It all started in my Grandmother's house. In a small room under the stairs there was a trunk full of old
Archie and
Harvey comics from the 60's and 70s left over from my aunt Mary's youth. (Why hadn't Grandma kept any of dad's old superhero comics?!?)
A visit to Grandma invariably featured rummaging through that trunk for buried treasure. Among the
Pep Comics and
Baby Hueys we would occasionally find an awesome old Horror Comic or even a Superhero comic! The first Spiderman comic I can remember reading was part one of the classic
"Six Armed Spidey Saga" featuring Morbius, the living Vampire. It would be many years until I found out how that story finally ended.
Peter and I had little school desks at the foot of our beds, and we'd sit in them and draw comics for hours. Usually we'd draw characters we liked from TV, like
Laurel and Hardy or
Scooby Doo. I still remember a
Mork from Ork comic I drew. I remember it because when I showed it to my sister Rose, she pointed out that it was all backwards. I had made it read right to left. I vowed to get it right from that point on. (I had no idea that they did it that way in Japan, not that it would have mattered.)
Eventually, Peter hit on the innovation of using brand new characters that we made up! Our first original character was a Basset Hound named "McCool". He was the sheriff of DogTown. From there, we drew our own characters exclusively. Sometimes we'd make them up from scratch, and sometimes we'd assign a personality to one of our stuffed animals and put them in the comics.
Our exposure to real comics was sporadic. Aside from the trunk at Grandma's we would occasionally get comics off the newsstands and regularly mangle them, having not yet learned the proper respect that all comics deserve.
One evening in 1984, we cleaned our room. To my delight, I discovered that we had managed to accumulate a stack of comics nearly a foot tall.
A house fire turned that stack into ash, along with everything else in my room.
Mom was compiling a list of stuff that was destroyed, and asked us what we had lost. "Besides everything?" I thought.
Then I remembered that stack of comics. I told Mom about it. The next day she brought home a box full of awesome comics! There was some
Avengers, some
Indiana Jones, and some
Batman in there too. From that point on, I was officially a comics collector.
A few years after that,
Gladstone started publishing
Uncle Scrooge comics. I absolutely loved Uncle Scrooge. The wild inventiveness and adventure that
Carl Barks and
Don Rosa brought to their Duck stories sucked me in. These were the first comics I actually subscribed to.
As for my own comics creations, they gradually moved from funny animal comics to funny
Dungeons and Dragons inspired fantasy comics.
In College I majored in Fine Arts. Unfortunately they didn't offer any cartooning or comics courses, but that was okay. I was having fun with my own comics and illustrations in the college newspaper.
At this point in my life, a career in art seemed unattainable. The only viable way to make money as an artist (or so I believed) was either by being an architect or a graphic designer. Having a successful career as a movie star seemed like an easier thing to achieve! So that's what I pursued. I switched my major to Theater.
I still made half hearted attempts to find a career in art while I was busy being an actor. At one point I redrew some comic strips and sent them off to a bunch of syndicates, only to receive a steady stream of polite rejection letters.
After college I got lucky and landed a job as a storyboard artist at Bates Advertising in New York City. This profoundly changed my outlook on life. For the first time ever, I was making good money, and being paid to draw! Suddenly a career in art wasn't impossible, it was actual.
I was drawing every day and getting better and better.
Drawing storyboards was great, but it rekindled my desire to make comics. I took a story Pete had written called
"Fat Mitch" and started adapting that to comics.
When I had finished the first issue, I started going to conventions and showing it around. I met a bunch of people that were very helpful and gave me great advice.
Mike Manley was one of those people. He posed this question to me. "What is your goal with comics? What do you ultimately want to achieve?"
It's a simple question, but not one I had ever really thought about. He stumped me with that one.
So I thought about it for a while. I knew for sure that I wanted to make comics, but how, and in what capacity? I felt like I wasn't cut out for superhero comics, but there didn't seem to be a market for anything else.
In the meantime, I lost my steady storyboard job and went freelance. Working freelance is great, but the work was sometimes sporadic. After a few years at that, I was ready to take on another steady job.
But, since I was still making money as a freelancer, I decided I could be a little picky. Since I wanted to work in comics, I would only apply to comics related jobs. If I'm gonna get a full time job, it might as well be in the field that I want to be in, right?
So I applied to every comics job that I was even remotely qualified for. For the most part, that meant applying for jobs at
DC. I applied for a couple of jobs at
Marvel too, but for some reason it seemed like DC was putting up new want ads alot more often.
I got advice on writing cover letters and resumes, and asked everybody I knew with a comics connection to put in a good word for me. I applied for a ton of jobs, but I never got an interview. I never got a phone call or even an email. I'd send off my resume and never hear from it again.
It was pretty discouraging. I felt like the world was conspiring to keep me in the advertising business.
So, I thought about my goals again. Although a job at DC Comics would have been awesome, I decided it was distracting me from my real goal, which was still a vague "Make Comics".
After a while I made my goal a little more specific. It wasn't enough to simply make comics. There had to be an end result I was looking for.
I decided I wanted to be like those comics creators that I admired most. I thought about Carl Barks,
EC Segar,
Charles Shultz and
Jack Cole and realized that they were all recognized for creating characters that had a lasting impact on the culture of comics and on pop culture in general.
So my new goal became "To contribute an original creation to the world of comics."
Of course, anybody can achieve that goal, without even trying that hard. Just put up some comics on the web, and there you go. Mission accomplished.
I realized for it to really count, my goal had to have some loftier ambition attached.
My goal became "To contribute an original creation to the world of comics, and to have that creation receive wide recognition in the world of comics and pop culture in general."
So there's my ultimate career goal. I had that goal in mind when I first heard about
Zuda Comics in June of 2007, and immediately realized what an amazing opportunity it would be.
So I worked hard on my submission, and when Zuda launched at the end of October, I was ready with
"The Night Owls". I pitched it at
Zuda's launch party, where it got a good reaction from Richard Bruning, the Creative Director.
I admit when I saw the comics that they launched with, I was intimidated, but thanks mostly to Richard's reaction, I was reasonably sure I'd get into the competition anyway.
In the meantime, I started developing new ideas, just in case "Night Owls" got rejected.
I still can't believe I was an instant winner.
I'm currently only a couple of months into my contract, but it's already been an amazingly rewarding experience. I love being a part of the Zuda community. I love hearing the reactions people post under my comics. I loved seeing "Night Owl" ads in the DC Comics. I loved getting my first check with the DC Spin logo on it.
At
WonderCon in San Francisco, I reached a milestone in my career. It was the first time I met someone in person who knew about my comics without me having to tell them first!
Now, I'm not saying I'll ever reach my goal. I don't have enough hubris to actually make that claim. It's a pretty ambitious goal after all. I think as long as I try my best to achieve it, that will be enough. A goal like this is more about the journey than the destination.
From the trunk of comics under Grandma's stairs to now, its been a long road, but really, the journey is only getting started. I think "The Night Owls" is a step in the right direction.
I'll be sure to keep you updated on whatever interesting stops we make along the way.
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