Rule Zero

Nine years ago I gave up being a cartoonist.

Years ago I did a comic called Memoirs of a Bored Student, or MOBS for short. The comic fell through, and I spent a long time struggling to get back into cartooning. Now I’m back, however, with my brother Frankie to bring you Rule Zero, a strip about a group of tabletop gamers trying to survive dungeons, monsters … and themselves.

I’ve tried starting comics over and over again, and nothing stuck. It was actually my brother Frankie who pushed me to do a comic about a gaming group. We started talking, and it wasn’t long until we both realized that this was a comic we needed to do together. He had to really talk me into doing a tabletop comic, but I should have realized it was inevitable.

The other day I was going through old gaming stuff when I found a weird greenish folder. Opening it up I found something I’d all but forgotten about. It was the first comic I had ever drawn. It was a comic about the group that played in my D&D games. It was then that I remembered how I got started with comics. An old friend, Aaron, pushed me into doing a comic about our group. It wasn’t long before I was writing page after page of comics about the outlandish, ridiculous things that happened in our games.

I never thought about doing comics before then. Now, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.

Thanks to my old friend Aaron, for pushing me to write about our old characters. Heroes such as Conan, Gandalf (the First, Second, and Third), Primus, Spike, and all the ninjas that Dante played.

Thanks to Frankie, for creating this with me, and helping me realize that what I really needed to do was to go back to my roots.

And most of all, thanks to my beautiful wife Jess, who won’t let me give up, won’t let me get discouraged, and didn’t let me give up on my dream.

See you all next Monday!