One of my earliest ambitions was to be a comic book artist.
In college, it was looked upon with an attitude of condescension, derision and scorn, and by the time I had started my illustration career in 1989, I had all but given up on the dream, thinking it was beyond the scope of my skillset and had contented myself with just being a ‘comics fan’. Occasional doodles and side projects were the only outlet for nearly twenty years.
In 2010 I got my first “professional” chance at doing comics, when Capstone Publishing enlisted me to illustrate a short graphic novel about Babe Ruth’s 1927 Home Run Record Breaking season. It was great fun, and then a few years later I teamed up with a writer friend to provide several comics adaptations of some of his personal memoirs for his website “Freaks of Nurture” (several samples are included in the slideshow above). Around 2013-14 I began doing a series of advertisements for a local ‘law firm’ specializing in elder care. The ads had the appearance of ‘Sunday newspaper comics’ and extolled the virtues of going to one of this lawyer’s ‘financial seminars’. Comics were creeping back into my life.
It was in 2018 that I was first contacted by First Second Books to begin work on a comics adaptation of Dan Rather’s “What Unites Us” for their upcoming ‘World Citizen Comics’ line of Young Adult Civics graphic novels. Released in February of 2022 after some Covid era delays. It was the single biggest project I had ever been involved with.
In May 2022 I began doing a daily webcomic, that I posted on Instagram. It was an experiment, and I didn’t expect it to last more than a month or two. Three years later I’m still doing it. I’d love to know what you think of it.