Well, that's not exactly true, but I did just move to where I now live and I did just join Tribe.net, so it's not completely wrong and it's something of an attention-grabber.

I've been a member of MySpace for a while, tried Craigslist, and did the chatroom and newsgroup thing for years, but even with my own website, I have only ever met one serious party for collaboration or discussing anything other than hot-button "troll" issues (politics, religion) or sex. I ran a BBS way back in the day and all anyone ever did there was play doors and leech files, so I'm not really expecting anything -- just hoping for more than what I've found online, so far.

I began collecting comics as a child and loved them so much that I began writing and drawing my own (though never finished any). Soon after, I found Stan Lee & John Buscema's seminal "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" and was off and running. But still never finished any story I started.

I was also very much into role-playing games and got deep into Champions. I amused myself by creating cool character names and often statted them up with the Champions system. This was the Day of the Independents -- back in the late 80s and early 90s -- when Cerebus had begun a whole cottage industry of mostly black and white, mostly lousy, independent titles, and the big thing in comics then was having your own "universe." Between the list of names, sketches, and storylines (all original, though some were role-played with others when I GMed -- which only happened a few times due to the fact that I was the only one who owned the Champs book and it is a pretty involved system), I eventually created just that: my own "universe" of costumed crimefighters and villains with in-depth histories and criss-crossing paths; supporting "mortals" and hapless victims; a fictitious, crime-ridden, urban sprawl in which they could interact... and never finished any story I started.

Then came music. I learned to play the drums from the time I was in the second-grade (my dad had played in a band when he was a teenager and had a drumset), so by the time I was in highschool, I was pretty good. And since I'd been listening to Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax, and so on since the 7th-grade, I was one of the very few around who could play well FAST. So I got involved in a number of bands, won a few contests/talent shows, and turned a hopeful eye toward possibly making a career of such.

But I never completely let go of my childhood dreams of doing comics and started a Comics Club in highschool and then attended a Joe Kubert School of Art workshop in Nashville in the 10th- or 11th-grade.

My parents owned a ballcards & collectables shop and my bass player owned a comics shop at which I often worked, and then Image came along and screwed up everything. Glutting the market, driving prices into the ridiculous range, robbing all the decent titles of talent. So I ditched comics and went into music.

And the music industry is an ugly, ugly beast. While I had limited success, the bitter reality of the situation is that, much like the comics industry, only the very lucky (note I did not say "talented" or "good") get a chance to do what they really like; the best way to make money in either biz is to work behind the scenes and work your way up, which often means working on projects you don't really care about. The thing is, you are able to do what you want to be doing, and it is steady work (unlike the vaunted dream of rocketing to the top -- which always includes a slide back to the bottom), even if it's work for which you rarely receive the credit you honestly deserve. But at least the comic book industry is actually somewhat structured, whereas the music industry is nothing but a whore's business filled with shady deals, shady people, and sometimes outright criminals.

I had been into computers since elementary school and when the family got one (a Tandy, which still sets under my bed!), I took to it like a fish to a bike. Turns out Rdio Shack and erroneously installed Win on the thing and after two trips and too much money, still hadn't fixed it. A blessing in disguise, as it forced me to sit down and figure it all out on my own. I started my own BBS and eventually got an Internet account. Several years ago, I signed up for Geocities and learned HTML in a single night (there wasn't all that much to learn back then, honestly). I made a few pages, eventually got better at it, then got a GUI program to do it all for me (Netscape, then Dreamweaver), and eventually set up a fairly decent site dedicated to RPGs and my own bloggy musings which originally looked exactly like Suck! (which is the site I idolized) -- this was right at the cusp of the blogging craze.

I have yet to actually finish a comic project, largely because I live alone and real-life always seems to intervene and rob me of the impetus, but I have a lot of ideas and a stable of characters, locales, and storylines, so I am hoping to find like-minded people to chat with and maybe even with whom to collaborate. As a published writer (in fact, I was a runner-up in one of those b&w indies from Back When -- Warlock 5), I know how hard these kinds of large projects can be and it's very easy to lose the steam if you don't keep at it. I see it a lot like working-out: you miss one day and it gets incredibly easy to miss another (usually without even realizing it!), then a week's gone by, then two, and when you get back to it, you feel so overwhelmed that you don't even want to bother -- so it's best to have someone you can turn to that will back you up and push you when you need it, to get you back on the horse and keep you going. Which means something completely different for most people in the music industry...