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.

Here's some more from the vault of unsuccessful bids to seek out work. Sometimes it was a solo flight, sometimes an invitation, sometimes a determined effort to grab onto a speeding opportunity. They all resulted in work that didn't land me a job I was hoping for. But no matter what, they were always educational. That part was NEVER a dead end.

What do Judge Dredd, Aliens, Ren & Stimpy, The Terminator, Bubblegum Crisis, The Rook, and X-Wing Rogue Squadron have in common? I didn't get to work on ANY of them! But I definitely gave it a try. Here you'll see my fruitless attempts at these and other projects from my comic book morgue.

The main purpose of ArtValt is to air out all the stuff in my archives that never got to see the light of day. This batch comes from my time working on staff at Malibu Comics (1992-94). Sometimes a special project would come from editorial that required full-up illustration work. It got really interesting when sample art was needed for a project the company wanted to license.

Logos for comic books are a vital component, since they are the first thing that identifies what you're looking at on a shelf. But very little attention is given to the craft of designing comic book logos, and the unique demands of working with letters. Here's a collection of logos I created back before the digital world came along to take the handcrafted look off the table.

I will not be at all surprised if you never heard of an independent film called Godmoney. It's a teen crime drama in which, according to the official logline, "A former New York drug dealer's past catches up with him as he tries unsuccessfully to build a new life in California." When the director hired me to create a prequel to his film, it became my first and only crime drama. It was an experiment in style and color never seen by anyone until now.

From 1984-86, I was Cadence newspaper's own version of Sergio Aragones, whipping up little jokes and cartoons for the margins. No reader ever commented and I don't know if they were actually noticed, but hopefully they brightened what could otherwise be a pretty standard routine of high school sports, local tempests, and that week's grocery bargains.

Once you cross the line into drawing comics professionally, assignments can come from places you never expected. This is one of those cases. It came from a fella named Dan Koeppel, an editor on Mountain Bike magazine. He wanted to create an article that reviewed tires, and he thought a 6-page comic strip would be a good way to catch some eyeballs.

They're weird! They're crazy! They're extremely unhygienic! Here's a bunch of dopey characters I invented during goof-off time at an animation studio. Not for the weak-willed or faint of heart.

Back in the days of the original trilogy, Star Wars was on my mind pretty much every minute of every day. Star Wars calendars were a regular thing by then; 1978, 79, 80, and 81 were covered, but as 1982 approached no new calendar was on the horizon. So I had no choice but to make my own.

To entertain my fellow employees at an ad agency in 1988, I’d crank these out (fast improv freehand style) and pass them around for laughs. I’d never lived anywhere but Michigan at this point, so they all kinda channeled stereotypes of the midwest.

One day I got a call from someone in the promotional department of Paramount Pictures asking if I could come in and talk about doing the art for a Phantom promo project, which was a pretty good gig for someone like me. Movies come and go, but a job like this comes only once.

After my first year as a professional comic book artist, I decided to gather up my advice and experience into an essay. Of course, it would be quite a different presentation today after thirty years of added experience, but the basics are still sound and it makes for an interesting time capsule from the pre-internet world.

The year 1986 was a huge turning point for me, the root of which was a yearly Science-Fiction convention called Babel Con. Here's what happened the year someone thought it would be a good idea to put me in charge of it.