At approximately 1:00 p.m., on Friday, July 18, 1975, the cartoonist Vaughn Bode came out of the bedroom of the apartment in San Francisco's Mission District he shared with a lover (I will call Helene) who worked as a secretary at UC Medical Center. He wore a monk's robe and several necklaces. His light brown hair hung in curls to his shoulders. His blue eyes were lined and mascaraed. A white triangle was painted on his forehead.

"No phone calls today, Mark," he said to his 12-year-old son, visiting from New York. "I'm doing my God thing."

"You look beautiful," Mark said.

His father smiled.

"You see, Mark, I really am a high priest."

He returned to his room. In the center, on the lid of a coffin, sat a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna; figures in the pantheon of a religion he was creating. Over the next few hours, to the accompaniment of Mozart and pausing only to slip $5.00 under the door for Mark to buy food, he worked through a series of steps as ritualized as a Japanese tea ceremony. He believed that each human sense was a window through which God communicated. This communication could be magnified by alternately silencing each sense. So he applied blindfold, earplugs, gloves, apparatuses to mute taste and smell, each increasing his expectations and excitements as he approached a climactic extinguishing of his conscious self.

For this, he tied one end of a leather strap to a chinning door braced on the doorway of his closet. He looped the strap around the bar several times and then wrapped it around his neck. He grasped the loose end of the strap in both hands and pulled downwards. He expected that, by cutting off his air supply, he would black out and fall onto pillows he had laid across the floor. The strap would loosen, and he would regain his breath. But while unconscious, he would have been launched into a circumnavigation of the universe. He would have been in touch with worlds and visions he had pursued for most of his life. He would have melded into "everything." He would have accessed Mysteries of the Light. When he awoke, he would have the harvest to enrich his art.

After he had performed this act for the first time, he had wept because he wanted so badly to return. Each of the five times he had done it since he had gone further and gotten higher. He was four days short of turning 34. Since Christ had died at 33, he had told himself that when he passed that age, he would not cast this die with God again.

He was at his professional peak. His work appeared in publications that ranged from the narrowest corners of the underground to magazines of worldwide distribution. Film production companies courted him. He had been only the third American to win the Yellow Kid Award from the International Congress of Cartoonists and Animators. His public appearances drew thousands. He had an agent at William Morris.

A necklace caught in his strap, and it did not release.

He had been born july 22, 1941, in Syracuse, New York. He had an older brother, Victor, a younger brother, Vincent, and a younger sister, Valerie. Their father, Kenneth, was an unpublished poet and a drunk. He was handsome, bright, and unable to hold a job. Their mother, Elsie, was good-hearted, likable, and warm. She worked the assembly line at a GE plant in Utica. Because she worked and Kenneth was drunk, the kids ran wild. They were in and out of school, in and out of juvenile hall.

When he was sober, Kenneth would do anything for his children. But when he was drunk, he grew sad; and when he grew sad, he became mean. He beat Elsie; he beat the kids. He beat them, while they slept, through their blankets with a belt. To escape, they would sleep on the floor beneath their beds. When Elsie had been beaten enough, she filed for divorce. Vaughn was eleven, maybe ten.

Kenneth moved to Philadelphia. Valerie was sent to live with grandparents. Victor was placed in a children's home, Vincent and Vaughn with different uncles in Washington, D.C.

The aunt and uncle who took Vaughn had a daughter his age. They were sure he would be her ruination.

"That Vaughn is no good," they said in front of him.

"That Vaughn will never be any good."

"That Vaughn will rape our daughter."

It did not help his standing when they caught him in the basement masturbating amidst discarded automobile tires.

Nor had it helped that, when he was little, Elsie, who had wanted a daughter, allowed his hair to grow in ringlets and clothed him in dresses so that he resembled Shirley Temple.

Nor had it helped when his father mocked him because he was no fighter.

Nor when his mother forbade him to play with other children because they might do harm. There were times he did not know who the fuck he was or what the fuck he was supposed to be doing.

Victor fled the home in which he had been placed and joined his father. From Philadelphia, he wrote letters to the rest of the family urging them to reunite the children. Finally, Elsie took custody and moved them to Utica, an aging industrial town of about 75,000 -- Poles, Italians, Jews. Little Chicago, they called it.

A family offers models upon which to build a life. And it unleashes scalp-hunting savages against which to erect a fortress.

The Bode family contained strong contingents of Baptists, Catholics and Methodists. For a time, Jehovah's Witnesses met regularly at their home. Vaughn saw that religion could bring meaning to empty lives, solace to aching hearts, courage to fearful souls. But no religion he met comforted him. At 14, he began to rewrite the Bible -- to tuck and taper its steamy blanket -- to chip and chisel from its unwieldy weight.

At another point, he considered becoming a Jesuit priest. It was not, he later realized, the theology that had attracted him so much as the life of quiet contemplation, the channeling of sexual energy into the courting of God -- the opportunity to wear a dress.

Then there was art.

He had drawn his first cartoon when he was five, his first comic when he was seven. No one else who came to supper or through a front door he was likely to step did that. This individualization strengthened his sense of a life apart. To the extent the drawing satisfied, the correctness of this course felt confirmed. Drawing drew him from where he was otherwise condemned to be. Its pencil lines and colors transformed him as well as any other blank page.

He clipped his favorites from the paper: Prince Valiant; Alley Oop; Pogo; Li'l Abner; anything by Disney. He created his own characters, dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands. Hobos found sunken treasure. Garbage men went to the moon. Mars and Venus were nearer than the corner store. He schemed out solar systems, populated alternate civilizations, every one more satisfying than the one to which he each morning awoke. He visited his worlds daily. The stretches during which he lingered lengthened. They were the only places that made sense or which he controlled.

At 13, he had his first "publication": a church flyer depicting Samson bringing down the walls of the temple. He plotted a career as a newspaper cartoonist. He intuited the need for a "front strip" the public would accept. It was not prepared for the worlds of his dreams. His first effort featured a man who resided in a trashcan. Hobos. Garbage men. Trashcan residencies. Smashed temples. His pages did not advertise a happy child.

If he had to be here, he thought, he must have a purpose. If he had a purpose, it must involve this talent that set him apart. And if his being apart exposed him to privileged visitations, he had a duty to lead others to places they could not find on their own.

At 16, at the kitchen table, he doodled two pipe-cleaner legs protruding from beneath a battered, extra large, wizard's hat. He cribbed his creation's name, Cheech, from a nearby nut jar. A panel or two of combat left him shredded, lumpy, on his back. "What didcha' expect, a dime store hero...?" he instructed. "Life ain't at all like dat, dope!"

[To read the full version of this essay, please see The Comics Journal 2005 Special Edition.]

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