For years, I devoted all my creative energies into professional work. Eventually I pursued creative projects of my own, simply to have a little sandbox to play in. Exploration often gets overlooked when working professionally with corporate whims, budgets & schedules. Much as I love the medium of animation, it is labour intensive & time consuming. Thus, my first projects for myself were in the solo medium of comics. NERVE BOMB COMICS, my self publishing imprint, is a place to dabble with ROCKET RABBIT stories, & SEPHILINA the Nauti-Girl, and other such silliness.
From 2001-2011 I exhibited at West Coast Comics Conventions, with my good friend, booth-mate and inspiring partner in creative-crime, RHODE MONTIJO. I'm working a ROCKET & PROFESSOR graphic novel now, and still have many comics stories I'd like to get to, but we'll just have to see if time permits me to do them..
Incidentally, having this personal outlet has made me a much better employee/team member when working on projects for others.
One of my most gratifying personal projects was ELEPHANTS IN THE NEWS, a book collaboration with my father. Dad loves elephants and limericks. He combined the two when work colleagues would cut out newspaper stories about elephants and challenge him to write a limerick about each story. When he had a folder of these, he tapped his cartoonist son to illustrate them. This took quite a while, and eventually I took a few months off work and devoted myself full time to finishing the job. We planned to self-publish, but along the way Dad made the acquaintance of a proper publisher. EXISLE PRESS published our father/son project as a rather handsome book.
I first began writing my autobiographical stories with a mini-comic about JOCK, the feisty little dog I had as a kid. Other such stories soon followed, and were developed on my BLOG, including more yarns starring my furry childhood sidekick. In the years when I lost the ability to draw and discovered the joy of words, my blog was the home for more such stories. I eventually illustrated them as I RE-learned how to draw in subsequent years. I'm working my way through a list of reminiscences of more episodes from my childhood. When finished, I hope to self-publish an illustrated collection (current working title FAIRY BREAD). Another similar collection deals with autobiographical stories from the globe-trotting years of my early career (working title JOURNEYMAN)
For many years I've wanted to do a sprawling SPACE EPIC. Not my usual goofy cartoon. Both the look and tone of the story is out of my comedy comfort zone. Thus it stayed on the back burner for many years, but I've just started writing short stories set in this world.. any sci-fi/spaceship drawings on my site were probably drawn for this pet project..
