"If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run..."
"If" by Rudyard Kipling
"If" by Rudyard Kipling
"If" is a guide of virtues to aspire to as a human being in society. This one poem stuck with me from that very young age on and remains my guidepost through even the toughest of times.
I've been running non-stop since, trying to pack as much into that "unforgiving minute" as humanly possible. My distance run brought me to copywriting, academia, comic book history, journalism, and even acting--and I feel like I'm still just waiting for the starting pistol to go off.
That motivation has fueled me since my first works of comic book history and journalism, and sent me into the university classroom for several years, devising courses like Star Wars Decoded, Comic Book History, Batman in Media, Vampire in Film, Hayao Miyazaki, The Star Wars Effect, The Technodystopia, and The Superhero Decoded.
I moderate for the GalaxyCon popular culture convention, take on a few acting gigs, write screenplays, serve as the curator of merchandise and branding for the Madmaniverse, showcasing the legendary indy comics of cartoonist Michael Allred.
My work as a comic book historian and journalist has been published in the books Leaping Tall Buildings, The Blue Beetle Companion, Conversations: Larry Hama, Conversations: Mike Allred, and several magazines, from Comics Buyer's Guide to The Comics Journal and (my greatest magazine work) Comic Book Artist. My most recent book, Cliffhanger: Cinema's First Superheroes, is a comprehensive look at comic book history and the low budget movie serial world of the 1940s and sold out within a year.
After I defend my dissertation on the Superhero in Radio, my next project is a groundbreaking biography of 1940s comic book publisher Victor Fox and his many crimes.
