I started drawing before I could speak. My parents claim that I was drawing realistic interpretations of household objects by eighteen months or so, and that if I wanted a glass of milk, I’d draw one and use the picture to get my point across. Although I don’t remember this, my mother has saved a few scribbly looking images that date back to about that time, and looking at them now I guess that with the right combination of myopia and maternal pride, someone might be able to buy into that.

One night when I was about five, I caught a flash of Star Trek as my Dad was flipping back and forth between our two local channels. I can still remember that first image: Susan Oliver morphing back into her “real” persona at the end of Part II of The Menagerie. It scared me, but it was also really cool, and when a week or so later I saw Mr. Spock, I was hooked. In those days, Star Trek had completed its network run and was already in syndication, but it wasn’t on everyday. In fact, it wasn’t scheduled at all. It just sort of popped up, I guess whenever the station had a hole to fill. I spent a lot of time in front of the TV in those days, especially late on weekend afternoons, waiting for Star Trek, and while I waited, I drew; mostly Mr. Spock (since it was fairly easy to come up with some sort of passable likeness), but sometimes Captain Kirk, and occasionally even James West (but never Artie; Artie really bugged me.).

And that’s how life went until I was around eight and discovered The Three Investigators. They led me to the bound Hitchcock anthologies at the school library. In turn, those books led me to the Twilight Zone collections, and suddenly I realized that Star Trek was simply a small part of a much larger world – A gigantic, mysterious, welcoming place packed with rockets and robots and Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para litefoot tennis shoes.

And while I watched the occasional sci-fi or horror movie (I really dug The Nightstalker, The Six Million Dollar Man, and the Sunn Classic “documentaries”), I found most of what I was looking for on the bridge of the Enterprise, or in the pages of whichever Heinlein or Asimov novel I was currently reading.

More time passed, and both my glasses and the books I was reading got thicker. I discovered James Bond, and fell in love with Lindsay Wagner. I saw Jaws, and got a C.B. radio. And then on a rainy Saturday sometime in late May or early June of 1977, I saw Star Wars.

It's understating it to say that Star Wars struck a chord in me. Like everyone else in the theater, I was entertained, but there was something more. I couldn't articulate it, but Star Wars touched something inside me, made me feel something I had never felt before, and when I walked out of the mall that day, I only knew that I wanted to keep that feeling.

During the ride home I thought about the surface of the movie. I loved the way the stormtroopers and tie-fighters looked, and I couldn’t wait to get home and draw Darth Vader. It occurred to me then that somebody had to have come up with that look. Somewhere an artist had designed Darth Vader’s mask. My next thought was nothing less than an epiphany: I could do that. I could be an artist. It was that simple, and from then on, I knew what I wanted to do.

 

In Junior High and High School, I took every art class I could. I read more, and added comics to the equation. (There was sort of a comics "mini-boom" in the 80's, and I took full advantage. I read just about everything, from Atari Force to Nathaniel Dusk; but my favorites were Jon Sable: Freelance and The New Teen Titans.) I subscribed to Starlog, got a job at a movie theatre, and spent the early 80's seeing every Science Fiction movie that came out - and thanks to the success of Star Wars, there were many: Empire and Jedi, of course, but also Star Trek: The Motion Picture (wanted to love it; told myself I loved it; didn’t really like it), and Superman: The Movie (loved it), and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (really loved it; Big Time Sci-Fi Crush Number 2: Erin Gray), and The Black Hole (hated it), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (really, really liked it, but as a big Magnum p.i. fan, I've always wondered what it would've been like with Tom Selleck), and Blade Runner (looked good, but I didn’t really understand it – I was just too young, I suppose, since I love it now) and about a hundred other sci-fi movies that would otherwise have never been made. Like Star Wars, the best of these movies were more than simply entertaining - they seemed to speak to me directly, and I wondered what magic they held.

In 1985, I saw The Power of Myth, a series of interviews with Bill Moyers and a man named Joseph Campbell. Campbell was the teacher and philosopher upon whose work Lucas based much of Star Wars, and after seeing the interviews and reading Campbell's masterwork, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I recognized what it was about Star Wars that had touched so many of us. To put it simply, the ideas and themes in Star Wars are universal, and the tale of Luke Skywalker is one that's been told thousands of times over thousands of years. Joseph Campbell calls this story The Hero's Journey, and it is a tale of self-discovery; a universal myth in which the names of the characters change, but the story remains the same. George Lucas says that Star Wars is "a story for a generation growing up without fairy tales," and I think that the movie resonates with us because we recognize ourselves in the characters we see in the screen. (In 1994, I explored the Joseph Campbell/George Lucas connection in a series of trading cards for Topps Company's Star Wars Galaxy III.)

When I look back on the books and movies that meant something to me, it's evident that in almost every instance there was that same spark of recognition. Those stories were important to me because I identified with the characters, and because I identified with them, I cared about what happened to them. And it's no surprise that in most cases millions of others cared too, because we humans are much more alike than we are different. I guess there is such a thing as a universal truth, a sort of indefinable something that all of us have in common. We can't all articulate it, but I think that consciously or not, all of us can feel it, especially when we share a good story. Campbell said that storytellers and artists are today's shamans and mythmakers, and when I'm sitting in a darkened theater sharing the exact same emotion with 200 other people, I can believe in magic.

I've known since 1977 that I wanted to create that same kind of magic myself, and in 1992, I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in painting, I finally felt ready to try. I bought a copy of The Artist's Market and sent out somewhere around a hundred promotional flyers. Almost immediately I got lucky. My first job was for Ron McCutchan at Cricket: The Magazine for Children. (I was hired to illustrate a story entitled The Lively Soccer Ball, and I was so excited to get the job that I handed in finished work four days after receiving the assignment - six weeks before my deadline.) A month or so after completing the Cricket job, I met Marvel editor Marc McLaurin at the San Diego Comic-Con. Marc liked my stuff enough to give a job on Hellraiser, and that led to a piece for Cheval Noir (Literally: Dark Horse. Get it?) at Dark Horse, which led to some Indiana Jones stuff for Diana Schutz. When Diana introduced me to Lucy Wilson at Lucasfilm and I did my first Star Wars painting, "the circle," as Darth Vader would say, "was complete."

 

I decided on the way home from the theater that rainy afternoon in 1977 that I would someday do exactly what I'm doing now, and if you could talk to the 12 year-old me, I'm sure he'd say he wasn't surprised that the adult me is a working artist. What is surprising, though, is that I've had so much fun on the journey to where I am. Every step on the road has been interesting, and I'd like to think that even my missteps have, in the end, made me a better artist and person. I've also learned a lot along the way, and it sort of surprised me recently to realize that I actually have a little knowledge to share. Since, in addition to my B.F.A, I hold a Masters Degree in Education (to quote my father: "something to fall back on"), I thought that it would make sense to put my experience and education to work and teach. So far it's working out well; I'm currently teaching a class in illustration and design, and it's fun and inspiring to work with students who are as excited about art as I am.

Joseph Campbell tells us that we are all on our own personal Hero's Journey, and as I travel down the path of my life, I'm lucky enough to have some good friends and family traveling with me. None of my success would be possible without these people; in particular, my wife and best friend, Tracy, and my children, Matt, Juli and Jessi.

I am blessed.