Wizard Issue 107:
A Friend Till the End

By Mike Cotton

Winick's "Pedro and Me" offers touching look at death of AIDS-stricken 'Real Worlder' Zamora

Imagine you're 17 years old, strikingly handsome and a brilliant student. Now imagine you're going to die. Meet Pedro Zamora.

"I want people to understand what it was like to know (Pedro) and what it was like to lose him," said writer and artist Judd Winick.

That's why Winick spent two years of his life creating Pedro And Me, a black and white, cartoon-influenced graphic novel which offers an emotionally charged autobiographical account of the pair's friendship during the last year-and-a-half of Zamora's life. Winick, who wrote and drew Pedro And Me, forged a friendship with the AIDS activist when the two roomed together during the filming of MTV's The Real World: San Francisco. Zamora died of AIDS-related illness one day after the last episode of the show aired in November of 1994.

Pedro And Me will be available in bookstores the third week of August. But even before its release, Pedro And Me is receiving acclaim from the creative community, comparing it to some of the biggest works in comics' history.

"Pedro And Me should be made compulsory reading," said Sandman creator Neil Gaiman. "It's moving, honest, funny and romantic. This is the real world in a way that a TV series never could be."

Winick -- the creator of The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius and the new writer of Green Lantern -- blushes at such comparisons. His real goal was to touch readers with an epic and sad tale of caring, friendship, disease and death revolving around a friend millions of people shared through cable television.

Winick, who lived with Zamora and five other strangers in San Francisco for six months as part of MTV's real life soap opera, said it took him four years to get to the point where he could write about the loss of his friend and another two years deciding how to present the story. The experience wasn't an easy one for the creator.

"It was tough to write about these personal experiences that were very painful," Winick said. "Drawing Pedro with shingles -- drawing this perfectly handsome picture of him and then loading up the other side of his face with lesions and sores and scabs. I had to write about what hurt most. I had to make it more personal. I didn't want to talk about certain things but it was powerful stuff, emotional stuff. I had to go in."

Luckily, Winick didn't have to struggle alone. Another The Real World housemate, Winick's current fiancee Pam Ling, greatly influenced the writing process.

"Pam's opinion was everything to me," Winick explained. "She was present for everything that was in the book. She told me when it was working and when it wasn't. She kept me honest. She told me how she remembered things and how she thought this was different and she told me when I was taking too much artistic license and when I wasn't taking enough. I'd say it all began and ended with Pam."

Winick held the novel back from other cast members because he didn't want their feelings to influence his work. But since the novel's completion, cast members Corey Murphy and Mohammed Bilal and the Zamora family have read the book and approved.

Dave Rainey, who fans of the show remember as the abrasive, hygiene-challenged Puck, is not a focus of the book.

"I didn't exclude him for any other reason than everything that could be discussed about Puck was discussed in the show," explained Winick. "[If he read it] he'd probably say what other Puck fans would say, 'Why isn't Puck in it more?'"

The Real World appeal aside, Pedro And Me has floored the comics community. Some creators are comparing it to 1986's critically-acclaimed Maus, a story about the Nazi holocaust told with mice and cats. Winick labels the comparison premature and inaccurate.

"The mainstream media will compare this to Maus because it's the last comic book they read," Winick chuckles. "They've never read Stuck Rubber Baby. Maus is one of our 'Citizen Kanes.' I'll just take the compliment though and blush."

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