ABOUT

I should tell you the truth about how I got here. The books tell it already; this page can keep them company.

I've wanted to make comics since I was eight, and I got there absurdly early: from 1999 to 2002, still in high school, I worked at Top Cow Productions — inside the industry I'd been dreaming about. Then I trained as a painter: Dartmouth, where two great teachers taught my drawing eyes to see, and finally a Masters at the Slade in London, where a teacher I admired told me I lacked structure — I carried that sentence around for years. And then in 2016 I walked away from all of it to become a shaman.

I gave that path everything. What I got back: a teacher who remade me and then gave me twenty-four hours to pack. A summer spent in four psychiatric facilities across Europe. A diagnosis I still carry. Before that there were years I don't romanticize — I synthesized DMT in my own kitchen and used it three to five times a day. There were nights in jail. There was a day I threw it all out, and there are still days I think about it.

Four years and two nervous breakdowns later, I picked my pen back up and started drawing Felix The Cat like my life depended on it — and in the quiet way these things turn out to be true, it did.

Here is something embarrassing and true: confidence — especially in creative pursuits — has never been a given for me. Likes and follows mean a lot to me; comments even more. Think about a day where four people say something nice to you about something you're doing. Now juxtapose that with three years holding maybe a dozen compliments. The effects on a creative heart — on any heart — are staggering. And I've learned something stranger: when these stories are actually read, the topics no longer hold the same way inside me. Things move. So whatever you do on this site, you're already part of the story.

The books are called Life Stories: autobiographical comics about enlightenment gone wrong, addiction, fat, love, mortality, and the void — drawn one panel per page, hand-lettered down to the copyright notice, and self-published. The pages on the Art page are the world of the comics brought to the bedroom and gallery; the early canvases carry a different signature than the new ink because I dropped half my name on the way here. The characters adorning these pages are the spirits I met along the way. I mostly hold the pen.

My ultimate goal, perhaps surprisingly, is to tell stories that are light-hearted and funny. For whatever reason, my pathway there is lit through darkness rather than heavenly clouds. It's been this way most of my life. The poet's heart, it turns out, is always more comfortable in the shade.

There's no publisher behind this, and no plan waiting behind it either. What there is, is a person showing up every day to draw a story that feels important, in a way that's fun to make.