In 1998, I was 23 years old. My dad had just passed away after a long battle with lung and brain cancer. I was living in the often rainy and seemingly always gray skies of, Rochester NY–A Negative Utopian mood in itself of sorts. I just finished getting my bachelor’s degree at RIT in illustration and I was doing some freelance artwork for a few role playing game companies and t-shirt designers while working at Media Play ( a wannabe Barnes and Noble). I was at a crossroads in life and the beckoning of manhood pestered me every day. Reality was a bitch and it was obvious that becoming a freelance illustrator and still living like a human being were going unrealistic. So I decided to put life on pause and enrolled into grad school at RIT while I figured life out.
Needless to say this was the pivotal point when I got hammered by creativity, inspiration and the culmination of recent years of mental and cultural growth. Since I was a child I had been on crash course with information. Information I couldn’t always get in school. I was always drawn to science fiction and often times found it more compelling and realistic than “real life”. As a child, as far back as I could remember I was obsessed with the Twilight Zone. I loved that show because every tale had a warning to mankind and was a social commentary for how careless, stupid, arrogant and clueless the human race really was. In science fiction you could call out people, cultures, governments, religions and more–and you didn’t have to apologize like you do in “real life”. I found sci-fi to be more truthful and for the last few years my art had evolved into this direction. I still am not sure if it was consciously or subconsciously but sci-fi art was where I wanted to be.
I had spent the last few years of college engulfed in various forms of intelligent science fiction related media. From music like Pink Floyd, Human League, Bauhaus and Kraftwerk to books like George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick /Roger Zelazny and H.G.Wells’ the Island of Dr. Moreau to movies like Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, Dune, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars and much more. Ironically it was at this time than I began to find a new appreciation for the 1981 animated Heavy Metal Movie as well. I also delved deep into studying ancient cultures such as the Egyptians, Sumerians, the ancient Eastern world, the Aztecs and the American Indians. I studied Gods, myths, legends, religions, customs, rituals, sacrifices, governments, laws and anything I could get my hands on. Joseph Campbell, Timothy Leary and other great twentieth century thinkers helped to open my mind. And boy did my mind open. It was when I discovered the roots of Christianity in ancient, ancient Egypt that the switch flipped, my mid exploded and I began to imagine the future of mankind–from my OWN point of view.
I then met a guy in Ithaca named Don Reddick. Reddick owned a small RPG company named Fractal Dimensions and published a magazine called Fractal Spectrum. He and I became friends and he started giving me freelance work. It was right around this time that my art was improving and my mind was growing. I had come up with this whacked out futuristic story about a tribe of humans that landed on Jupiter’s moon Europa, only to find that it was inhabited by a robotic overlord that was a byproduct of greedy power-hungry humans, long since dead. This overlord manipulated everything on the lush planet, teeming with life and he had created a new race of human animal hybrids, that I called Animoids. After pitching Reddick the story, he agreed to make it an RPG as well as a comic book.
So I began cranking out drawings, paintings and more. And my art and ideas kept getting better and better. After deciding to sell Fractal Dimensions to another publisher, I parted ways with Reddick, took my ideas and decided that I was going to head west, to Los Angeles and see what luck I could turn in California. I was still reeling from the loss of my dad and dissatisfied with my life in Rochester. I had a very nice girlfriend but my emotional unrest and my yearning for more caused the demise of our relationship. I believed in my idea, which I had christened with the unoriginal title “the Conquest of Europa”, I believed in myself and now I had nothing to lose. So I sold everything material and useless to me except my computer, art supplies, clothes, books and music–packed it all into my car and headed to L.A.
When I arrived in LA in September of 1999, I had never been to California but I knew it was where I needed to be. It took me a while to get settled but by January 1st of 2000, I had my own apartment, a cat, a full time job as a production artist/graphic designer and a freelance gig as a cartoonist doing dirty cartoons for various adult publications. Life was cool. I had now entered the digital age and Photoshop beckoned. I had been drawing and painting since I was 3–with traditional tools such as pencils, paint, markers, ink etc. Now a new media I had scratched the surface of in college had become my favorite tool to create art with. Photoshop was now my new toy. So I began to work, honing my skills and evolving as I absorbed LA, and all of the new people, places and forms of alternative education.
I then moved to West LA, near the ocean and enlisted some writing help for a while. We refined some ideas and generated some new ones for the project I created back in rainy ol’ Rochester NY. We laid out a good framework and a script and renamed it Ascension–but something seemed to be missing. When I felt that we had taken the project as far as we could, I decided to branch out on my own once again. Working solo was a great move, and from here it evolved beyond my wildest dreams. Loose ends became tied up and new ideas that reflected today’s current religious, philosophical and political issues came to light. Over the course of the next four years the project would evolve into what it is today–GATES. Back in 2007 I had a comic book publisher interested in publishing it as a book/graphic novel. BUT when they tried to screw me in a heavy handed deal, I simply walked away, following my gut instinct to run. Smart move for me!
Now, present day August 2010–I am married with 2 wonderful daughters and living in Culver City, CA. Gates has become a reality and has landed with the right company. With Gates, I will be launching Heavy Metal Magazine’s first online comic franchise. I cannot say in any number of words how honored I am to be working with Heavy Metal Magazine. Kevin Eastman is just an inspirational man and was responsible for creating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before acquiring Heavy Metal back in the mid 90′s. To be a friend of his and to be working on a Heavy metal property is just amazing.
I’ll never forget watching the Heavy Metal movie as a teenager with my buddies. From Harry Canyon to Den, we loved it. And somehow, some way I ALWAYS knew I would end up working with them. Maybe it was fate, luck, the law of attraction or just an anomaly of space and time, but here I am. Gates has found a home with a magazine and a franchise I have adored since I was a teen growing up in small town upstate NY.
As I closed the deal yesterday for the comic, I said to Kevin Eastman, “Ya know I’m destined to be here, working with you. My first name is sci-fi,(HAL: like the super computer in Kubrick’s 2001) and my last name is (HEFNER: porn, like Hugh Hefner/Playboy). That’s Heavy Metal dude.” He laughed and agreed.
ABOUT GATES:
GATES is young man living a wretched existence in an isolated colony of humans. Deep within the caverns of an industrial mountain complex, his society is ruled by a totalitarian government called the ConGenement who controls all facets of life.
The ConGenement manages the colony’s reproduction process and all people are procreated genetically susceptible to drugs that dull free thinking. Ambitionless citizens believe that life cannot exist outside of the colony’s confines and are obliviously obedient slaves to their ConGenement masters.
But Gates is special—He was conceived naturally, in secret. Unlike other citizens Gates thinks independently because his body is immune to any affects that the ConGenement regulated drugs induce. Gates has avoided ConGenement detection until recently when he is forced into a shaky partnership with a crooked ConGenement official who has uncovered his secret. In a quest to prove that life exists outside of the colony, plans go awry and Gates and two unsuspecting participants, ADENA and KANO, are stranded in a forbidden land that is not supposed to exist.
What they discover is a twisted, alien environment flourishing with life and dominated by SOLOMAN – a nightmarish, god-like overlord. With his organic plant based technology, Soloman captures the three humans and is instantly obsessed with the experimentation of them and the extermination of mankind.
While in Soloman’s clutches, Gates and Adena are befriended by an ANIMOID (hybrid human-animal) named NEKTU. Believing that Gates is a figure from his tribe’s legends, he engineers an escape from Soloman’s fortress. As they escape, Gates steals Soloman’s SCARAB SEED, which is the root of his power. On a treacherous journey outward they trek through the catacombs of the fortress and discover hundreds of Soloman’s cloned bodies. Gates, Adena and Nektu battle their way out and retreat into the lush, untamed jungle of the planet. Nektu leads them to his tribe who adopt the humans. They struggle to survive but for the first time experience what it means to truly be alive.
In a climactic final battle with Soloman, the fate of the world and all its inhabitants are at stake. Gates must utilize the power of the scarab seed to become one with nature and something more than human to defeat Soloman.
