My career in comic has been a long and slow journey, but from the very beginning as a child I was creating my own super hero characters.

My first character I created was called… Captain Combo <cringe, I know> – I tried to draw a character that was partially every character I knew in the DC Universe – The Superman Shield, the bat symbol, Flash’s lightning bolt, the Dr. Fate’s helmet with Dr. Mid-Nite’s goggles, and so forth. It was really silly, and long before I discovered the android Amazo which was basically the same thing.

After the chaos of childhood, I began to develop stories and characters with a little more substance. As stated before, I had fallen in love with writer Roy Thomas’ All-Star Squadron, and that I was already passionate about the Golden Age characters and pulp adventure heroes.

At first, I was just coming up with my own ideas for characters, I never attempted to just create my own version of Superman, Batman, and so forth, but you must recognize that every character you’ve ever read or seen influences everything you create. So, I began to take my childhood ideas and develop them further away from where they came from.

Over the years I created a bunch of characters and a world they lived in. I even had a three-ring binder with the words “My Universe” on it. A friend in college laughed at me because of it. Of that, but there was the DC Universe, the Marvel Universe, and several others, so why couldn’t there be MY Universe.

MY Universe would eventually change to the FG Universe.

FG wasn’t my take on Wonder Woman, if anything she was a mix of Liberty Belle and Miss America. (Both DC and Marvel had versions of Miss America) – In one drawing she a skirt wearing pin-up girl of the 1940s, and in another drawing, she had pants and a workman’s shirt.

I wrote her origin story as part of an online writers’ group on the GEnie bulletin board. It received very good responses from this group, taking a little bit out of it while expanding others.

One of the most important things that came out of this ‘origin story’. Flying Glory was no longer wearing two costumes, but that there were two women that had been Flying Glory and this story was about how that happened.

Because I had received such positive responses to that story, after rewriting it I decided to do one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I put together packets which including that story and series outline about Flying Glory, and brought it with me to the San Diego Comic-Con International.

There was no way I’d be able to take it to the Big Two, DC and Marvel, for many reasons, but there were some of the smaller publishers who might take a chance to look at someone’s passion project.

One of the publishers I gave the packet to was a company known as COMICO. When I was a kid, COMICO was best known as the company that published the ROBOTECH series of books, based on three anime series.

It started out as a graphic novel and then three series: ROBOTECH: THE MACROSS SAGA, ROBOTECH: SOUTHERN CROSS, and ROBOTECH: THE NEXT GENERATION. That had several other successful books, but Robotech, and later my favorite detective comic THE MAZE AGENCY, were all that was important to me.

So, at the San Diego Comic-Con that year, approached their booth, and offered my comic pack to them and very friendly they accepted it.

Months would go, and wasn’t going to be surprised if I never heard back from them…

… then I heard from them!!

I got a letter in the mail.

The publisher actually liked the comic.

They liked it and was interested in publishing the book, but wanted to see more samples of my work and where I planned to take the story.

So, I responded joyfully, and wrote a premise of the next story and where I wanted to take book.

Then everything went silence.

In today’s word’s you might think I had been ‘ghosted’, and that has happened to me, but not this time… it was something far worse.

Comico had gone bankrupt and ceased operations and came to an end.

That could have been the end of Flying Glory, but it wasn’t.

The one concern I received over all about FG was that there might not have been an audience for stories taking place in the 1940s, but I wasn’t willing to change the concept. Flying Glory took place during World War II, it was an extremely important part of her character (both of them).

That’s when my girlfriend (now my wife) Shannon Elise Muir had an idea.

As my career came out of my childhood love for comic books, her career came out her love of animation. For me it was the All-Star Squadron, for her it was VOLTRON DEFENDER OF THE UNIVERSE and the music-based series JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS.

What if we kept all my original ‘golden age’ concept, but also told the story of Flying Glory’s granddaughter who was using the FG name to promote her rock band only to discovered she had inherited super powers.

Working together we created a new comic idea called:

FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY

We developed it as a comic, as an animated series, and even as a movie. But what became the most successful was as a Webcomic.

Over the last two decades, Shannon and I have been writing the story and I have been illustrating the comic pages. Shannon also writes the songs that the band sings.

Issue 18 has begun and you can find it on the website: www.flying-glory.com

If nothing else comes out of my career in comics, I am very proud of FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY.  Hope you like it.