So how did you first get into writing and illustration? I've always been into creating my own stories and drawing pictures. I've probably written stories for almost as long as I've been reading and I started drawing the day I first grabbed a pencil and saw that I could make marks with it. My mom and sisters remember me drawing pictures when I was two-years-old. I think that the spark for me to be an illustrator was first ignited by a teacher whom I had in first or second grade. She would play these Disney story albums and have us imagine what was going on while we were listening to the stories, then draw the scenes we were seeing in our heads. She always seemed to love what I was doing and gave me a lot of encouragement. Similarly, my mom would give me a paper and pencil to keep me quiet in church. My dad was a Baptist minister, so mom would have me draw whatever dad was preaching about. Samson and the Prophet Elijah were favorite subjects of mine. Otherwise, I'd try to sneak in a few sketches of race cars or cowboys when mom wasn't looking.
What was your first major project, and can you tell us what you remember the most from that experience? Wow, that's actually kind of a tough one, because I had so many experiences early in my career that were really personally monumental, if not "major" in the historical scheme of things. The project that was the first for me emotionally was a little job I did for a magazine called Weird Worlds for Scholastic Publishing while I was still a student at the Joe Kubert School in New Jersey. It was written by a young author named Bob Stine, who later was known as R.L. Stine, writer of the best selling Goosebumps children's books series. But my first work as a pro, after I'd graduated, was a cover painting that I did of a spaceman for a magazine that SPI games in New York published, Mars. It was horrible! I was working from a sketch that the art director provided. The thing I remember most is the fact that I realized how much I had to learn as a painter at that point! I was so bad! I was far more comfortable with black and white work. A year or so later, my insecurities were only reinforced after I became part of the art staff at TSR Hobbies/Dungeons & Dragons and was working in a studio environment every day with such phenomenal painters as Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell and my very dear friend Keith Parkinson. I pretty much gave up fiddling with acrylics or oil paints and dedicated myself to pen, red sable brushes, bristol board and india ink. It took me years and years to discover my painting technique.
Can you tell us how the role playing game Rifts Dimension Book 1: Wormwood came together as well as what it was like to work on? The Rifts work came several years after I'd quit role playing games and had gotten into comic book work full time. Someone remembered my work with TSR and asked me to come up with a characters and concepts which they would, in turn, flesh out into an expansion module for the Rifts game series. It was a cooperative thing. Pretty fun, as I recall. Not a major undertaking, but kind of an interesting little side-step-- something that seemed like an interesting thing to try to do. I gave my pal Flint Henry a call to help me out with that. He had such a wild imagination and I knew he'd be perfect for the job. I came up with the concepts and characters. Flint and I split up the character designs. I'd always wanted to integrate comics into role playing games as part of a module-- something that TSR had always resisted, for some reason, but which the Rifts folks were very receptive to. I thought it would be a perfect and logical way to walk gamers through scenarios, visually. This project gave me the opportunity to investigate that. So I wrote a little story -- nothing really groundbreaking, admittedly. I think I did some rough layout work, Flint did the penciling and I did the inking. If I remember correctly we also did some single interior illustrations. Sorry, but I don't have a copy of that around anymore to refresh my memory. Hard to believe it was so many years ago.