I started drawing comics professionally in 1992. After a few stories for a publisher who only sometimes paid me and soon collapsed I drewI remember my last conversation with the attorney financing the failed company, who obviously fancied himself Michigan's Tom Cruise. He was dressed in a pink polo and wayfarers in his law office. I stood demanding my money while he screamed at me "Do you know who I am!?! Do you know who I am!?" And I thought to myself, honestly, not many people do or would care to. And to this day I don't understand why he thought impressing me with his wealth and power would have made me NOT expect to get paid.

But I stayed in the game and eventually got my first gig, Green Lantern #36 for DC. I've been working pretty steadily ever since.

1992. So I've been around for a while. Fourteen years. So it came as a big shock today when the DC production manager wrote me a curt email complaining about the images I'd sent him. I'd made a mistake while converting it to Bitmap and it came out looking like a cheap dot matrix print:

Ouch. Before I'd realized my mistake I first reacted with indignation. I don't make mistakes like that! Then I checked it out and knew he was right. It's amazing how painful and offputting things like this can be after all these years. After I fixed the mistake I had to stop and be a bitter little troglodyte in a dark room.

One hopes to get better and better as the years go by. But occasionally we end up making very basic mistakes. What made me stop moping is remembering the scared young artist I was fourteen years ago who kept trying nonetheless, and all the artists today in the same situation. I just couldn't stand being that pathetic.

But really, I couldn't draw for a while. It's funny how there's still a moody teenager inside my middle aged body.