During the Mavelmania days in the late '60's I got a phone call one evening and I answered it and this voice said, "Mike Royer? This is Jack Kirby. Word is you're a pretty good inker." That's how it started.

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.

In most companies, the corporate mentality is if you're over 30, you're on the downhill side, and if you're over 40, you're brain dead. Or, if you're over 30 or 40 and you've been doing it for a while, you've got experience and you want to be paid for that experience.

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!"

My most vivid memories of those times weren't the actual nuts and bolts, but just pleasant times sitting with Jack [Kirby] in his studio, going over the pages and looking out the window at my kids playing in his swimming pool .

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.

I guess I've been naive my entire life.