I started writing this for the About Me section but it's getting long.

Originally shared by Tycho C.

I started writing this for the About Me section but it's getting long... probably just write it out as a couple blog posts...

I was born on August 16th, 1977.  It was during a thing called the Harmonic Convergence. Astronomically, it was an unusual and unique alignment of planets in the solar system. Eight planets were, when viewed from Earth, aligned in a configuration some folks called a grand trine.  Then, there was some stuff in the Mayan Calendar and my mother delivered me at a convergence at Mount Shasta.  You do stuff like that, it’s your own damn fault when your kid comes out kind of strange.

And I did come out strange. I was born knowing how to draw. When I was four, a local art gallery put my preschool drawings up in a modern art display. He, of course, was trying to mock another gallery that was exhibiting things like Crow in a Coal Mine and Dove in a Blizzard (which were essentially black and white canvasses respectively).  Anyway, my stuff went up.  One drawing was a bunch of tornadoes.  Then, there was a freak period of 17 tornadoes in the Midwest...  Another was an explosion and a face on the ground...  I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a prediction of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.  (The bomber’s face was found later...).

In any case, a mysterious buyer purchased my pictures.  The gallery owner must have felt guilty about it, because he told them that I wasn’t some mysterious artist (he’d written a ridiculous bio of me being a refugee from Eastern Europe or something), and the guy still wanted to buy them.  It got a lot of press.  We were on a couple local shows as a yuk yuk.

Of course, one group that didn’t find this funny or coincidental was the NIA.  They wanted me to participate in what I guess was the project that would become Project Wydah.  My parents hated secret government agencies though, and were paranoid, so they went on the run, taking me with them.  I’d say they dropped off the grid, but there wasn’t a grid back then.  We just dropped out of the real world.  Went renegade.

I just kept drawing.  Every once in a while, I’d get a weird image, but I learned enough not to draw it. Of course, it would come true in some way, but I kept it quiet.  If anybody went back over my old sketchbooks they’d find some creepy stuff.

One year, we were hanging out in Mexico, but my mom and dad had to come up north.  We just happened to be in San Diego in time for Comic-Con.  I found a badge in the trash, and I put it on.  I figured maybe I could sell some pictures.  I just set up at a card table and sat there.  People came up.  I sold a lot of stuff.  I didn’t know what to do, so I started drawing stuff that people asked me to draw.  A Superman...  A Spiderman...  Whatever.  I always had a gift for imitating. Like when they asked me if I could do Batman, I said, “Which one, Kane, Giordano, Sprang, Miller, Timm?”  I could do them all.

So there was a guy there. This was back in the hipster days of comics, and there was this artist who was more image than reality, and he told me to imitate him.  I did some stuff on the fly.  It totally blew him away.  What I did looked more like his stuff than his stuff did.  And what was really wild is that he had already drawn the panel he told me to draw, and I did it exactly the same way.  Got to tell you, it was creepy.

Anyway, since I was still underage, I ghosted for him. He paid well and fairly.  And it was regular.  Then his buddies got wise to what was going on, and they started contracting me.  By the time I was 15, I was the hardest working ghost in comics.  The strange thing is that I had no desire whatsoever to do my own books.  I liked the shadows.

I like being invisible.  They pay me in cash.  They mail it to a P.O. Box.  I never agreed to meet with any of them.  I felt like some kind of a superhero.  Like the Spectre or something.  Or the Invisible Man.  He was always my favorite character.  I mean if I were to get a power, it would be invisibility.

Visibility is bad for art, anyway.

To be continued...