Still, we like to know about one another, and we’ve decided on conventional formats for this: we tell each other where we were born, where we grew up, where we went to school, what we do in the world to support ourselves… I suppose we’re trying to offer points of reference, but the point of reference is already established the minute we begin the conversation; we’re human, and we thrive on communication. 

I pursued this very seriously until college, studying at ACT, The Drama Studio London at Berkeley, The Julia Morgan Bay Area Youth Theater Co, Camp Cazedero, The Berkeley Shakespeare Festival, Jean Shelton’s, and, when I lost the ability to attend Berkeley High due to a district move on my mother’s part, SOTA, the San Francisco School of the Arts. I mention this because I later discovered that many writers – particularly in comics – have also had experience with the theater, and I’ve come to view those exercises in character motivation and scene beats an invaluable part of my training as a writer, maybe even more so than the trunks full of journals and notebooks I began keeping from the age of eleven on. 

I graduated from high school early and began attending a local community college. It was there that I first decided to hang up my comedy and tragedy masks in favor of wielding the mighty pen (I wish I could say I came to this conclusion in the midst of a fiction class, but, oh well…cheating on sociology papers will have to do). I found out that novelist Mona Simpson was teaching at Bard College in upstate New York (completely unaware, at the time, that there even were X-Men, let alone that they, too, schooled at Annandale-on-Hudson) and four days after interviewing with a local alumni, was standing in the middle of Grand Central Station, ecstatically working my way North. 

I graduated college in the middle of a recession, and ended up heading back to California, frustrated and unsure of how best to continue pursuing my dreams. With a generous and well-timed gift from my step-mom, I was able to rent an apartment in San Francisco with my girlfriend at the time, Alyssa. I found a fairly normal nine-to-five job in the Research Division of a large HMO while Alyssa worked in retail and stayed on my ass about finishing the novel I’d started writing in college. I began taking graduate writing classes at the University of California at Berkeley (most notably with novelist Brian Bouldrey, who has earned my eternal gratitude with his unflagging support and friendship), but being a creature of my age, it was, of course, television that changed my life.

I’ve told this part of the story many times now, but the gist of it is that Alyssa and I were channel surfing one day when we caught an episode of the then brand-new Batman: The Animated Series. It was love at first sight for both of us, Alyssa immediately calling Warner Brothers stores to amass the finest collection going of shirtless Bruce Wayne cels, and me running down to a comic shop manned by a dear friend of mine to ask what he could tell me about Robin. 

Arnold had lots to tell me (“which Robin? What do you MEAN, which Robin? How many Robins ARE there?” – “oh, boy. Sit down…”), and it only took a few minutes to hook me irrevocably on the fresh and fascinating medium of comics. I had never read a single comic before that day, but I left Comics and Comix that afternoon with a backpack full of Moore, Miller, and Gaiman, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics already open in my right hand, and the Art Thibert Nightwing poster rolled under my left arm. 

And on the way home, I was hit by a cable car.

Okay, not really, but that would have been nearly as cool as what actually happened, which is that, after rather boldly (one could argue naively) establishing contact with the Bat-Office in New York via free work email and faxes (hey, that’s what day jobs are for!), and studying more about the medium under the two-year, long-distance tutelage of Scott Peterson, Darren Vincenzo, Jordan Gorfinkel, and Denny O’Neil, Darren offered me the chance to write a ten-page story for the Bat-office.  I broke in to the industry (odd phrase, that) in 1997 with “Like Riding a Bike,” in The Batman Chronicles #7. That led to a Batman Plus special with Arsenal, the Catwoman and Nightwing annuals for that year, and then a position as the monthly series writer for Catwoman at DC. 

I quit my day job rather impetuously, and eventually even moved out to New York where I spent four great years working on projects like Relative Heroes, a six-part creator-owned limited series recounting the adventures of an original group of teen heroes called The Weinbergs; USER, a three-part, prestige format, creator-owned Vertigo miniseries about identity issues and online role-playing; a two-year run on The Titans; several miniseries (including Nightwing/ Huntress and Arsenal for DC and Black Widow for Marvel Knights) and contributions to the acclaimed No Man’s Land arc in the Batman books.  I was lucky enough to have my work profiled in mainstream media such as USA Today, Working Woman, and Entertainment Weekly and also in alternative press such as The Village Voice, The Advocate, and Curve, which brought me great pleasure. 
 

More recently, I’ve moved back to Northern California, where I completed a Ghost Rider miniseries for Marvel and a two-year-plus run on Batman: Gotham Knights. Currently, I’m thrilled to find myself working on X-Men: Evolution, the Marvel comic book based on the hit TV series; Matador, a creator-owned project with brilliant artist and all around prince Brian Stelfreeze due out from Wildstorm later this year; and, also, this little monthly title called Nightwing for the DC Bat-office (which Robin, my ass…). 

I currently live with three friends, one brilliant nineteen-month-old little girl, one dog, two cats (one of which is mine), two tree frogs (also mine), one fire-bellied newt, three fish, and, more often than not, a bucketful of crickets ready to give their lives to the cause of the amphibian tank. I love role playing games, spicy food, and damn near anything Japanese, and like to consider my bisexual, bi-coastal, comic-book-writing, role-playing, vegetarian, Buddhism practicing, cosmogony studying, 460-thread-count sheet addicted, music-loving, botany-obsessed self a fairly typical representative of my utterly unpredictable generation. 

Last but not least, if you’re really smart and you skipped over ninety-percent of the ridiculously copious text on this page to see if there’re any good links down here or anything, I’ll reward you by clarifying the moral of the story above: learn anything anyone is willing to teach you, always have people around who love and support you, and, most importantly, watch lots of TV.