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

When I was at Disney and was a character art manager and handing out artwork that had to be inked we had a thing where if there was any lettering on it I'd hear, "I don't letter," and I said, "Look at it. It's drawing. Ink the drawing." I just learned from Mike Aarons how each letter was just part of the drawing.

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 have my heroes. Some of whom are still alive, and unfortunately many that aren't.

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.

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.

It's not Comic Con any more. It's this huge marketplace for the motion picture and television industry. And the toy manufacturer's and the game people. One of the problems with International Comic Con is that tickets go on sale for the next year's event and the place is full of thousands and thousands of kids who have scraped together every dime to get admittance because they want to get all the freebies.