I assisted with Russ [Manning] for about eleven months and my day job for 5 days a week was credit manager and paint salesman for Sherwin-Williams.

I did get a nice compliment from Ramona Fradon a few years ago.She was talking about the one and only Plastic Man comic that I inked for her for DC and she said it was the only time that she'd ever had anyone ink her. Everyone else put in their own personality and changed it. In fact, bless her heart, she said if she were still doing Brenda Starr, she'd have me ink it.

I started out wanting to be a straight adventure cartoonist, but in 1979 realized what my real bag was.

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 learned that, "Mike, you get your first job on your ability and every job after that on your dependability."

Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.

I found that the majority of people who stopped at my table [ at the Comic Con] last didn't even know who Winnie the Pooh was, and the new feature was just opening in the theaters.