-Skippy
ARGHHH!!!
It’s the stupefyingly dull, self-absorbed autobiography page. Get out now, while you still have a will to live!
I was born in Calgary in 1972, the youngest of David and Leanne Matheson´s three children. This was really great as my two sisters, Samantha and Joanna, desperately needed someone to beat the crud out of. My father served in the Canadian Forces and as a result, we got to travel through most of the country west of the Maritimes. My family has lived in Inuvik, Cold Lake, Victoria, Ottawa, and Red Deer. Perhaps the most wonderful thing I learned from all the moving around is that weirdness is not limited by geographical boundaries; man, you can go just about anywhere and it´s a different place!
I was never exactly sure what I was going to be when I grew up, and now I´m not exactly sure what I´ve become. In high school I wanted to become a doctor, however the specimens I dissected in biology class looked like I´d used a chainsaw on them. No surgical internship for you Dr. Matheson! I then thought of becoming an airline pilot and even went so far as to get a private license, but my vision wasn´t good enough to fly commercially (I can still get a job as a Montreal cab driver though...) At the moment I´m a nocturnal automotive inventory engineering specialist at a nationwide retail conglomerate (I fill shelves on the night shift).
I´m also an erstwhile artist and full-time smart ass. Ever since I was a kid I found myself coping with life through humour, irony, and sarcasm. In highschool I rediscovered a childhood enjoyment for drawing. Animals were particular favourites, both cartoony and realistic wildlife art. For better or for worse, I´m entirely self taught, learning mostly from trial and error and the occasionally helpful book. I started by copying Disney and Don Bluth characters, moved up to forging Robert Bateman paintings with my pencil crayons, and eventually proceeded on to my own stuff with pencils, pen and ink, pastels and acrylics.
It made sense that I´d eventually combine drawing and humour to create something like Mynarski Forest. The strip could loosely be described as "The Cunning Little Vixen meets Calvin & Hobbes", which also describes my original motivation for creating it in the first place: The Adventures of Skippy & Liska fulfilled both my desire to tell my own stories about Rudolph Tesnohlidek´s heroine, and in some trivial way filled the void I felt when Bill Waterson retired. Along the way both the premise and characters grew far beyond their initial inspiration, and Mynarski Forest, a moronic little strip about a socipathic red fox vixen and the neurotic rabbit who tolerates her, was born.
As of the autumn of 2009, I´ve been doing the strip for over twelve years. It´s been a tremendously rewarding and educational experience that I plan to continue for many, many more years to come. Beyond that I´m not sure what my hopes for the strip are... I´m as ambitious as the next guy, but I suspect I wouldn´t enjoy cartooning as a future career nearly as much as I do as a hobby now. I guess the best thing is to just consider opportunities as they come and have fun with the strip as I always have... I hope you will too!
| "When the entire universe is out to get you, paranoia is just a logical defense mechanism..." -Skippy | Return to the Mynarski Forest Home Page! | |