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About me, Matt Johnson
Whenever I read a web comic, I wonder about the authors. What do they do for a living? Where do they live? Where did they grow up? That kind of stuff had always fascinated me, so I decided to spill my guts to everyone nice enough to visit my site!
My name's Matt Johnson and I'm a marketing manager designer for a Land and Sky in in Lincoln, Nebraska. In my spare time I've been drawing web comics, partly because of my passion for the art form but mostly for the chicks. I owe most of my comic strip aspirations to a guy named Bruce Blitz. In fifth grade, when my dad owned an art store, he gave me a couple of his videos for Christmas, and I was instantly enamored with the idea of drawing my own strips. I was also influenced by Japanese cartoons like watching Voltron, and I also enjoyed a certain cartoon between segments of the Tracy Ullman show called The Simpsons. In 1990, when my family moved to a miserable little town called Warrensburg, Missouri, and I made it my personal mission in middle school to learn how to draw all the Simpsons characters. I also discovered the joys of Nintendo during these years and practiced drawing popular characters like Mega Man. All this greatly influenced my drawing style as my family moved to Alabama in 1992 and I started high school. I rediscovered my love for the manga style in the instruction manuals for Nintendo roleplaying games like Dragon Warrior and Arcana. I drew several cartoon adventures starring myself and a cluster of real and fictional people in a collection of old unused journals.
When my family moved to Nebraska in 1995, I studied the drawing process a little harder learning gradually to draw skeletal outlines of my figures first with pencil before inking in the outlines and contours for a finished piece of artwork. I started using Photoshop for coloring my characters and soon started learning how to build web sites for fun and profit in the late nineties. I kept drawing cartoons on into college, but didn't do any real strips until my years at Wayne State College, where some of my characters appeared in the local paper and the college newspaper. I graduated from Wayne State College in 2002 and have been living in Lincoln, Nebraska ever since. I started off working at a miserable little print shop, which has become the basis for Wieser Graphics in my comic, and my boss there became the inspiration for Chad. In early 2004 they dumped me in for a cheaper, less experienced, employee. During the dark days of my employement, I started drawing Cortland every weekday in order to keep my sanity, a schedule I managed to keep up for more than two years.
Bringing my comic to Comic Genesis has honestly changed my life in ways I never thought possible, mostly in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with my comic. Sure, I've learned to draw a little better since I started here, but it's the friends I've made in the forums and IRC that have made all the difference. Since meeting up with these guys in St. Louis and Toronto, a whole new virtual community has opened up to me. That's the best reason to have a web comic. It's certainly not for the money.
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