It was just too hard from my standpoint to apply myself properly for the lessons from art school and also work 6 hours a day at the Ben Paris restaurant in downtown Seattle. There was just no time to have a life.

If you ever go to talk to an editor you don't want to be able to turn down a job because you can't do what is necessary.

I know some stories about "liberation" and stuff that's been liberated by people who turn around and get on their soapbox about how it's unfair that the artists didn't benefit while they're sitting on stuff that they "liberated," but that's another story for another time.

I went to art school for about a year. I was born and raised in the Willamette Valley in Oregon into a middle-class family who didn't have the funds to say, "Here, kid. Here's your money for school." So I worked real hard during the summer and saved money and was able to go to school for a year and borrowed a little money which I paid back after that first year.

I chose Bagdasarian Productions when I heard from some colleagues at work who were buying story boards at the time back in the early '90. I met the man once when I came in with the first half of the story board and the only thing he said when looking at the first half of the board was, "It's so nice to see someone using their imagination."

I've met some real talents that were...real talents and I've met some real talents that were incredible people.People like Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, to a certain extent Jim Steranko, who is an institution all to himself. What a talent. What a genius talent.

I remember on a Friday afternoon getting a phone call from Grant Simmons saying, "Mike," we got to be pretty good friends; "Mike, the Sheriff is closing us down on Monday. If you'd like to drive into the studio tomorrow morning, you can have anything you want." So rather than go in and take home piles and piles of cels of Spider-Man what did I take home? Two pages of original art that got sent out to the west coast. Now of course if I'd have taken all the rest of that stuff home I could probably have retired a lot earlier.