Like every anime fan with artistic proclivities, I took my turn at the fan art wheel. Most of what you'll see in this collection was done for one APA or another, but there's some other stuff too. If you're an anime fan but still completely baffled, remember what stretch of time this represents, and what the favorite shows were back then. If you recognize all of them, we're automatic friends for life.

Two more projects I did for DISC Distributing were calendars, one for 1997 and another for 1998. The '97 calendar featured the DAD character in various everyday scenarios. The '98 calendar had a movie theme with DAD participating in scenarios from 12 favorite and iconic films. The only concession to advertising was that each image had to somehow incorporate the company's 800 number. So it was fun to figure those out.

This third and final set of cartoons for DISC Distributing, drawn in 1997 and 1998, puts their mascot character ("DAD") through some more weird and wacky paces, and also gives him a sidekick. In fall '97 the company introduced their own branded credit card, and I learned what it was like to articulate a character with a 1-dimensional body.

As time went on, my clients at DISC Distributing got more and more inventive with the cartoon scenarios for their DAD character. I don't know whose responsibility it was to think them up, but every couple of weeks I would get another unpredictable request. One by one, I'd whip up a new cartoon (or several) that put DAD through his paces. Here's round 2, mainly from 1996.

I don't exactly remember how I got involved in this particular arena, but it lasted a good long time and I've got a LOT to show for it. The arena was computer hardware. The job was cartooning. The client was a company named DISC Distributing. It went to some silly places.

It's a grab bag inside a grab bag! Here are a whole bunch of projects I did over a stretch of about thirty years. The only thing they all have in common is that they came out of my head and helped someone else achieve their goals.

Super people? Aliens? Sonic the Hedgehog? Buckaroo Banzai? Here's another round of projects that went nowhere, at least in terms of them panning out into real gigs. They were certainly not dead ends in terms of creativity.

Robots, fascists, Mandalorians, puppets, and who knows what else come springing forth when the dead-end art archive is opened up for a fourth time. See all of these and find out why you didn't see them before now.

This was my third assignment from Chris Hart, author of how-to-draw book for artists-in-training to draw in "Japanese manga style." Chris asked me to cover one chapter with 11 environmental drawings of a fantasy castle, which ended up being quite detailed and satisfying.

This was my second project for "how-to-draw" author Christopher Hart. It was a chance to peel off the surface stuff and look underneath. I'd been drawing comics for over ten years, and it gave me a rare peek under my own hood. Always a healthy exercise for an artist.

In Part 1, I described how I got the assignment to draw robot designs for the first segment Chris Hart's Mecha Mania book. As I explained therein, I was not 100% thrilled with Chris' presentation choices. Shown here is my work for two subsequent segments, which I also took issue with for...reasons.

One day in 2001, artist/writer Christopher Hart invited me to contribute to his next proejct, a how-to-draw book on Japanese-style mecha design. The timing was good, and mecha design is close to my heart, so I relished the chance to turn it into a learning opportunity. But I have to report some mixed feelings about the end product...

I've said it before in these pages, but it bears repeating: if you really want to draw comics, don't be picky about where your opportunities come from. When left to our own devices, we draw what we love, whether it's spaceships or horses or monsters. Which is just fine. But there's a limit to what you can learn from what's already inside your own head. And the potential for comics as a learning tool is practically limitless.

All the way back in 2006, a strange little project fell into my lap via a friend in the comics biz. It was a sort of horror anthology called Tales of The Spooky. the comic never got done for reasons that I never learned, but I still have the materials for the story, so now it can finally see the light of day. And it's still just as creepy.

When I decided to put some of my earliest works on a website for public view, I knew it would be like disclosing my high school yearbook photos. And now that becomes literally true. The Vantage Point was our school newspaper, and I contributed to it with almost no oversight for two years, which was utter madness. Here's a sample of what happened.

I've handled some unusual projects in my time. I've taken a few meetings that would qualify as weird. But this one went to a wild frontier unmatched by the others. It was to be a live theater experience; a musical founded on psychological concepts that would probe different parts of the mind, turning them into a visual feast. My long history of reading and drawing comic books prepared me for anything, it seemed.

Reagan. Gorbachev. Marcos. Qaddafi. These were the news leaders back when I officially entered adulthood, and I spent that time turning them into cartoons for a weekly Michigan newspaper. No matter when you become of aware of them, politics are never new. Just sometimes easier to make fun of.

Here's the second set of political cartoons from my days working for Cadence, a locally-based newspaper in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. The paper's editor-in-chief Susan Lovell was the originator and I was her art monkey.

At the tender age of 19, I got a graphic arts job at a weekly newspaper. I was the only one on staff who actively drew, and when the editor in chief discovered this, she added "political cartoonist" to my job description. Here's the first of three time capsules from back then.

One day in early 2008 I was contacted by a fella named Bob Sipchen about doing what he called a "graphic novel" for an issue of Sierra magazine. I'm always up for something fresh, so I said sure. I don't do a lot of "real world" comics on my own, so it was a good way to find out I still could.