Part One –  A preface of sorts:

So here’s the scene:  I’m 5 years old, stuck in the back seat on the way to my grandparents.  This is in the time before interstates (yes I predate interstates, snicker to yourselves) and the trip from Middle Tennessee to the coast of North Carolina was a major deal, driving through the countryside on 2 lane blacktop.  The speed limit was a primary source of income for some of those one traffic light towns, with the speed limit dropping from 50 to 25 as you came around a curve, and a cop car sitting there just waiting.  Once a year we would carefully pick our way across, two full days of driving and detours and potholes that you can do in about 11 hours now.  I’m sure I was complaining.  At a gas stop, my Dad told me to find a toy.  They didn’t have much of a selection, a cap gun, some bags of plastic soldiers – green for Allied, yellow for Japanese, light blue for German – World War II was still being fought out in sandboxes across America.

My Dad was rushing me, and they had nothing you could actually play with in the back of a car.  He points to the comic rack and tells me to grab two – 12 cents a piece, so he pays the lady and complains all the way back to the car that they used to be a dime.  I remember nodding at the injustice of it all.

So I pile in the back seat with my new purchases, grabbed at random off the rack.  I have no recollection of one of them, but I can remember the other one well enough to look up the cover on the internet – Fantastic Four 26 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – guest starring the Avengers and The Hulk.  I couldn’t read a word at the time, but I opened it and it was pure madness.  There were so many characters they barely had more than a panel apiece, Jack Kirby action lines flying everywhere with people stretching and throwing fireballs and growing and shrinking and turning invisible, and a guy made out of orange rocks and another dressed in a flag and throwing a shield, one with long yellow girls hair and a hammer and one in red and gold armor, and a big green one tearing through all of them with a kid in hot pursuit.  I had no idea what was happening, but it was some other world that I was peering into that was infinitely more interesting than the back seat of the car, and I studied it over and over until it was too dark to see.

A week later on the way home I was up to 5 comics – the seeds of a collection.  I taught myself to read picking through comics, studying the words until they made sense, just as I would watch my own son do years later with Final Fantasy 7.  But even more importantly, those comics, those words and pictures, fueled my imagination at an age in which I was young enough for it to stick.  Thirty years later, I sold the box of dusty old comics, used the money to buy my first animation computers and software, and began making my living with that imagination.

For a little while, I got to bring to life one of the characters from that first comic from 46 years ago, and I got to type into the credits a thank you to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.   Every once in a while you find yourself looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and they suddenly feel like the same direction.

We all set out on this project determined to bring something new to the table, but for me personally it was also a debt that needed to be repaid.