NEWSDAY:
From 'Real World' to Real World, Sort Of

April 16, 2000

FANFARE--

HE WAS KNOWN throughout Generation X-dom as the guy who couldn't get a date. The guy who spearheaded the move to kick Puck out of the house. And the guy who developed a strong bond with the HIV-positive Pedro Zamora. But six years after escaping the fish bowl that was MTV's The Real World: San Francisco Dix Hills native Judd Winick is making a new name for himself. He is now the Green Lantern.

Winick, 30, will take over writing duties for the man in green starting in July. The superhero duties are just another rib on Winick's ever-engorged comic plate.

"I'm doing a lot," Winick says over the phone from the San Francisco apartment he shares with former Real Worlder Pam Ling. (The two started dating after the show and got engaged in March.) While other The Real World personalities have flogged their 15 minutes to death (the aforementioned snot-infested Puck is currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file), Winick has slowly built a career as an artist and cartoonist in the six years since appearing on the show, in which a group of 20-somethings lives in a house together in front of TV cameras.

After the show, he got money-paying gigs such as illustrating duties for the "Complete Idiot's Guide" series and penning his mini-series The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius for Kevin Smith's Oni Press. In September, he will release the graphic novel Pedro And Me chronicling the life of his friend Pedro Zamora, the The Real World cast member who was HIV positive and died of an AIDS-related illness hours after the season's final episode aired in 1994. (A graphic novel is essentially a long-form comic book; in Winick's case, it is a work of nonfiction, even though it is called a novel.) Winick described himself growing up in Dix Hills as "a grumpy, quasi-budding artist kid." Dreading the school work at Half Hollow Hills East High School, he sought refuge in his comics. At 15, he was earning $5 a submission from Anton papers to run his original comic strip "Nuts & Bolts." He brought that strip with him to the University of Michigan, and upon graduation received a development deal from a large comic-strip syndicate. But the deal fell through, and Winick, who had come out of college "full of --- and vinegar," was forced to make the walk of shame back to Dix Hills to live with his parents during what he calls "the lowest point in my life." It was while commuting into the city to work odd art jobs that he saw a flier for "Real World." Winick ain't gonna lie to you-the lonely comic-strip drawing portrayal of himself on The Real World opens a lot of doors for him. But the show was also where he met Zamora, and that friendship, however brief, affected his life immensely. Winick stayed friends with Zamora after the show wrapped and filled in for him on AIDS-awareness lecture tours across the country. He even went to live in Miami to be near him in his final days.

After Zamora died, "a lot of people came to me to see if I wanted to write a book," says Winick. Not being a prose writer, Winick slaved over three revisions of the graphic novel, and he finally emerged last fall with the completed 180-page work, which will be released in September by Henry Holt and Co.. Winick had shown the novel to Bob Schreck, now an editor of DC comics, and feels it was a major reason for his landing the Green Lantern gig.

Where will Winick be taking the Green Lantern when he slips on the power ring in July? "He's an artist in his late 20s, but I'm going to make him do comics. I'm making him more and more like me," Winick says of Green Lantern's alter-ego Kyle Rainer. "The only difference is I don't have the most powerful thing in the universe dangling from my hand."

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