Happy Birthday to My Favorite Letterer!

 I've wanted to make comics for as long as I can remember. And while I've been blessed to team with Nathan Arnold on “Support Group” and a few other folks on projects that made it online or into print, my first comic collaborator was my mother, who is celebrating her [redacted] birthday today.

If you followed my Free Willy movie posters (and apparently at least a half dozen of you did, once in a while), it won't surprise you to know I enjoyed drawing early on. But writing was more of a challenge, and my penmanship was not the greatest at age 6 – nor has it improved significantly since then, my own 6-year-old would tell you.

So I enlisted family members to write my dialogue and captions. I always thought of my Mom as my primary letterer, though going through some of my projects, she informed me she also recognized her own parents' handwriting on works like “The Returners” and “Ghost Busters and the Incredible Hulk I.”

The first one we narrowed down to her lettering was “Pinocchio's Adventures,” which at first glance I thought was my comic book version of the Disney Pinocchio film. Turns out it's a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure that, frankly, gets a little dark and weird, especially for a 6½-year-old.

Another was a team-up book starring Spider-Man and Firestar. Mom's responsibilities didn't extend to editing, which is why the latter character is referred to as “Fire-Star.” I also can't blame her for my Flash comic in which the speedster takes on the “Region of Doom.”

Mom's lettering was especially important in telling the story in “Droids and the Great Ski Machine,” as you can see here.

We also teamed up on some “Masters of the Universe” projects, including “King Hiss's Evil Plan.”

No, it did not involve stealing He-Man's pants; I just wasn't much of a stickler for details. Nor, as you can see from the other images bleeding through, was I overly concerned about production value. I was just a content machine.

I'll probably share a more in-depth look at some of these in the future. For now, I just wanted to take a quick trip down memory lane and thank the person who has believed in and supported me from the beginning. Mom never discouraged me from enjoying comics and pursuing that and other forms of writing. Despite her own career in the health care field and hopes I might follow her, she said to me as I was looking at colleges that I should probably pursue something involving writing since math and science weren't areas of great interest to me.

For my high school graduation present, Mom took my best friend and me to the Chicago Comic Con, where I almost met Stan Lee. I did meet several other writers I admired there and at subsequent cons we attended. When I got a chance to talk to them, if Mom was nearby, she would always proudly tell them how I'd been writing comics since before I could write.

And it wouldn't have been possible without her support.