It Started with Peddling Comic Books

I stood in front of the refrigerator; arms proudly bent at the elbow, hands in fists resting on hips. With feet spread evenly, shoulder width apart, I cocked my head back, allowing an exultant chin to jut out in pure triumph. The deed I had done lay spread out in front of me, and so a smile spread itself expectantly across my face. Just as planned my mother came over to inspect my kindergarten handiwork, hanging front-and-center on the fridge door. “Very good Alan, it looks wonderful!” she cooed running her hand through my shaggy blond hair. “Thanks, mom,” I replied, allowing her to bring me in for a hug. . . . From the very beginning of my history with pencil and paper I loved to create art. Those early years of my childhood I created innumerable prints, paintings, pictures, and doodles. It wasn’t long, however; before my clumsy kindergarten drawings progressed into more skillfully rendered sketches. The third-grade was about the time that my proficiency within the visual arts became evident from amongst my peers. Differences between what I created and that of my classmates was subtle; more accurately rendered shape, a better placement of details, and higher levels of symmetry all marked my burgeoning artistic ascension. Soon classmates were paying me for poster sized replications of the KU Jayhawk (looking back, an obvious copyright infringement), prints of rainforest animals, and the latest installment of my new comic book, “Star Boy.” . . . “Five dollars!” cried a classmate. “No six dollars!” shouted another. “Twenty-one dollars and eighty-seven cents,” came Mason Grey’s offer, stepping forth. His backpack jingled with the sound of loose change as he proffered his funds for the impromptu auction. “Sold!” I said, happily accepting Mason’s offer for the newest addition to the Star Boy comic series. A collective sigh emanated from the assembled students as they shuffled back to their desks. Plopping his Jansport backpack on a nearby desk, Mason quickly unzipped it and began counting the change within. . . . Somehow, at the time, the scene of fourth-grade children openly bartering for goods in a classroom didn’t strike anyone within its confines as out-of-the-ordinary, not even the teacher sitting quietly at her desk. That moment wouldn’t be my last to see me profit from my artistic creations; many more like it would serve to galvanize me as an artist and an entrepreneur, thereby irrevocably shaping the course of my expository writing. Years later, in high school, my incessant sketching and classroom doodling led me to an inevitable encounter with the computer program Photoshop. At the behest of my independent study instructors, who saw my evident passion for graphic arts, I used my sixth-hour class period to complete a self-instruction course on the program. The relationship between Photoshop and I has been a love affair ever since. After becoming proficient with the use of its image creation and editing capabilities, I quickly put them to use creating cover graphics and using the program to integrate text and sketches into my first poetry book. Though I had begun to experiment with poetry and the effects achievable through crafting sentences and stanzas, Photoshop helped to expand my love of visual artistry into the boundaries of print media by integrating the two. Soon Photoshop had gone beyond stoking a smoldering interest in writing and fanned it into a full obsession. Within two years becoming proficient with the program I had published two poetry volumes, “The Symphony of Frost and Flame” and “Trashcan of Literary Garbage” for distribution amongst friends and family. Expressing my early literary work with these books, I became enamored with the act of writing poetry itself. Each poem was composed not only of carefully crafted expository lines and stanzas, but also by fonts that conveyed the desired mood and aesthetic line formatting. In this way, poetry acted as the ideal segue between graphic design and literary composition. Placing some emphasis on the visual elements of poetry and creating accompanying graphics, the pursuit was not exclusively literary, and soon it began to foster a love for crafting the same artistry into prose.