About the Artist…

So you want to know a little about me? Well the story starts way back in 1981. My parents, Bill and Jill (yes those are their real names) were living in Bankok, Thailand. You see my Dad worked for the Canadian government in the foreign service…. No it’s not like the foreign legion…. Although that might have made life a little more…. Interesting…. So being born in Thailand sounds kinda neat right? And some of you might be saying… “wait a minute… if yer born in Thailand then yer a Thai-person… thingie…. Guy…. Right?!” But they’d be wrong… My birth certificate stated in big ol’ letters, that “this child is NOT a Thai citizen….” See?! Shunned from birth! Anyway, so we moved pretty soon after I was born and again every few years…. All around the world! Pakistan, the US, Belgium…. Lots of different places…. Every couple of years a new house, new country and new people.

Both my parents were avid readers…. They love books…. So naturally they were always happy to buy literature for me…. However I always liked drawings…. Both making them and looking at them…. In fact it wasn’t long before I discovered the comics section in my dad’s daily paper. I quickly fell in love with a certain fat orange cat who has a distaste for Mondays. I was hooked! It wasn’t long before I owned every single Garfield collection that ever hit the shelves. My love for comics quickly spread to a few other strips including Calvin and Hobbes… which I still love to this day…

I started trying to do a comic strip for my school “paper” (it was more of a one page newsletter really) but in grade 4 what kind of life experience does someone have to write jokes about?! So I quickly decided that I didn’t have what it takes to do a comic strip, but I couldn’t shake my love for cartooning…. I decided to steer my career in the direction of animation…. I thought “if I can’t come up with my own ideas, I’ll just draw someone else’s.” But through highschool and well into college I always felt an urge to write…. I really enjoyed any class I took that gave me the opportunity to do some creative writing.

I finished College, got married and started working for a couple of local animation companies… but all the while I felt like I wasn’t getting enough creative satisfaction from the work I did at the studios. Don’t get me wrong, being paid to draw is great! But there was something missing. So a couple of years went by and my creativity had been building to the point of bursting… that is when I discovered a book that changed things for me…. “How to make Webcomics,” by Dave Kellett, Brad Guigar, Kris Staub and Scott Kurtz. The book made making a comic strip seem a lot more possible. I decided to jump in… with the help of these four great cartoonists through their book and their fantastic podcast “webcomics weekly” the future seems bright… but only time will tell.

So now I’m living in Ottawa Ontario, with my beautiful wife Amanda and my four cats (they outnumber us 2 to 1) I spend my days as a mild mannered Animator and my nights moonlighting as a Comic Strip artist… I have high hopes for the strip or whatever strip may follow it.

Thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoy reading the strip as much as I enjoy making it.

Rawb

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