I thank George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, for getting me started in this krazy kartoon business. It was his illustrations in "The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel" that had me hooked that magic summer of '67. I was 6 years old, not yet interested in the Beatles, the Doors, or Jefferson Airplane, but those Herriman toons really got me rocking. I bought the book for a whopping 5 cents (I got a loan from my mother) at a flea market across the street from my house and ran home to copy his drawings for hours.

After getting my fill of scribbling cats and cockroaches I immediately branched out to the world around me. Raised in a large family of 10 children in the remote beach town of Hull, Massachusetts I had a never ending supply of material to draw from. I drew my way through school and after graduating from high school in 1979 I enrolled at Westfield State College as a business major. Frustrated, I left WSC after only 2 years and drove cross country to check out the beaches on the other coast. Several dead end careers, 257 fish tacos and 3,522 waves later, I returned to Massachusetts to continue my education. After attending Boston University's School of Fine Arts and graduating with a BA in English Lit from the University of Massachusetts, I decided it was time to try my hand at cartooning professionally.

In 1991 I became the editorial cartoonist for the Hull Times (Massachusetts), my hometown weekly newspaper. It took me all week to draw that first cartoon. It was exhausting. But when I saw it in print the next day, it was like I was 6 years old again looking at a Herriman cockroach. It wasn't long before I was self-syndicating my political cartoons to a variety of Massachusetts dailies, including exclusive editorial cartoons on the op-ed page of the Boston Globe. I won my first Massachusetts Press Association award in 1995.

In 1997 I married Danielle, who I met in Tai Chi class, and in 1998 we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to check out the beaches in between the coasts. Lots of sand, no ocean. My cartoons began popping up in the Weekly Alibi, the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Albuquerque Journal. Danielle soon took over the administration and promotion end of the business and it has been expanding to include illustrations for children's books and magazines, party caricature, greeting cards and cartoon murals.

Not bad for a childhood investment of a nickel.

When I'm not cartooning, I enjoy playing with my daughter, Pema, and my son, Bodhi, laughing with my wife, cooking, gardening and training for triathlons.