An Overview
I like to make cardboard robot costumes, goofy puppets, corny T.V. shows, and slick comic books. I was raised on a strict diet of cookie dough, action figures, sci-fi, puppet shows, arcade games, and most importantly, my Grandma’s unconditional love. She made me PB&Js and I sat on her floor watching Looney Tunes and UltraMan and drew pictures of robots and monsters. She allowed my imagination to blossom without restraint and always told it to me straight about how the world works. Nowadays I roam the halls of the SF Armory making robot porn for Fucking Machines dot com.
Since 2002 I’ve been working with my partners-in-crime Marc Nordstrom & AK Smith on various comics like ‘Ms. Monster’s Hel on Ice’, ‘Dark Rainbow’, and the spoof/gag series ‘Go-Go Changeformers’. We brought Ms. Monster and her Monster Melons to life and resurrected the long-lost sci-fi series ‘Space Planetary Base: Awesome’.
On Comics:
My association with comics was spotty in the past…
I BARELY read comics as a kid. The Star Wars adaptation probably qualifies as the only comic I read before high school. Then I read maybe 1 or 2 issues of New Mutants. I wanted very much to be an animator as a kid (being obsessed with Looney Tunes and animation in general) and comics didn’t quite do it for me. In the 90s I found The Maxx and that’s when it really peaked my interest however aside from that one series I still didn’t delve too much at all.
Finally in 2002 I started working on comics, started going to the shops, conventions, etc. Now I’m eternally hooked and I love reading and drawing all genres of comics. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. I buy faster than I can read and I’m experiencing the reverse of “the law of diminishing returns”. Thanks, comics industry, for being so fucking vast!
On Film:
I’ve always loved cartoons and sci-fi films and television since I can remember. Star Wars, Black Hole, Battlestar Galactica, all the 70′s and 80′s sci-fi I could get my hands on as a kid was really formative in my imagination and artistic development. Sci-fi eventually blurred into fantasy and horror which I was resistant to until after my teens. So now I’m obsessed with robots and zombies and anything else that’s tech-y and slimy and geeky.
On Toys:
I’ve been a toy whore from the day I was born. Probably even in the womb. I wet the carpet when I was three cuz I was playing with my new FisherPrice town set and I was too excited to stop and go pee in the toilet. I was born in 1971 and the world of toys was an amazing, beautiful place. My grandmother was on the “sucker list” (as my father called it) at our local King Norman’s toy store, meaning they would call her the minute they got a shipment of Star Wars figures. She’d buy two of each, one for her collection(which ultimately became the back-up set for my lost or broken figures) and one for me. She was a big sci-fi/horror buff which is probably where I get it from. I loved that King Norman’s. One of the earliest dreams I can remember was going into King Norman’s and they had a life size section of the Millennium Falcon that you could put together and play in.
I’ll never forget walking into Woolworth’s and seeing Greedo, Hammerhead, and WalrusMan hanging on the pegs all in a row and nearly pissing myself. Between Woolworth’s, Walgreen’s, and King Norman’s, my action figure selection was plentiful. I would get much of my toy info from my older cousin who got all the really primo stuff. They were pretty rich. The big Mego Star Trek sets and old G.I. Joe 12 inch stuff. Tons of Micronauts. I spent hours in their pool with the Joe Submarine attacking it with that rubber giant squid. That was one of my favorite toys. My Father would take my Grandmother and I to China Town in SF and we picked up stuff like Go Lion and God Sigma.
Nowadays I focus heavily on robots. I’d say my collection today is about 90% robot. There are some cyborgs and “humans in suits” sprinkled in there with a dash of vehicles and 1/1 scale weapons. My collection has gone through many phases and there was a point when I had toys dripping from every horizontal surface in my place. I always had minimalist tendencies(which is a dilemma for any collector as you all know) so a few years ago I started purging down to the absolute favorites. It’s so hard though, with gorgeous, amazing stuff coming out all the time now. We really live in a new toy renaissance. I gotta be really choosy nowadays so I don’t loose my mind from clutter and go broke.
