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 went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement.

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.

Being a naive 20-something I didn't think that I could just go to the screen cartoonist's union, that I was a member of, and scream bloody murder and they would have jumped all over this guy and said, "Oh, but yes he does get screen credit."

I did a dozen superhero pinups. I signed them "Kirby/Royer" because it was Kirby's drawing. I didn't think I was committing some sort of sin.

When you're paid $29 for something and 30 or 40 years later you're seeing it on eBay with pages going for $199 or more, it's like, "Dammit!"

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.