ABOUT

The Apollo moon mission, Star Trek, Major Matt Mason, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, The Thunderbirds, Astro Boy, and Marvel Comics had already taken hold of my ten-year-old mind by the time this picture was taken by my mother as I waited for my heroes, the Apollo 11 astronauts, at a ticker tape parade in New York City in 1969.

Even with all that space-age stimuli, I was not destined to be a science fiction author. There were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Batman, hot rod models, MAD Magazine, basketball, and, of course, drawing to round out my interests. There was always the drawing to express whatever I was fixated on at the moment. I would bounce from cartooning to psychedelic to illustrative drawings from week to week. Spacemen, rock bands, ball players, superheroes, and anything else that caught my interest could be drawn into a scene of my developing imagination. Though I had many friends throughout my childhood, I found I could endlessly entertain myself with basic pencil and paper. 

As a kid, I struggled with reading. Dyslexia was not known to parents and teachers back then, and it caused a lot of confusion in my life. I managed to find enough to keep me engaged and unknowingly worked through the disorder. But as I reached my teens, I struggled to pay attention in class, and my reading fell off. The science fiction books The Andromeda Strain and Earth Abides were a few of the exceptions. I couldn't even make it through Orwell's 1984, even though I requested the book to be one of our choices in my senior English class. I'd become more visually oriented, aping the style of Roger Dean, Robert Crumb, Rodney Mathews, Foss, Boris Vallejo, and Frank Frazetta. Once I graduated, Star Wars, Heavy Metal Magazine, and Punk Rock hit me like a cultural tidal wave. 

I lasted one semester at DuCret School of the Arts, a last-ditch effort by my parents to get me educated locally when I failed to turn in my submission form for The School of Visual Arts in NYC. I had become a colossal screw-up and was repeatedly brought home by the police and spiraling downward. In my infinite wisdom, I dropped out of art school and began printing T-shirts. My father was impressed with my industriousness and set me up with enough essential equipment to start a business that would become wildly successful in eight years. 

In 1986, I drew several dinosaurs that would later become the merchandising sensation Saurus. Beachasaurus, Rockasaurus, Shopasaurus, and Partyasaurus appeared in a series of sketches out of thin air on a cold February afternoon in my screenprint shop in Matawan, New Jersey. Thanks to my father's business sense, those dinosaurs and hundreds like them would wind up on millions of T-shirts, mugs, towels, and hundreds of other items over the following year. Saurus forever changed the course of my life. Rather than live out my life as a printer, I'd been restored to being an artist. And an artist could create anything...

Saurus had run its course, and we were now a large company printing licensed T-shirts of TV shows, movies, and comics. I'd grown restless, and in 1996, I left Talking Tops to launch Crucial Comics, featuring my new character, Rat Bastard. Influenced by Judge Dredd, Blade Runner, Robocop, Moebius, Mork Drucker, Jack Davis, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and Al Jaffee, I combined sci-fi and funny books to deliver social commentary in the form of a smart-talking five-foot private detective who happened to be a genetically modified rat. By 1999, Robocop creator Ed Nueumier was contacting me with the proposition that Ron Howard's Imagine Televison was interested in optioning Rat Bastard for a primetime TV show. Although the show never aired, a 4-minute mini-pilot was directed by Kevin Altieri, who also worked on Batman: The Animated Series. It can be seen on my YouTube Page.

After four years of shopping Rat Bastard to anyone who would grant me a meeting, I left Los Angeles and returned home for a more normal life. My father retired, and I took over the helm of Talking Tops. In the first year, I grew our sales by 15% and increased them by 10% in the second year. In the third year, I contracted Lyme disease in 2007, and my father had to return to liquidate the company. 

After several grueling years of mental confusion and crippling pain, the intravenous vitamin C treatments and countless hours in a hyperbaric chamber slowly restored me to roughly 75% of my old self. While I was prone to occasional bouts of fever or agonizing joint pain, I was able to go about my shambles of a life. I was unemployable, running low on funds due to medical expenses, and I searched my imagination for my next creation. One day, I got a call from two friends who had closed down their record store but were still selling vinyl at local record fairs. They knew I lived only a few miles from Asbury Park, where they would be selling records that weekend. They were aware that I'd been in rough shape and thought it'd be good for me to get out and hang out with people. When I walked into The Asbury Lanes, a club I'd frequented often, I immediately noticed that record fairs were set up like comic cons — collectors rifling through white cardboard boxes. I found the manager and made a reservation to rent the club to launch the first Asbury Park Comicon. Within two years, the little comics get-together graduated to a major event and moved to Asbury Park's Convention Hall. My guests included MAD Magazine's Al Jaffee, Ren & Stimpy Show co-creator Bob Camp, and Ramones album cover artist John Holmstrom. I invited my old friends, Herb Trimpe, Don McGregor, and Evan Dorkin, to round out the list of talent. The following year featured Marvel legends Jim Steranko and Chris Claremont. 

In 2015, I relocated the event to the Meadowlands Exposition Center in Secaucus, NJ, just across the Hudson River from New York City. We began booking celebrities to complement our growing lineup of comic creators. I had a hard rule about only featuring the comic creators on the poster -- we were running a comic con, and the people who created the comics would always be prominently featured on any promotional material, website, or merchandise. That said, we booked Nichelle Nichols, Val Kilmer, Danny Trejo, the surviving cast of Lost In Space, and many others to the delight of the fans. East Coast Comicon was growing in popularity with each passing year. However, the stress of running an event with so many moving parts would cause my Lyme disease to flare up toward the end of each event. My wife felt I needed to seriously consider if it was worth the risk to my health. 

2020 was going to be our best show by far. Everything was in place for my biggest, most successful convention ever. The comic creator guests included Tom King, Clay Mann, Mitch Gerards, Simon Bisley, Donny Cates, Ryan Stegman, Brian Stelfreeze, Don McGregor, Walt & Louise Simonson, and Steve Englehart. On the celebrity side, we had Chandler Riggs and ten other Walking Dead actors, five Power Rangers, four X-Men '92 Animated Series voice actors,  twelve Red Dead Redemption voice actors, eight actors from The Warriors movie, and several actors from Game of Thrones. Then Covid hit.  We had so many great guests we couldn't fit them all on the postcards we handed out at comic shops and other conventions.  The vendor tables and booths were sold out months in advance. Ticket sales were brisk. And then came the pandemic...

All the money I spent on advertising and office staff would never be recouped. However, my losses were nothing compared to those of all the small businesses that would never recover. I could sit tight until the pandemic ran its course. Or could I? When would it be safe to reopen the con? What if the state of New Jersey required us to wear masks during significant indoor events? Could we police an event where a percentage of the fans would simply ignore a mask mandate? Would I be liable if people contracted COVID-19 at my show? In the early months of the outbreak, I sought to gain a long-term perspective on what could and would happen in the ensuing years. What I saw seemed untenable. Once again, I found myself at a point where I had to make a radical course correction in my career. 

It was beginning to sink in that we would all be in lockdown for an extended period. With no con to run, I could finally return to drawing and create something new. I settled on a science fiction concept I'd envisioned decades ago while living in Los Angeles. It was an ambitious project I could never muster enough bandwidth to flesh out properly. The premise was to flip the narrative of the old alien invasion films and pulps so that we were the invaders of other worlds. Humans were the oppressors, the destroyers of far-off planets. But although the stories would be about corporate exploitation amongst the stars, the real focus would be on the everyday lives of the people who worked on the massive acquisition ship. The stories would be very character-driven. 

I dug through my sketches and notes. I found several character model sheets, some pre-visualization drawings, and a list of unappealing names for the project. Back then, I had settled on a working title of "They Came From Planet Earth," which I knew at the time to be too on the nose, but it explained to me—and anyone else — what the vibe was. 

I've always found scriptwriting to be clunky and lacking in detail. While it's true that I love writing dialogue, there's little room for much description of a scene or action on each page of a comic script. Graphic novels are a highly visual medium, and I found I wanted to add details to the page. I began writing extensive notes about the characters' actions, their surroundings, etc. 

One morning, I opened my notes app and scanned over what I had written the previous day -- it was like reading a page from an actual novel. But I can't write a novel, I thought. I have no formal training. I never studied English or went to college. Yet there it was -- the makings of a book. Yes, but how does one write a book? I had asked myself a similar question all those years ago when I made my first comic. Why should this be any different? But how do I start? I decided to simply write a scene or a chapter and see what happened. And something happened! Characters said things I had never intended. Tight situations appeared on the page. Frustration, danger, action, relationships, technology, terminology, and betrayal all appeared each time I sat down to write. What surprised me the most was who I killed off and who I intended to die but kept around. I had no real sense of where the story was going from day to day. I was on an incredible adventure within the confines of my house. I could escape the mindnumbing boredom of the lockdown and venture off into space whenever I started to write the next chapter.