From The Vault - Spider-Man 1996

I've been pulling pieces out of an old portfolio I found on my bookshelf a few weeks ago and I finally got to a page with ol' Spidey on it.

The interesting thing about this piece is that I think it was one of the first pieces I did when I got to Boulder, Colorado.

I had left New Jersey a few months before. I simply packed up my jeep with as much stuff as it could carry and headed out on the road. I didn't even know where I was going but anywhere, at the time, seemed better than staying in Jersey. I traveled to Washington DC, North Carolina, and even set up shop for a little while at my friend Craig's house in Ohio. But, I still didn't know where I would settle down.

Finally, I took the long trip west, across Indiana and Kansas, and ended up in Colorado. I figured it was far away enough from anyone I'd ever known that it was a good place to start fresh.

But, after all that travel time, I was really itching to just sit down and draw again.

I think I did this Spider-Man piece for a few reasons. One, because I love Spider-Man, two, because I was itching to draw again, and three, because I had a relationship with Marvel Comics at the time as a painter and I thought if I could show them I could do more than color that it might mean some more work.

I'm not sure if I ever sent this piece off to Marvel or not. This is in the days before I had a computer so it wasn't as easy as scanning a piece and sending it off in an email. But, at some point, I did move from coloring work to inking work so I must have shown them something to give me those assignments..

But, yeah, Spider-Man...probably the first piece I did when I had my western based studio set up.