Thieves & Kings is drawn in pencil, inked with black pen, and then treated with dot screen tones to define highlights and shadows, (formerly the screen tones were done with Letraset products and an Exacto knife, but more recently with scanners and computer software).

Thieves & Kings is a black & white comic book, with the only color being on the painted covers. (I often put a great deal of work into the covers of my books. If you want to take a look at some of them, they can all be viewed elsewhere on this site.)

One of the more singular elements about the book is that the story will alternate from standard, frame-by-frame comics pages to decorated pages of prose text. I go to lengths to integrate the two, and shift back and forth between them depending on the needs of any given scene. I find the text passages provide me with a wonderful tool that other comic artists don't have at their fingertips, while being able to draw gives me a powerful means of expression that classical book writers can only dream of. A picture is worth a thousand words, but just try drawing a life philosophy, or 'emotional turmoil'. Of course, it can be done, but you can also drive a nail in with a screw driver. It's so much easier when you use the proper tools!

The combination allows me to achieve a great range of effects, while enabling me to pack more story into a smaller space. More bang for the buck.

To many, it is obvious that I have been influenced by Japanese comics, and this is true. North American comics, when I was young, were the rule; the reality. Like school buildings or the sky, the North American Spiderman style of comics art seemed like an edifice which would stand forever because it was the only thing that could exist. When I first became aware that I might be wrong; that there could be another way, I was excited beyond words, and I endeavored to draw exactly like a Japanese cartoonist. Of course, I failed. -And not just because I was seventeen at the time; culture and artistic approaches draw, I believe, upon very deep wells which share their sources far beneath the crust of the human psyche. (I am convinced that the way kids in different cultures learn to read and write has a massive impact on how the artistic centers of their brains develop. I'm talking about the differences between learning and practicing to draw 26 letters versus 6000.) As well, I have long since come to the conclusion that the artistic 'realities' in other countries can make just as an imposing and stifling set of edifices as they do here, if they prevent an artist from feeling free to explore his or her own possibilities. -And of course, as with anything, 90% of everything published is poop, no matter where you happen to live. But I was certainly influenced!

My style today, I find, is different from anything else out there. It has developed on its own, and I am both comfortable with it, and proud of it. It is entirely me on the page when people read it. I like that. -In fact, that's one of the things I am most pleased about that none of those other comic books out there which bandy about authors and artists like interchangeable parts can say; This book is pure; the product of a single vision from beginning to end.

Rather lofty sounding, I know, but I think these things are important.