1. What initially drew you to comics?
Like most comic readers and pros, I fell for comics when I was a kid. My mom was a waitress at the time, and she had a regular customer who "outgrew" comics. (That FOOL.) So he brought a longbox of mostly Marvel books from that era. It was mostly Miller Daredevils and Amazing Spidey, which are both my lifelong favorites. Couple years after that I ended up hooked and doing the ol' weekly pilgrimages to the local comic store.
I eventually went to school for Graphic Design, because I'm a terrible illustrator who desperately wishes he could draw, and a few months after I finished college I went to a Wizard World convention in Chicago, where I met my future boss, Richard Starkings of Comicraft. (How's THAT for a run-on sentence?)
2. You have worked on so many wonderful titles — is there an especially rewarding experience you’d like to share about?
As I mentioned before, Daredevil and Spidey were my first loves, so when I got to letter those at the beginning of my career, it was one of the biggest thrills of my life. My dad still has my first credit in a Spidey book framed and on the wall, 20-some years later. More recently I've been really grateful to work on a lot of Batman books and other fun DC books. Marc Silvestri's new Batman and Joker: The Deadly Duo is the most fun I've EVER had working on a title, though. It's just an absolute joy every time I open one of Marc's pages.
And speaking of Marc Silvestri, for the most part my "day job" for the last 15 years has been working for Top Cow, where I've been lucky to work on a million projects I enjoy.
3. Please tell us about your creative process.
My favorite part of the creative process is starting a new series and choosing the fonts and caption styles, etc., to give each title a little different look. I especially enjoy getting to do more eclectic, odd lettering, so it's always cool getting to work with publishers like Image, who are more willing to let a book have more esoteric lettering. I've included a few examples of recent stuff, including a page from a short story from Bad Idea that was really fun and funny. Also included are a page of Silvestri's Bat book and a page from a recent Top Cow/Image series that I loved called Metal Society.
My day-to-day is pretty uninteresting, though. Start a book, listen to podcasts and music all day, wrap up the book within a day or two, usually. I love working on graphic novels, specifically, because it's more fun to just get in The Zone and do 100-some pages in one fell swoop.
4. Where can we find more information about your work?
Other than Facebook, I don't really have a social media presence or a website or anything, because I've been lucky enough to just always find steady work. I've gotta make a conscious effort to start using Instagram to post comics stuff in the future, though.
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