A Look Back at Fifteen Years of Madness and Adventure

“Two roads diverged in a wood,
I took the one less traveled by,
and that made all the difference.”

Frost

My Previous Mundane Life

For a few years I had been making a living through a combination of jobs that were incredibly dull (dining room manager at a Village Inn, salesman at a Radio Shack, delivery for Domino’s Pizza) and unsavory (I ain’t telling). I was spending gross amounts of money collecting guns, which will be indicative of my mindset at that time.
One day, I was hanging out at a friend’s house when a strange person that my friends referred to as “That John Guy” showed up with some tapes of Japanese animation. (Space Cobra and Macross TV series episodes.) We looked at them and I was instantly enchanted. “This looks really cool but what the hell are they saying?”
I continued to think about the animation for the next few days and wanted to see more. I got in contact with John and borrowed some more tapes from him.
I didn’t have my own VCR at the time so I had to watch the tapes at work (Radio Shack). Customers would walk past the TVs and double-take, walk back to them and ask, “What the hell are they saying?”
“I don’t know but it looks really cool,” was my only reply.
I dubbed off copies of Nausicaa, the Crusher Joe movie and the Locke the Superman movie to watch over and over. (Yes, I had tapes before I had a VCR I was well on my way to anime fan madness.)
I finally bought a VCR (a Beta machine) and got copies of all the anime I could find and watched them over and over too, trying to figure out what was going on.
I was particularly interested in Urusei Yatsura. It was wacky and funny and looked completely different than any animation I had seen before. It was totally unique to me.

Prehistoric Anime Fandom

At that time we had a very dynamic small group of anime enthusiasts in Denver, C/FOOD—the Denver C/FO (Cartoon/Fantasy Organization) chapter. The monthly meetings soon became the most important thing in my schedule and I started helping John out with the newsletter (the C/FOOD Platter¹) typing up articles, doing synopses, art and such.

I would spend hours with these weirdoes looking at shows and trying to figure out the stories. (Everyone else was much better at it than I was. They probably still are.)
Our copies were pretty bad, mostly third generation and worse. The colors and music were very weak on some of them so seeing better copies was like watching a new film. Tracking errors, static, color smearing and drop-outs were part of our anime viewing experience, I guess.
Soon I began talking to other anime enthusiasts around the country, most often beginning by trading tapes or newsletters. We would compare and contrast interests and talk about all manner of things.
I was so infatuated with anime that I started to do artwork in an anime style. I created what had to be the most terrible newsletter cover proposal ever done² and kept going from there. Pretty soon I was working in very thickly laid on watercolors and spending a lot of money on paint, paper and art tools. I never had any formal art training so everything was a learning experience. I started working with technical pens (oh, how I loathe them!) and screen tone but I found that I was still much more attracted to color. (Read as: my color work was much better.) Eventually I figured out how cels were made and started making my own cel-style illustrations with store bought acetate and consumer acrylic paints.³
By this time I was spending an inordinate amount of money buying anime merchandise and magazines. (I suppose that it was better than guns but not by much.) At that time there wasn’t the same overmerchandising that there is today so thee wasn’t nearly as much stuff on the market and there was almost nobody importing it so it was really expensive. We were paying $20 for Newtype magazine (cover price 500 yen) when the yen was still 200 yen = US $1. Still, there wasn’t much we could do about it at the time. There was only one local store that had anime merchandise and we would descend upon it like possessed junkies on Friday night when the shipment of anime stuff would come in.
I left my regular job and began to immerse myself even deeper into the anime fan world. (I won’t say how I kept money rolling in. The statute of limitations has run out by now but…) I became the Chapter Representative for C/FOOD. I spent far too much time writing letters to other clubs and talking on the phone.

Hey, maybe I can do this for work…

It was in the deep, dark winter of 1985 when I first got to thinking about pursuing a career in animation, particularly something anime related.
I was going nowhere in life. I had no job, no degree, no real skills (except gunsmithing which did not lead to a lucrative career). In the words of Don Maclean “I’m watching the future… It’s black.”
The most important thing to me in life, then and now, is to make a difference. Not to just take up space and produce carbon dioxide for plants to eat.
I felt happy when I was doing my anime style artwork—happier than when I was doing anything else. Even though it was a total fantasy at the time I thought maybe this was how I could make a difference. How I could be something different and special. How I could both make and do something important.
Even though I was most interested in Japanese style animation the thought of moving to Japan was far from my mind. I had a passing interest in Japanese culture but not a lot in Japanese history or economics. After researching animation schools (and their exorbitant tuition) in the US, the idea of going to Japan became a bit stronger.
I continued to do (terrible) fan artwork⁴ and began what must be the strangest self-study Japanese language course ever. I bought some language study books and tried to translate manga and anime comics.
My first efforts were, needless to say, way the heck off. I would have to guess at most of what they were saying and I couldn’t even begin to figure it out unless I had something written as well. I persisted, knowing that if I wanted to go to Japan and do something I had to learn the language. (To what degree I had no idea but I didn’t imagine it was nearly as bad as it really is.)
I wasn’t really sure what the work of an animator was like but I got it into my head that I wanted to be a character designer. The fact that I had never really designed an original character, always using somebody else’s work or style for reference and ideas did not have much weight in my head. I figured that a character designer sat around all day designing characters, ones that he (or she) wanted to design, and had a good old time.
(To this day I cannot comprehend what I was thinking at that time. I had no idea what I was getting into and I was getting ready to jump off a big cliff.)