ver since I can remember, I've enjoyed drawing. I don't know exactly what it was that first compelled me to set pencil to paper, although I'm sure it had to do with emulation of my older brother, Ron. He would decide to draw something first, and if he could do it, then by God, so could I. As near as I can remember, the earliest drawings we did were of automobile tires. Our father fixes cars for a living, so it is no surprise that cars had a big influence on our life. By the time I was six or seven years old, the drawings had expanded to whole cars. These were usually fantastic dragsters, drawn flatly in landscape orientation on a piece of loose-leaf filler paper, with the vehicle resting on the bright red border line of the paper. Of course, these were a big hit with our friends, and the popularity they created ensured a continuance of more and more drawings. Then, one day, Ron brought home something that would change both of our lives: a comic book.

Both my brother and I immediately became hooked on comic books, and both began putting any extra money we had towards them. Strangely enough, even though I was reading comic books, it never occurred to me that I could draw my own. My brother started to draw his own, and through his influence, I also began drawing comic books. Now, there was a purpose to our drawing, a reason to draw. I continued drawing comic books throughout high school, where this eventually culminated in a magazine that I produced called the Smudge. This was pretty popular in High School, but when I went to college, I had no time to continue such endeavors, and my artistic bent began to be directed towards fine arts painting. I won several awards in college, and have been painting ever since (check out the Visual Arts Gallery of this Website).

A couple of years ago, after going nowhere in life, partly due to having a Fine Arts degree and no knowledge of how to really market myself, and partly due to the fact I was touring in punk bands all the time, I decided to go back to drawing comic books. I started drawing Rule the World Comics, then the Spasms, the latter loosely based on my touring band days. Thanks to the Web, I can now "self-publish" pretty effortlessly, so now the whole world can read my comics. And I hope they do.

Watch this particular space for some of my earlier works. The Wayback Machine is being designed to be a gallery of this earlier work, so you can see back into time to my humble beginnings.

-Randal Huiskens