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If you asked kid me what I wanted to be when I grew up, for many years I would have told you newspaper cartoonist. I religiously read the funny papers every day, and poured over collections of comics like Calvin and Hobbes, Foxtrot, Zits, and Garfield, to name a few favorites. My mother wrote columns for the Post-Gazette, so even as the newspaper industry slowly dwindled, I still spent my childhood years addicted to the funnies. Though my path never took me down that route professionally, and I spent most of my adult life as a musician, the desire to be a cartoonist never left me. I made several attempts over the years to start a webcomic, but nothing ever had any momentum. I made maybe five or six semi-autobiographical comics about an emo band of misfits, and one I remember is exactly one comic strip about a wolf getting job as a college professor (shout out to "General Education Number 1!" aka the only General Education I ever drew!). There must have been others that I can’t quite recall.

Then here comes Nudist Mouse. A doodle of a naked mouse guy yo-yo-ing, that I added some panels and a cheeky “Nudist Mouse #1” marker on. I posted it near midnight, and called it my “fictional newspaper comic.” I wasn’t done drawing for the night, and thought it would be funny if this cute little dude was a huge dick, so I drew another one. Two hours later, at midnight, came “Nudist Mouse #2 – DMV.” My weird sense of humor not yet sated, in two more short hours I had another comic, where he comes home and finds his wife cheating on him. This made me laugh enough for now–taking an adorable and relatively innocent drawing and turning it into the story of a misanthropic, bad-luck attracting little loser–but what I didn’t quite realize yet was that I had started rolling a snowball that none of my previous “serious” attempts at comic art had ever been able to push.

Now here we are: six months and one-hundred comics later. Story arcs have come and gone, characters and places have been fleshed out, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the art style. The world and look of Nudist Mouse is fleshed out beyond what I could have imagined for any of my previous attempts in my twenties. A lot of people seem to find luck with making comics about being an aimless twenty-something artist or musician, but I think for me the reality of doing it was too comical in and of itself. The journey to IDGAF-ism of entering your thirties has provided a much deeper well for me to pull from when making this comic, and the ideas just seem to flow. The snowball hasn’t stopped rolling yet. I love these little characters, this setting, and the stories to be told within.

What warms my heart more than anything is how many people have come to find, connect with, and laugh at this comic too. Gaining over four-hundred followers for this angry naked mouse cartoon over just a hundred comics actually blows my mind. Maybe being a musician for so many years has made me anticipate a much different landscape, but I really feel blessed that so many people read this comic and love it. We’ve built up a great little community here, and I’ve even made some special and amazing friends from it.

Is this anything like what I anticipated would happen? Not at all. Neither when dreaming about being a newspaper cartoonist as a kid, nor when making the midnight doodles that formed the basis for Rin and his world. With that being said, I want everyone to know that I’m incredibly grateful. Music has been up and down for me for a few years now, and I’ve been struggling to find my artistic purpose, and make things that resonate with my soul. I hope you understand that this comic strip really represents my sense of humor and my desire to tell unique stories. I cannot thank everyone who has supported and shared the comic enough.

So here’s a toast to one-hundred more strips, and maybe a few hundred after that! We’ll see what happens. I set up this blog to be a single zone off of social media where I can share my thoughts and updates about what I’m working on artistically. Hopefully there will be a lot to share over the coming year, both with my music and the comic. My resolution for 2026 is to “de-Google.” These social media platforms and web companies never last forever, and they all seem to have the goal of stealing and selling our data. So for me, a place like this blog, and keeping my music and comics in self-hosted places are part of the main goals. Will it give me a wide-audience and sell out stadiums? Probably not. But will it let the art live longer than the lifecycle of a social media website? Absolutely.