Here's one of those comic strip samples I mentioned in My Life in Comics, Part 7D, featuring my cats, Stan and Ollie. There are three pages of strips like this in Innocent Bystander #4, my self-published comic book series from the 1990s ... this strip is just about 25 years old at this point, making... Continue Reading →
Innocent Bystander #3 did so well in the early part of 1997 that I was inspired to jump right back in and do another issue. Where I found the time and—more importantly, energy and MONEY—to do this, I have no idea. I often referred to my self-publishing side gig as my “early mid-life crisis” (I... Continue Reading →
By 1997 I had two issues of Innocent Bystander under my belt and I was heading towards issue #3. Because of my daytime job (well, really a nighttime one, since I worked the 3:00-11:30 PM shift) as a TV news graphic designer at KDKA in Pittsburgh, time was limited for any personal creative endeavors. I... Continue Reading →
Yes, I’m going to make you sit through all six issues of Innocent Bystander and then a quick recap of my part in ten issues of Geeksville, co-published with Rich Koslowski of The 3 Geeks fame (and Image Comics, for a time), before I get to the part you really want to read: "My Life... Continue Reading →
As promised (or threatened) in my last post, My Life in Comics, Part 7: The Innocent Bystander Years, here’s the first in a deep dive into the comics themselves. I’m going to try and post some actual pages, so you, dear reader, can have a bit of the Innocent Bystander experience as it happened, over... Continue Reading →
Looking back on it from the vantage point of 25 years later, it was probably just an early midlife crisis. Rather than a hot, young girlfriend, or a hot, expensive car, I decided to publish a comic book. In the early 1990s, I was into my second decade of gainful employment as a television news... Continue Reading →
I graduated art school in March of 1976 with a degree in Visual Communications, but I failed to become the comic book artist that I hoped to become when I enrolled at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. After some lackluster job searches (I was hired and then promptly fired from a prominent Pittsburgh advertising agency... Continue Reading →
So there I was, in art school in Pittsburgh in the mid-1970s, a quiet, shy kind of guy, bombarded by the changes in life involved in moving from a small town to a big city. So what did I do to start some kind of social life? I joined a comic book club. My memories... Continue Reading →
A “My Life in Comics” Side Trip I’ve been thinking about my years at the Art institute of Pittsburgh since I wrote the last installment of “My Life in Comics” (which you can read by clicking here). I attended AIP from March 1974 through March 1976. Beyond an Associates Degree in Applied Something-or-Other (I graduated... Continue Reading →
At some point in time, I decided I would become a comic book artist. While I can’t tell you the exact date, I can tell you how that thought came to me. Sometime in 1970, I was reading a comics fanzine called Auction Block. In its second issue, there was a long interview with Al... Continue Reading →
Above: The Exhibit Hall at the 1972 New York Comic Art Convention at the Statler-Hilton Hotel. The swinging sixties swung forward, and we (my brother and I) kept buying comics. The Marvel Age of Comics moved into hyper-drive, with the team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at their creative zenith, the return of John... Continue Reading →
Retirement is the perfect time to think back and reflect on your life. One of the constants in mine has been comics. It was a large part of my childhood, followed me into adulthood (the definition of which may vary from person to person, especially me), and even, eventually, became a defining point in my... Continue Reading →
Recently I was having a “shower moment;” you know, some fantasy of a past or future moment where you imagine some event that you’re involved in, something where you’re erudite and articulate and people are hanging on your every word. I think most people have these moments in the shower, when they’re imagining what they... Continue Reading →
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