I was born in 1993. I wasted too much time resting in the womb when I could have bought a house for $2.17.

I grew up in a Rust Belt town that’s infamous for smelling like burnt Cheez-Its. I spent my childhood searching for an escape and I found it in the world of stories and art. It has always been my refuge from pain, an uncharted universe for me to explore, a wellspring of strangeness, and a tool to examine uncomfortable realities. I’ve been drawing and writing stories since I was 4 years old. My head was overflowing with weird, imaginative ideas that I was compelled to get onto paper. I was an only child with undiagnosed autism, and making friends was difficult for me, so the world of fantasy was where I found refuge. I imagined elaborate animated scenarios of my characters going on adventures. I called them “my movies” and they were the driving force behind all of my creative work. They still are to this very day! Everything I have ever drawn and written has been an effort to make my inner world as rich and lifelike to others as it is to me.

I loved the painted worlds of picture books and I enjoyed making my own. I’d write 5 to 10 page story in Microsoft Word 97, leave room under the paragraphs for the pictures, print them out, illustrate them with crayons and colored pencils, and staple them together. I was so proud to make my own little books! Unfortunately, I don’t have many of them anymore. One of my Holy Grail of Holy Shit items was a crossover fanfic I wrote when I was 9. It was about SpongeBob falling into a time warp—which I called a “spinny time thingy”— and meeting my character Travis the Dragon. They spent the entire story going to the movies and eating at a Chinese buffet. I have been digging around at my parents’ house for this story for 20 years, because I KNOW I didn’t get rid of it, but no dice. Someday I will find it…mark my worms.

Even as a kid, I was always pushing myself to improve my craft so that I was able to communicate my ideas with the same level of vividness they had in my mind. I was fascinated with comparing my new work to my old work to see how I’d “evolved”, as I liked to call it. When my dad had band or orchestra practice, he would bring me along. The facility would always either be a church basement or a school. I’d always take my pink SpaceMaker box full of crayons and pencils, and I’d entertain myself by sitting in a back room and drawing. The area usually had extra printer paper lying around, but if it didn’t, I always kept a notebook to draw in just in case.

When I was a kid at home, rarely sat at a table or desk to draw. I often was lying on the floor on my stomach, kicking my little feet, surrounded by pieces of paper and art supplies. I used a large hardcover book as a clipboard. When I was 11, my dad built me a desk out of plywood and put it in my room. I used it constantly until I moved out. When I was about 14, I realized that it was ergonomically necessary to draw on a slant. I made an angled surface by duct taping a cheap $5 lap desk from Target onto the bottom legs of a locker shelf, which I’d duct taped together at a 60 degree angle. I duct taped this whole janky contraption to my desk and used it until I moved out.

When I was 11, I became more serious about practicing art when I bought How to Draw Manga books from my school’s Scholastic book fair. The books presented foundational art concepts that were easy to understand for a kid like me. I learned about using articulated stick figures to construct the human body, drawing using simple perspective, and how to shade. One of the most important concepts was how to build a drawing with a sketch, pressing lightly on the pencil, then inking it using fineliners. Before this Eureka moment, I had been pressing the pencil so hard on the paper that I gouged lines into it and couldn’t figure out how to erase them properly. I drew mostly anthropomorphic dragons and birds in my interpretation of the manga style. The characters all had huge, glossy eyes and flowing hair. One of my favorite subjects were bird magical girls. They held mystical wands and staffs, floated through the air, and wore short, flowing dresses in a rainbow of colors. I also enjoyed drawing superheroes who wore elaborate costumes.

I found furry art at this stage of my life. I had been drawing anthropomorphic animal people since I was barely able to hold a pencil, but had no idea that the art style had a name, or that so many other people were doing the same thing as me. I was fascinated! I didn’t make any accounts because I was too scared to post online—rightfully so—but I spent hours a day trawling through people’s art galleries on Deviantart and Yerf. I studied their techniques and picked up on style. The furry art world is where I learned about real art supplies. I was no longer content with using Crayolas and printer paper for my creations. I asked my mom to pick up Prismacolor pencils, Sakura microns, and sketchbook paper, and I used them for everything I drew. I liked the way people talked about their own work in the artist comments, so whenever I finished a drawing, I wrote down creator’s commentary in a Word document. It helped me think about my own work with a critical eye while still enjoying the process.

Around this time, I discovered electronica, specifically trance music, while scrolling through the CD sampling station at Circuit City. I was enthralled. I had no idea music could have such an intense, otherworldly sound, like the soundtrack of a dream. I saved up my allowance money and purchased various artist trance compilation CDs from Sam Goody’s all the time, never knowing what I was getting but always expecting something mind blowing. I discovered artists like Armin Van Buuren, Carl Cox, Kraftwelt, and Juno Reactor through these albums. Trance music fueled my artistic journey by giving me a soundscape for my inner world. The strange, trippy music brought out strong mental imagery in a way I’d never experienced before. It put my brain in a surreal fantasy land whenever I listened to it and it began reflecting in my art, albeit in a way that was limited by my unpracticed preteen hands. Despite being hampered by a lack of skill, my urge to recreate the atmosphere of music through visual art changed my life. From then on, music and art would be permanently intertwined for me, with music being a primary driving force behind my creativity. I am always trying to replicate the atmosphere I perceive in many genres of music.

My middle school years soon came upon me and many changes took place. For starters, I developed interests in darker subcultures and wanted to call myself a “skater goth” even though I didn’t own a skateboard and didn’t know a single thing about goth music. I just liked wearing black band t-shirts, masculine jewelry, and skate shoes. I would never be a goth, and I would never cultivate an interest in the alternative music of the 2000s, but I discovered one of my great loves instead: 80s heavy metal. I developed an interest in the music when I was about 12. I wanted something with a dark, intern sound, but didn’t know where to look for it. None of the modern alternative bands did anything for me. Korn, Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold, Breaking Benjamin, and the like didn’t go hard enough. I wanted more. I happened to hear about this band called “Metallica.” Apparently their album “Master of Puppets” was pretty good. However, my parents had a problem with it and didn’t want me listening to it. They thought it might make me “a juvenile delinquent”, an opinion they had carried over from the satanic panic of the 80s. I was undeterred—the music now contained a forbidden mystique. My local library carried a copy, but it was always being checked out. Every time I went to the library, I checked to see if it was there. It usually wasn’t. One day my interest paid off and it was sitting there on the shelf waiting for a curious listener to take it home. I snapped it up without thinking twice.

“Master of Puppets” blew me away from the very beginning.

I didn’t know it was possible for music to sound like this. It was complex, thoughtful, and musically accomplished, but also powerfully intense and dark. I became obsessed and listened to it nonstop. Thus began my love affair with 80s thrash metal that would last the rest of my life. Soon I would save up my allowance to buy metal CDs at Circuit City and sneak them home in my jacket when my parents weren’t looking at the cash register. My other favorite albums of the time were “Show No Mercy” and “Hell Awaits” by Slayer and “Ride the Lightning” by Metallica.

My art was becoming something different than anything I’d ever drawn. I wasn’t interested in drawing magical bird girls anymore. Instead I drew characters inspired by the iconography of metal, including demons, evil fantasy warlords, armored warriors, and motorcycle guys. Much to the sheer horror of my parents, I developed an interest in satanic imagery and put inverted pentagrams on everything. One of my fixations was on the concept of the Antichrist. I created an evil character who was the son of Satan and took over the world by turning it into Hell. He wore black leather and spikes, had long black hair, sported an inverted pentagram on his forehead, and carried a pitchfork. I became obsessed with this character. I couldn’t come up with a name for him until I looked over at a DVD copy of the veggietales short film called “Gideon: Tuba Warrior”. Thus began the story of Gideon. His original concept is undeniably grandiose and silly, but something about this character grabbed the folds of my cerebral cortex and never let go. I dedicated most of my spare time to figuring him out and he would go on to become my first highly developed character.

I did everything start to finish on a slab of watercolor paper back then, from the sketch to the final product. I inked my sketch with microns, erased the lines, colored it with watercolor pencils, and sloshed some water on them with a brush to blend it. I was prone to making mistakes and often wore through the paper trying to fix them. Working with digital tools never occurred to me because I did not want the family computer to make art. I didn’t like the idea of my parents walking in on me drawing a blood-soaked demon at 2:00 AM. We had one working computer, laptops were expensive, and smart tablets weren’t a thing yet. I was content to mess with traditional media alone in my room where nobody would bother me.

High school was rough for me. Things weren’t going well at home, and though I brought home consistently good grades, I struggled to relate to my peer group. My mental illnesses came out in force, but unfortunately they would remain undiagnosed and untreated for another decade. Having nowhere else to go, I retreated into my inner world. I found great solace in my art and writing, and dedicated myself wholly to my craft. I spent hours every day experimenting with media, studying art theory, and trying out new techniques.

When I was about 15, I developed a strong interest in surrealism and horror. I wanted my art to be freaky and disturbing because I was comforted by unsettling imagery. I decided that full color wasn’t scary enough and only worked in monochrome. I primarily used India ink with a dip pen, but I combined it with a mess of media: charcoal, black watercolor, white ink, markers, chalk, white-out, China markers, even a black Prang crayon I found on the floor at school. I drew full illustrations on pieces of 9x12 Vellum Bristol board and labored over them for weeks at a time. I was happiest when I had a detailed drawing to come back to each day.

Gideon grew into his own strong personality during this period. As I worked on his backstory, I became interested in the idea that he was secretly an isolated, tortured soul and not just a pompous, evil overlord who killed people. Eventually it no longer made sense for him to hold any position of authority at all. He had become a neurotic, bizarre character with strange obsessions and a paranoid fear of people, yet could be silly when he was in a good mood. Developing Gideon’s character was a primary means of entertaining myself back then. I had never had such a well-rounded character until then and I was completely taken by him. I poured so much of myself into him that he had become a reflection of myself with all of my issues cranked up to 11, and a vehicle through which I explored my unhealthiest tendencies in a safe way.

I wasn’t content to keep Gideon by himself. I decided to give him an “evil voice inside his head” that he could talk to, but it was bad for him and was slowly driving him insane. It needed to have a physical form that Gideon could see, interact with, and touch. Gabriel was created almost instantly. In contrast to Gideon, who required years of development, Gabriel popped out of my head fully formed. He was sarcastic, sly, mean-spirited, and manipulative, always cloaking his true intentions, which made him fun to write. He fed on Gideon’s insecurities and gained power by feeding on his negative emotions, which provided me a way to explore the dark corners of Gideon’s mind. The psychological aspect of their story fascinated me and the inner workings of the mind would remain a permanent feature of my work

Eventually I turned 18 and moved out, a moment I’d been dreaming of since the day I was born. The winds of change were a-blowing and I wanted to become this completely different person. I became obsessed with the psychedelic hippie culture of the 1960s and channeled an idealized version of it. I draped myself in layers of jewelry, mismatched earrings, and flowing vintage shirts in neon paisley. At the end of the day, it was a costume that I was wearing to experiment with my identity. I thought my past self was an unlikeable, unconfident edgelord and wanted to put as much distance between myself and them as possible. I also associated my own masculinity and love of heavy metal with being bullied and desperately tried to hide from this aspect of my identity from everyone, including myself. It didn’t work. Surprise!

I was a painting major in university. I picked up on techniques very quickly and loved working with oils. I camped out in the studio all night long covering huge canvases with psychedelic illustrations. When I painted, I felt like I was being sucked into the canvas and lost all track of time. It felt incredibly natural to me. One of my favorite memories from college was wrapping up a hard day’s work at 4 in the morning and riding my bike back to my student apartment in the cool early morning air while the rest of campus slept. It has been a long time since I painted anything with oils because it’s not safe to use them at a home studio without proper ventilation or an oil soaked rag disposal, but to this day I’m still nostalgic for the smell of paint and Eco-House citrus thinner.

I came up with Rhodes and Dempsey during this time, my other two main characters. Dempsey arrived first in mid 2012. He was originally a middle aged hippie who I’d created to be Gideon’s boyfriend. He was a bass player in a psychedelic rock revival band, and he had a tragic anime backstory: he’d been kicked out of his family home because he got caught making out with another guy. I explored his teenage years to get a feel for his life experiences and drew him as a nerdy, repressed kid with square glasses. I designed the guy he’d gotten caught with as a beatnik who thought he was too cool for everyone. As I explored their story, Dempsey became more energetic and chipper, and Rhodes became more introspective and withdrawn. Their chemistry was so natural that it no longer made sense for Dempsey to grow up to be a hippie who falls in love with Gideon, and I decided to pair him off with Rhodes for good. I couldn’t tolerate the idea of Dempsey having an abusive family that kicked him out for being gay, so I made him a mama’s boy. Eventually I wrote an AU where Dempsey was a computer programmer in the 90s and it worked out so amazingly well that I made it canon.

When I graduated university, I felt like I’d been thrown to the wolves. Until this moment, I’d had my entire life laid out before me, and now I had no idea what to do or where to go. The uncertainty and pressure to succeed tore me to pieces and I had a mental breakdown that lasted half a decade. I won’t go into details, but I was in such bad shape that I couldn’t work.

I began writing “Krazy Noodle Massacre” when I was 21. The story united all four of my main characters into a long, epic story about obsession and overcoming trauma. I had the intent to turn it into my career, but no clear plan for how I was going to get there. What I did know is that it was going to be beautifully drawn and rendered with every page being a work of art. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but it was a journey of self-discovery in every sense of the term. I started the project painting each page with markers and ink on paper. It was discouraging to spend so long on each page, knowing that I’d have to approach each one the same way, with hundreds of pages ahead of me and no end in sight. I picked up digital art when I got sick of my old method, and loved it so much I never looked back. Things that spent hours rendering by hand, like flatting colors, could be accomplished in minutes with the click of the paint bucket. I donated my Copic markers to a local charity because kids would have more use for them.

I started posting KNM online in 2017 or so. I was expecting a tepid response, but a lot of people liked it. Eventually I realized that many eyes were on me and my work, which caused my untreated anxiety to spike. Eventually I realized that I couldn’t continue my art unless I got help. I started therapy and medication in 2018 when I was 25 years old, and I began the long process of untangling the knots in my brain.

In 2019, I started feeling well enough to try to turn things around and go back to school, this time to get an associate’s degree in graphic design at the local community college. I loved the coursework and made the Dean’s list the entire time I was there. Unfortunately, I graduated my program in spring 2020 when the entire planet was shutting down and graphic designers were all the way at the bottom of the list of essential workers. At this time, my husband and I adopted a dog: a pit bull named Nora. She’d come from a rough background, but we worked to help her feel comfortable in her new environment. She was, and still is, very silly, playful, energetic, and lazy. She’s super buff for no reason even though she’s asleep 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time she’s tearing around the house playing with toys and getting zoomies. She will never know it, but she gave both my husband and me a reason to get up every day. She can’t take care of herself, so we have to feed her, give her water, walk her, give her enrichment to make sure she doesn’t get bored, and regular medical care. She went from being skittish around everyone to running up to complete strangers wanting to play.

I had a tough time finding employment in my field of study, so I decided to start taking paid SFW illustration commissions from strangers on Instagram and Twitter. Freelancing was fun for about a month, but having art be my sole source of income was much more nerve-racking than I expected. It had absolutely no working benefits, no insurance, no protection from higher ups, and no schedule. I couldn’t call the manager to deal with annoying customers because I was the manager. My work and home life blended together. My personality does not mesh well with the life of a freelancer because I can’t tolerate the lack of stability or structure. Ultimately I decided to get a normal day job so I always had a guaranteed source of income, a place to go every day, and a schedule around which I could build the rest of my life. Ultimately it turned out to be the right call because dealing with all sorts of weird and annoying problems taught me much-needed life management skills. Working basically forced me to grow up.

Weed became fully legal in my state in 2020. I thought I wouldn’t like it because I had tried it at a college party years prior and had a bad experience, but I was at a house I’d never been to with people I didn’t know or trust. It would be much different using it at home in a familiar environment. Out of curiosity, I decided to go to the dispensary and pick up a few items to try: a disposable vape and a bar of THC-infused chocolate. After consuming them, I realized that the anxiety that normally dominated my life was gone. If I was keyed up, angry, and/or panicking, all I had to do was hit the vape a few times and I forgot all about the thing I was upset over. Taking edibles before drawing put me in a meditative trance where I could hyperfocus on my art to the point where I was able to pull from areas of my mind I couldn’t normally access. In short, I was in a quasi-psychedelic state of mind that benefited my creativity. Some nights I’d lie in bed in the dark, high as a kite, and watch incredibly vivid mental imagery play out behind my eyelids while listening to music. My art began to shift, becoming sharper and more vibrant, with a psychedelic edge I wasn’t able to achieve before trying THC. Everything was changing quickly, and I was becoming more comfortable with myself.

I did some homework and learned that PTSD was a qualifying condition for a medical marijuana card in my state. It saved me money by not only bypassing the huge 40% sales tax on recreational use, but also allowed me to grow up to 5 plants. I bought a grow tent, a carbon filter and exhaust fan to scrub the odor, LED panel lights, and some cheap white label seeds. Off I went on my journey, halfway expecting every seed to fail to germinate, but all 5 of them sprouted. They grew like, well…weeds. I learned how to care for them, what type of fertilizer to use during what stage of growing, and problems to watch out for. I planted one of them in a bucket with extremely cheap soil infested with fungus gnats so badly that I had to transplant them into better soil. I totally babied these plants every step of the way. They became so big I was afraid they’d outgrow the tent. I was delighted when the first flowers bloomed and transformed into stinky little nugs. After a few months, I had my very first harvest: a little over an ounce of the good shit across 5 plants. The nugs were airy and small, but they got me where I wanted to go, and I was the one who made it happen. I have continued this hobby over the years because it not only saves me thousands of dollars, but also gives me a sense of accomplishment and peace.

Working on my new psychological horror comic “Is This You?” Using it to channel my strong interest in extreme horror, grossout visuals, and social taboos in general.

Completely left social media, including my old Comicfury account, for maintaining my own presence on the small web. Dealing with a lot of feelings about letting go of things that represent unpleasant aspects of my past, but I’m working through them.

Growing peppers and green onions in tents in my apartment. I’m running Corno di Toro, mild banana peppers, red beard green onions, and the stubs of grocery store onions. Learned I could permanently get rid of fungus gnats by baking the dirt in the oven before planting, but it’s necessary to add compost products to the dirt afterwards. Soon I will have more pickled peppers than I know what to do with.

Working on my website to make it completely represent who I am. Writing lots of content, designing graphics, and making new features. I’m gleefully making it as tacky as possible because I revel in gaudy aesthetics. It’s supposed to look like the owner unironically wears Ed Hardy. I have an Ed Hardy shower curtain and a melting flower smiley face bath mat. I am embracing being the flamboyant cartoon character I am on the inside.