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My thrilling bio :
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I was born an Air Force Brat and began drawing a few years after that. I copied all my favorites: Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Dondi, Pogo and B.C. from the comics pages, magazine cartoonists and of course, MAD magazine. I also made some pocket money selling ripoffs of these on occasion. What did I know? When I was in high school in Arizona, a teacher suggested that I could have a career in art. I guess it never occurred to me that these artists and cartoonists I admired were actually involved in careers doing it.
A few years later, I had a 2-year degree in Advertising Art and became a graphic designer and illustrator. Along the way, I met Jerry Scott, another young guy who had also just figured out that there was a career to be made in cartooning. So we kind of learned together, making some sales to national magazines and even tried our hands at creating comic strips together (though unsuccessfully).
Fast forward another fifteen years or so. Jerry had pursued the path of a comic strip artist, and I had gone the way of design and humorous illustration. We decided to do another comic strip together. My wife had just given birth to our second daughter, and Jerry, not having any kids at the time, was a little baffled by what was happening to our household. Neither of us took note of this as I would recount various horror stories related to babies. We chugged along trying out various concepts for strips, none of which panned out. One day, we had one of those slap-your-forehead moments and realized there was a strip idea in what was happening in my family--the adventures in parenting.
Once that was decided, the ideas came like a flood. Nearly every syndicate turned us down when we submitted our new comic strip...but Creators Syndicate released Baby Blues January 7, 1990. Now with King Features Syndicate, Baby Blues appears in over 1200 newspapers in the U.S. and many other countries in several languages. Over 30 collection books of Baby Blues have been published in the U.S. and many more in other languages. Baby Blues was made into a TV series on the WB network, which aired 13 episodes, and can occasionally be seen very very late at night during Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network.
My wife and I still live in Arizona with a bunch of cats and dogs, and the kids are grown and having adventures of their own. I spend my spare time playing drums and guitar--and recovering from tennis injuries while trying not to trip over any animals.
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