About Me

I'm 20 years old and currently a student at James Madison University in Virginia. I'm a Media Arts major, concentrating in Cinema Studies. Eventually I would like to write for television or movies, but I'm also interested in writing for local media like radio or print media. To be honest, I'm not sure where I'm going to end up, but I do know I want to write for a living.

Aside from being a full-time student at JMU, I also work on campus. In my free time, I enjoy video games, anime, movies, toy collecting, and, of course, drawing. I'm a big reader but not of novels-- I generally read magazines pertaining to my hobbies and comics and manga. I'm a member of JMU's anime club, MANGA-- if you're a JMU student, come hang out with us! It's a great club with a lot of fun people.

Some of My Inspirations

There have been three main influences on my comic art and writing over the years. The first was Transformers, which has been with me since I was a child and is still my favorite science fiction story today. Featuring great art by British Transformers artists like Geoff Senior, Dan Reed and Andy Wildman, as well as fantastic stories by Simon Furman, the Transformers comic book took the world of Transformers in wild, unpredictable directions. Unlike the television show, the comic was written in a sophisticated manner with sharp, character-driven plots and ambitious story arcs. Plenty of scans of the old Transformer comics are available on-line. I highly suggest you check them out.

More recently, Akira Toriyama's famous manga Dragonball has been a great inspiration to me. It's been criticized by many anime fans as childish, boring and overly-simplistic. However, many of these opinions come from people's experience with the English anime dub. I highly recommend heading to Planet Namek and reading the uncensored, original Japanese manga. Toriyama DID write simple plots, but that requires a certain grace on its own. After all, millions of readers kept coming back each week for ten years, so he must have done something right! Dragonball is a simple tale of good vs. evil with endearing characters that really pull you in as you watch them change and grow.

Finally, my favorite Marvel classic, and the only one I've really followed faithfully, is the Fantastic Four. I love this title for a couple of reasons. First, under some of its best writers, like John Byrne and Walt Simonson, FF was less of a super-hero comic and more of a sci-fi adventure. While heroes like Spider-Man were fighting crooks with electric guns in downtown New York, the FF were challenging inter-galactic demi-gods who were trying to destroy reality, or travelling through time and negotiating quantum physics. Another reason this book is special is that it's about a family-- a husband and wife, a youger brother, and a close family friend who would each give their lives for the other without a second thought. I always felt like part of the FF when I read the book because of their closeness.

Story-wise, many films have also been inspirations to me. I think the best sci-fi, action and adventure films are ones with simple concepts that focus on people, rather than trying to top the special effects of the last big flick. Film series like Robocop, Terminator, Mad Max and Aliens are about people, and what the fictional world created in the films says about humanity in general. That's how you write sci-fi. Recent attempts like Battlefield: Earth and the relatively disappointing Star Wars: Episode I have shown that you don't achieve greatness with nothing but cool vehicles, huge budgets and a few good fight scenes (yeah, so SW Ep1 made $400 million, but that doesn't make it a great movie).

My all-time favorite live-action film is Braveheart, Mel Gibson's greatest achievment and the best example of heroic cinema I've ever seen. I honestly believe that if this movie fails to stir your blood, you're either dead or cynical beyond all hope (but maybe you like it that way). I have way too many favorite movies to ramble on about here, but that one beats them all. It's the pinnacle of film as a moral art form.