I'm taking a different approach in how I finish the pages of my second book.  I have about twenty pages in various stages of completion, so I'll be posting more as I finish them. 

This page is when we went to San Diego Comic Con, back then I had no interest in comic conventions. I was more interested in venturing out of the comic con I did not feel a part of, so I went for a walk. I wanted to educate myself in books I thought were important and challenging to me, so I picked up a copy of Plato The Republic. I didn't have an understanding of the beginnings of western culture but I was curious to find out more. Anyway I bumbled along and thought it was interesting to read, even though I didn't understand it fully. The cowboy in this sequence was posing as a wax figure, I thought he looked so real and I had never seen anything like it before, so, I decided to touch it. The joke was on me - a bit of American western culture. Ha Ha Ha!!!

This is me as a teenager, just goofing around in the junkyard. My dad wasn't very organized with tires, they were randomly stacked everywhere! The house in the background was our first home, which was quiet small with just one room we all shared, and at the time this picture was taken my dad used it to store more junk. We had no plumbing til the early sixties, that's whats so funny about this picture - we really didn't have "a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of!" which was one of my dad's favorite expressions. 

You can imagine how difficult it was for my mom  raising four kids, but the wood-burning stove kept us warm in the winter and I don't remember ever going hungry. We eventually moved out of that little house into to a bigger one, that still remains today. That's where my brother Ed lives now, he's a hard working guy just like my late Dad, the salt of the earth. It's always comforting to visit him in the summer, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to return to the place I grew up. Who would have thought I'd be writing about it all these years later?