For those of you who don’t know me or the Cosmic Rage story, I want to fill you in a bit on how the whole story was started. I feel that when an artist reveals the foundation of their work, it helps the audience understand the piece a bit more.

Since I was a kid, I always enjoyed drawing comics and telling stories. Whether it was using characters that already existed (such as Garfield) or creating my own characters, I always enjoyed making these characters interact with one another and their environment. However, through the years I started drawing less and less until I almost didn’t draw at all. I found other hobbies and we moved to the city life and I now had many more people to do stuff with.

Around the time of high school I came home from work one night and watched the good ol’ Cartoon Network late night programming. A show called Outlaw Star was on and I immediately was intrigued. I had never known that animation existed in this way. The next day at school I talked to one of my good friends and he immediately knew what I was talking about. He referred me to the local On Cue store (On Cue was part of the Sam Goody branch of media stores).

The first anime I bought was Akira on VHS (Which I still have to this day). I was able to watch the first half of the movie before I went to work that night and was completely blown away by the opening bike sequence. That night I eagerly returned home and stayed up late and watched the rest of the movie. This film fueled my new found love for animation.

In the coming weeks I continued to get such films as; Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell and Princess Monoke. I have never seen animation used to tell such amazing stories. These stories had characters dying, suffering loss and themes that I haven’t seen before. These films would unleash my love for storytelling.