I know, I know, I know, officially I’m against authenticity, but in the back of Back To Brooklyn #1, Jimmy Palmiotti wrote something I mutter under my breath every time I go home. The typos give it immediacy:

I lived in the real Brooklyn, born on Flatbush Avenue and Avenue J [That's a few blocks from, me, son. Did you go to Hudde? -- ed]… not some newcomer who happened to get his dads money and buy a loft in Greenpoint so he can say he lives in Brooklyn and wear a trucking company hat and thick rim glasses. I’m the guy that used to chase that motherfucker back to the subway and back over the bridge. I’m the guy that corrects people when they say they are brooklynites after having only lived there 2 years… and I’m the fucking guy that knows where the good pizza is to be found, where the best tattoo parlors are located, and finally, where the bodies are buried. Like the main character in this book, I know where go to get into trouble and where not to go and at the end of the day; I can kick your ass playing stickball.

Much of that I can’t relate to. (My glasses are so thick-rimmed they might as well have spinners.) But the essence of it I feel in my soul. For instance, Harold Hunter — you know him from Kids — once chased this guy I knew across the Bridge after skating too close to him at the Banks. Similarly, no one I knew actually played stickball — long ago, Justin Silverstein and I made a joke out of the idea that people still think that’s a real-New-York-kids-activity — though I challenge Jimmy to a game of boxball right now. In any event, Jimmy Palmiotti, as far as I’m concerned, you kick ass and are officially out of Quesada’s shadow. (Was "knifing it" past your time?)

Also, Jimmy, you’d appreciate this. On the Foster Avenue side of the corner of Foster and Ocean Avenue, the base of the apartment building there used to have a legend spraypainted in blue paint. Without any discernible style — someone just rushed up, sprayed, and left — it read ALL DA PEOPLE WITH DA $ DONT KNOW BKLYN. It’s been years, and it’s mostly washed away, but I always look for it whenever I walk by, coming off the Q at Newkirk — it will always be the D Train Station for me — on my way to Ma’s.