when Eggers was about ten, an aging Latvian American painter named Hyman Bloom, who influenced Jackson Pollock and was a friend of Eggers’s parents, gave him two books of woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer, fifteenth-century German printmakers. “That is when I almost literally, but certainly metaphorically, put away my comic books and became a snob and a dilettante,” Eggers told me. “The sea creatures and the satyrs and the wild men and the demons did kind of put Marvel to shame, in my eyes.”