I just honestly, from a really young age.
I was in the third grade when I read my first comic book, Amazing Spider-Man number 350, and I was hooked from that point on.
I mean, comics are cool, superheroes are cool, superpowers, all of it.
The bright colors, the cool costumes.
And so I think I was just so energized by, you know, that that world was so much more sensational than the one I was living in.
Phil Hester is another cartoonist in Iowa, and he invited me to his studio and he's done it at the time, probably a 20 year career writing and drawing for Marvel and DC Comics, and he saw a lot of potential in the work I was doing.
My first gig was a cover of Green Hornet and just, I mean, just riding that, you know, high of finally doing something that was going to be published in a comic book, not too long later, we worked on the Justice League.
I got to work on my favorite character Superman.
A couple of issues of Action Comics, Batman Beyond.
So personally, a really gratifying gig.
And eventually, you know, writing and drawing your own stories kind of took more precedent, too.
You want to create your own characters.
You want to tell the stories that mean something to you.
Yeah, a former librarian wrote to all these illustrators and artists and was like, Could you send us an original drawing.
They just did.
You don't want to know what that is worth now.
What I'm working on right now is a graphic novel series called Sort of Super.
Now, speaking of original see, mine, you can tell and there's all kinds of pencil lines and stuff.
So the genesis of this is I wanted to be and I mentioned I wanted to be a comic strip artist, and this started out as a comic strip pitch.
So I worked on this pretty relentlessly 2002 to 2017.
I think I just kind of came to conclusion that it was just not going to happen.
A best case scenario, it was going to take years and I was putting so much time into these drawings and these writings that, you know, I just wasn't getting a return.
But as it would happen, another friend of mine, Jason Platt, he's another Iowa cartoonist.
And but I saw he had a book deal and he had taken his characters and he was working on a comic strip and he had made them into a graphic novel.
So I just called him out.
I said hey, like, tell me about this.
How did this come about?
I didn't know that those graphic novels were really blowing up.
How many in here read graphic novels?
A lot of hands.
And there was such an appetite for young readers to read the kind of stories that we were trying to tell.
I combined those into a graphic novel and that graphic novel was sort of super.
And so, like I said, it's kind of a mash up of, you know, kind of a love letter to comic books and comic strips, taking all of that humor and whimsy that I really loved about comic strips.
Kind of mashing that up with all the action drama and adventure of comic books.
It's about an 11 year old kid named Wyatt Flynn.
Was kind of impulsive, a little bumbling, and he accidentally gets a bunch of superpowers.
Wyatt He wants to be a superhero.
His dad doesn't want him to, but his sister whos two years younger than him.
She's super smart, and she is a little more clear eyed and doesn't see the world in such black and white.
So she's like, No, we can do this.
What Dad doesn't know doesn't hurt him.
Yeah, it's been great.
I kind of felt I knew I was doing something right because I had, you know, just this immediate and such an excitable response.
Yeah this is the sequel to sort of super.
But kids, you know, they devour these in an afternoon.
And so almost immediately, the second book just came out in July and immediately I was getting emails, kids who, you know, when's the third coming out.
And so I was really gratifying, but I can't make these fast enough.
So it's been a really positive response.
And I'll just do a quick headshot of my main character, Wyatt Yeah, just make comics and it sounds like such a cop out of an answer, but really, you know, it takes such a long time to get well.
It took me such a long time to get good at it.
I still I'm still learning.
And you're always going to be learning.
A lot of kids come up and say that, you know, I have all these ideas, but, you know, I'm scared or I don't, you know, I can't get to draw them or they're perfectionist.
So honestly, just sitting down, making comics, that's going to be, you know, your biggest educator is getting on the page and making those mistakes and finding those victories and just keep going.