As a young child, Gregory Rick found solace in drawing. It offered both refuge from real-life traumas, and a means of escape, a way of living amidst the challenges. He drew a lot of battle scenes, mostly old military skirmishes he obsessively read about in books, but also imaginary conflicts of the future. Every battle has its tale, and in crafting narratives Rick developed his own ideas about what storytelling was. “It gave me agency,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I had too much power, but I had power over these.”