How to become a Comic Character

Once upon a time, on the pioneer era of the Internet, there was a website. It was called 43Things. It allowed users to make a list of 43 lifetime goals, short and long-term, keep track of them, share them with others and find inspiration and suggestions thanks to other user’s experience on a given goal.

The most common was “Lose weight”. The second most common was “Write a book”. I also wrote my list and I still remember some of my goals that I never achieved. One of them was “To end up on Wikipedia”.

The time passed and I couldn’t really see a way to be so famous to deserve a place on Wikipedia without doing something highly illegal, so I changed my goal to something way more down to earth: “To know someone who’s on Wikipedia”.

And then I did. Three times. But in all these three occasions I didn’t realise it for some years.

The most curious happened in 2015, when I walked my first long trek and discovered my passion for hiking. I started with the Camino de Santiago. One week into it I stopped in a Donativo (a hostel for Pilgrims which provides a bed and a meal and relies on free offers). It's one of the most welcoming and famous on the Camino route, in a very small village called Grañón.

Among all the pilgrims I spent some time with a Norwegian man, walking the Camino for the first time as a gift to himself to celebrate his 50th birthday. He was also, like many people on 43things, writing a book about his experience. A comic book.

We played chess, talked a bit and then in the next days kept bumping into each other as we had a similar pace. It’s something very common to keep meeting the same people while walking, or in the evening at the hostel, as the Camino is a long procession of people going from A to B.

We became Facebook friends and I never heard from him again until one year later, when I found a job in Norway. I started looking for potential friends I could meet there, and I remembered about John.

I couldn’t meet him because he moved to southern France already many years before, as he’s not fond of the Norwegian climate. But we exchanged some chat messages anyway.

“Did you finish your book?”

“Almost. I would like to ask if it’s ok for you to appear as a character”

“Of course. Is this your first book?”

I asked it in all my naivety: truth is, in that very moment I was basically asking Al Pacino if it was his first time acting. Because the humble, simple John is one of the most acclaimed Cartoonist in the whole planet, winner of 3 Eisner Awards (the equivalent of the Academy Awards for Comic books) back to back. All this with his pen-name of Jason.

I’ve always been very ignorant on the subject but the magnitude of it became clearer during my first summer in Norway, where I had to repeat dozens of times the story of how I met Jason and how he is in person.

Since that day I learned to Google people before assuming their expertise at something by their attitude. Because Jason is as talented as a cartoonist as he’s humble as a human being.

The book was then published in 2017 in several languages; the English version is called “On the Camino”. And here and there on the book, a very tanned dog named Davide appears. Maybe this will allow me to have my own Wikipedia page.

The Wikipedia page of Jason