Hair Forte

They always say "write what you know and I ignored that advice until 2005. Striving to be a syndicated cartoonist, I worked on everything and all the ideas I could think of with ... little success. I created a comic strip about a park ranger, a kid inventor, a stranger, a family headed by a dog, but (curiously) there has never interested until the unions ... I decided to work on something that I could actually relate to.

In early 2005, I contacted Amy Lago, comics editor in the Washington Post Writers Group and former editor of Charles Schulz, with an idea: I wanted to do a comic strip about growing up in a family of military. She encouraged me to develop it so I hit the drawing board. In a few weeks, I created the comic strip of Fort Knox.

The Knox family is based on my own family: He understands my father (Joe) - a colonel who spent 30 years in the army, my long-suffering mother (Jane), my brother megalomaniac Red (Dan) who carrying a briefcase and wore a tie in kindergarten, and I - who was an asthmatic weak perfect bait for all intimidating city. I kept the names of my parents first the same, but changed the name of my brother "Donald" and "mine" to "Wesley". I also added a love interest for the mixture: Betty Betty Wu is based on my wife's strong will and named after a former colleague. I completed the cast wild with my grandmother tried to get lessons gun when she was 80 years (called "Pearl" in the band), General Wickum - the name of a general who lived in the street from us, and Frank Tucker, who is based on all the friend of my father ever had.

Life at Fort Knox Fort Knox / Comics

Even if we lived in or near many military bases, the band centers on the experiences of my family to Fort Knox, Kentucky from 1985 to 1986. At that time, I was sharing a room with asthma accidentogenic a brother who was only focused on world domination. He was even known to conspire with her teddy bear (in the band this bear is named "Fidel").

Fort Knox was both wonderful and horrible experience for me. On the positive side, I was spoiled by my parents because they thought that my asthma was trampling the life out of me. (Honestly, I'm not really sure it was true, but the Christmas holidays, I spent it was the best ever. Santa was almost drown me with toys.) Moreover, I also faced one of the lowest school bullies I've ever known. His name was Mike and his eyes were covered by her long blond hair. He was a tyrant who I also considered his best friend. (It is difficult to "pal around" with someone who stuffs you in a locker.) In the band, Mike has been renamed "Kurt". Apart from that, nothing else about his rotten self has changed.

Launch of the Fort Knox of Comics

I spent three long years of development of the comic strip of Fort Knox with Amy. She advised me on everything from character development of punchlines. Then in April 2009, I received a call from her: They wanted to launch the band in October. After breathing into a bag for ten minutes, I hit the ground running. At the October 5th launch date, I was more than two weeks in advance in the development of a year of writing in the box. After months of hard work, we started with the band in 35 newspapers. darn good enough in such a difficult economic climate.

With the band started, my main goal now is to reach the other military families and give them a voice on the comic pages. So I partnered with sites such as MilitaryBrats.net and I am featured on other sites, including ArmyWifeNetwork.com. I even set up a fan site Facebook http://www.facebook.com/fortknoxcomic who spent more than 1,200 members in two.