and me that she knew how we British people liked to swear on the radio, and that no swearing on our parts would be tolerated. (We asked if it was all right to mention a fictional book in Good Omens called the Buggre Alle This Bible, and she went away and checked with the Authorities and said it was.) Wed neither of us ever sworn during any radio interview before, but were now terrified that we would, and we did our interview convinced that at any moment a fit of something resembling Tourettes syndrome might overtake us. I remember that it was late at night in a dim-dark studio, and when Joe went over from talking to us to taking questions from callers, at least one of the voices at the other end of the line made no sense at all, the words were random and confused, and Joe cut him off, but kindly, and we carried on talking.

I say properly met, because I think I had already met Joe before that, at dinner with Harlan Ellison, but maybe all those dinners with Harlan were afterward. And thats the hell of memoirs and autobiographies: you are dealing with what you remember, and what you remember is fallible and its unreliable and sometimes its simply wrong, and yet its still all you have to go on.

Weve worked together once: Joe asked if I would write a script for Babylon 5 for him before the show began, and each season I would apologize because my plate was filled with Sandman and with the original Neverwhere TV series, and then Joe got to his final season, and I said yes, because Sandman and Neverwhere were done and I had the time, and in 1998 I wrote an episode called The Day of the Dead for him. Joe was, for the record, the easiest and sanest television executive Ive ever written for: he was writing the entire show himself (except for my episode), and overseeing it, and doing all this without giving any indication of breaking a sweat.

So Ive known Joe for almost thirty years. His hair has changed in that time (long ago it was darker and there was significantly more of it), but from the hairline down hes still very much the same man I met in that voice-haunted radio studio late one night. Hes decent, and hes good-hearted; he works harder than anyone Ive met in film and TV; hes sane and hes sensible, accessible and wise. Which, you would think, would mean that the autobiographical volume you are reading would be as dull as insurance policy small print: people are as interesting as they are flawed, their stories as fascinating as the obstacles they encounter on the way.

In Joes case, as you read his story you also start to realize the pressure and the force that created the ferociously hardworking and ethical entity that he is: you understand not only what he was reacting against, but the pressure that he was under. Superman, one of Joes inspirations, could squeeze coal into diamonds. I was never convinced that it would work in real life, the whole coal-to-diamonds thing, suspecting that if you werent Superman and you squeezed a lump of coal really hard, youd get coal dust; but the pressures of Joes life and childhood, the people who surrounded him, gave him something and someone not to be, gave him something to transcend, something to survive. Most people would have become coal dust. He didnt.

The childhood we read about here is like an iron key winding up the clockwork that might so easily have destroyed Joe or turned him into a monster: instead it gave him power and a place to stand, and, most of all, a willingness to learn.

We follow him through several careers, and in each career he learns how to do it, how to set out and make something happen that ought, by any stretch of the imagination, to have been impossible. Its his willingness to learn, his quiet persistence, and his willingness to do the work that are his superpowers. He has become a diamond.

And now he is finally willing to share.

Neil Gaiman

London

June 2017