How many ways can you tell a story?
My life is haunted by this question. Draw it on paper, push pixels in the computer, photograph it, record it, and speak the words that are written on the page.
For the longest time I fought the desire to work in so many different mediums. It seems like every time I get a handle on one I find myself looking at yet another. With each new venture comes the inner turmoil of settling, of figuring out what I want to be.
That question, “What do you want to be?” always calls up a scene from my childhood. I’m sitting in the back of my mom’s car as we drive through San Francisco with her new husband on our way to the pier. A pad of paper sits on my lap, comics folded over to action scenes I’m trying to render between bumps in the road. Cool bay air swirls around us, wafting away the stale awkwardness that has filled the car over the past two hours. And for just a moment there’s clarity in life. Gazing up at glass office buildings stretching to the sky, I tell myself, “Someday I’ll work in a place like this. I’ll move far away and be someone else. I’ll make comics, and tell stories, and spend my life creating!” And for a short while I’m happy in the dream.
Ten years later I’d find myself taking art classes in that same city, walking down those streets, living in a building like the ones I’d passed. But the fantasy doesn’t take into account bunk beds in a studio apartment with a punk rock dumpster fire as a roommate, or the mountains of debt, or the noose-like tether tugging on you each weekend with the gentle callings of “don’t forget your friends.”
When it came time to chase my dreams, to invest in them, to take the chance, I let myself slip into the safety of the known. And now here I am, twenty years removed from the dream of becoming an animator, or a comic book artist, or a novelist, or anything really. My head is still teeming with stories trying to claw their way through the fear. Sometimes they get out. When they do, if they can make it through the maze of responsibility life erected over the years, I put them here.
This site and what I do here is my last desperate attempt to tell stories. There’s too much between their birthplace deep in my subconscious and reaching the maturity of expression, and so I don’t place more limits on them by telling them they can only take one form. I hope you enjoy what you find here. Some of it’s going to be weird, some of it challenging, but in the end I hope it inspires you to feel something and that in inspires something in you as well.