When I was a kid, Television was often so boring, that I'm not surprised I liked drawing to pass away the hours. Unlike most other kids growing up in the 70's, I never dreamed of going to disneyland... I always wanted to go to LEGOland. Y'know, way back when there probably was a significant difference between the two parks [like before star wars ruined the naivety of everything cool about being a kid].
      Our family was lucky to have had a Grandfather who was a professional carpenter & architect that always made clever stuff and toys for us in his free time out of wood in his basement shop. I gave my friend Ron Rege Jr a couple of his woodcuts and he mentioned him in his Drawn & Quarterly #4 story, which is fitting cuz Grandpa grew up in Quebec [see wood crafts here]. Once I showed Grandpa a color book of Howard Finster's painted wood pieces because his are somewhat similar, and after reading the book he told me he thought that guy was cuckoo. Pretty funny! I guess he musta' inspired me to want to make art cuz he did have a goofy, but reserved sense of humor as well. But it was his pious wife who wigged me out in November of 1974, when out of nowhere she bought me my first issue of Mad (the Exorcist barf bag issue!). Oddly, it was just a year or so earlier, while my older brother's were snooping for Christmas presents at the back of our parent's closet, that they stumbled upon some adult mags with an amazing Nativity scene lurking inside. So before I even knew about MAD magazine, I was loving to eyeball the glossy adult entertainment for men by Kurtzman, Elder and Gahan Wilson.
      It was unusual for our household to ever get any actual comic books and so I was primarily more enthralled by newspaper comic strips and MAD's satire. The first comic books I really enjoyed reading were by Carl Barks. Once, while reading a Barks interview, I was exposed to Winsor McCay's old comic strips. After a 3 week wait I was stunned by a massive collection of 'Little Nemo in Slumberland' that arrived via a far away inter-library loan [during those fossilized decades of pre-digital materials]. Not long after that, I was able to order McCay's 'Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend' from our town's only bookstore and acquired a taste for the surreal potential of comic strip humor. Naturally, soon thereafter I began drifting into the underground comics realm after meeting D.Sim at an early 80's Con. I began by reading Cerebus briefly with issue #19, but only until I transitioned into Crumb's Weirdo mag, that I bought one time cuz it happened to be on the same very small Adult Books rack as Cerebus.
      If all I ever saw were comic book pamphlets, I wouldn't have ever wanted to draw comics. For me, even though seeing Winsor McCay and reading Barks significantly altered my perception of comics, it was discovering Gary Panter & George Herriman in the 80's that made me want to make my own comics. And convincing me didn't even take that much, because back then it was extremely difficult to hunt down and find any Panter or Herriman from my resources. I would occasionally find and have to sustain on little scraps of images, a panel in a margin, or a tiny one page reproduction. But the power of those images even out of context inspired me. It was probably better at first, cuz I ended up inventing my own Panter & Herriman comics for lack of any real ones. The Underground arena of course also revealed the other great image makers who were in Weirdo & Raw, etc. and soon the influence of their finer offerings was concrete. Using my inspirational faves at the time, I assembled a few into an anagram to use as my pseudonym when signing-off my comics, Panter, Segar, Herriman, Addams and Wolverton.
      In the Fall of 1988 I finally started assembling my own comics along with my friends into the self-published comic anthology entitled, ST.iNK [a link] and out into the tiny under the radar 80's counterculture zine network it ran amuck. I moved to Cambridge, MA in 1991 to begin my attempt at forging an original drawing style in an unfamiliar environment that struck me as conducive to my imagination. 1993 was the landmark year that I penned the universally misunderstood Pre*K Manifesto that served as my imperfect vision to initiate working at reconciling my wildly chaotic artistic and comic tendencies into some illustrative order.

           Look for more scribbling here SKETCH BOOKS