...Latest victim of "art" filters.

Mimus is one of the first, if not the first character that my best friend and I created together. Colin and I met when we were just about to enter junior high. We bonded over a love of rock and roll, comic books, movies, and general lunacy. We both had older brothers that were quite influential to our interests but when we got together those interests grew exponentially. We were both aspiring artists of roughly the same ability, but Colin was also quickly becoming an accomplished guitar-player. Even before we began to create our own comics we were in the habit of creating characters for as yet unnamed projects. I remember many a conversation that began, "We could have a guy that...", and went on to describe some unusual character. The concepts discussed were often visual in nature so it's only natural that we both gravitated to being cartoonists. Ironically the first project we ever worked on together was a "film" entitled THE BATTLE OF ZENON, which was named by Scott Franzke, who along with his brother Bobby, Colin and myself comprised the film crew. We never got further than the creation of a miniature set which was comprised of dirt, and Star Wars toys painted to reflect battle scars all placed on a card table.

Colin and I progressed as artists, and unintentionally as writers as well. Encouraged by local small-press publishers, and cartoonists we met at The Dallas Fantasy Fair we created Milk Vampire Babies which was a magazine sized, and fairly ambitious project for a couple of teenagers. The final product, which was put together with help from my brother Andy under the Permanent Press imprint, was a bit rough but the experience gained was indispensable. Next we did the mini-comic MIMUS which got published by Starhead Graphics in Seattle. Starhead was a small-press comics label that was started by a couple of guys that used to live in Dallas, and I've since forgotten how we hooked up with them. As cool as that seems now we decided that we could easily self-publish our own stuff in exisiting formats we became familiar with through the mini-comics scene and so Permenant Press was reborn. We got reviewed in a few related publications and began to get orders from all over the country to our amazement. This was by no means a lot of interest but to us it was the coolest thing in the world.

Colin and I started doing more comics on our own, as opposed to as a team, but we continued to record our silly, and sometimes disturbing music under the name THE SONS OF GRAVITY. The name is laughable now, but to my addled teenage mind it was perfectly appropriate. As time went by Colin went away to college at The University of North Texas in Denton, while I stayed at home to complete my senior year in high school before going to North Texas after two years of community college. We rarely spoke during this period, and by the time we met again we had changed in unexpected ways. I had grown up a bit and become invloved in a serious, but ill-fated relationship, all the while partying with old high school friends. Colin had immersed himself in bohemian college life with all that comes with it. Without going into too much detail, Colin had a mysterious, life-changing experience that would permanently alter his behavior and life. It was years before we had a "normal" conversation but we eventually began to speak farily regularly.

Recently Colin has been putting together a new mini-comic called PERMANENT PRESS PRESENTS, which showcases many of our characters in new stories, some old sketchbook pages, and other loosely related comics. He has asked me to contribute but up until now I have been extremely lazy about producing artwork. The reasons for this are numerous but I am attempting to break the cycle. It's not much, but the drawing of Mimus is one sketch on a page I'm working on of our old characters. This is just the beginning.