So I was intrigued by this whole bloggy/forum things and thought I'd give it a test drive. What a better first topic than ME?!?! (Don't answer that)

Well, I am a 33-year old journalist who grew up wanting to draw and write comics. Even when attending I just assumed that is what I would do. I did a daily strip called Slacker Life http://www.drunkduck.com/Slacker_Life for a few years in the Arizona Daily Wildcat, the student newspaper for the University of Arizona.

You can read some of those old strips on DrunkDuck: http://www.drunkduck.com/Slacker_Life

I have been drawing since my mom would first let me hold a pencil and fell in love with comics when a crazy aunt bought me a stack of comic for Christmas when she could afford nothing else. To me at age three or four it was an awesome gift and I was an avid collector until the mid-90’s when the hobby became to expensive. I still occasionally pick up the odd graphic novel or beat up copy at used bookstores.

I was a bit older when I fell in love with the daily newspaper strip. Peanuts and Garfield were the first I gravitated to, but by the time I was in high school I was enthralled with Bloom County, the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes.

Today I still love newspaper strips but have also fully embraced web comics, mostly because of the edginess afforded on the Web.

I am also a writer. Professionally I am a journalist, but I have written two movie screenplays and have a novel about ½ way finished.

Biggest Influences – Cartoons
Berke Breathed – Bloom County really clicked on the light for me. The art, the story telling. I see a huge influence in my story telling.
Gary Trudeau – I read a collection of his Yale college strips that really influenced me. I see a lot of his work in what I did on Slacker Life
Bill Watterson - Calvin and Hobbes is the finest comic strip ever in my opinion.
Darby Conelly – Get Fuzzy sort of reignited a passion for comic strips. It never went away, but he was the first “new” cartoonist to make me take notice.
Jeph Jaques – Questionable Content was one of the first webcomic I read and made me think “hey there is an avenue for me”

Biggest Influences – Comics
Paul Smith – Don’t know if I would call myself a huge fan, but for some reason I started drawing my triangle noses because of some of his old X-Men issues.
Matt Wagner – His run on Demon and Mage was an influence artistically. Don’t know if you can see it in the cartoony stuff, but my more “serious” stuff has some of his influence in it.
Arthur Adams – Again, don’t know if it shows up in my work, but I copied a lot of things from Adams when I was developing my style.
Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison – These writers made me rethink how comics could be written.