In 2007 or 2008, my old friend Rantz Hoseley invited me to contribute work for the Tori Amos anthology he had set up at Image Comics. The deal was each Creator or Team would pick a Tori song and create a story inspired by the song, as opposed to literal adaptations. I kept coming back to the song "Father Lucifer." It made me think of my own old man, who never came close to growing old.

I told the story of my father's brief life wordlessly, in 9 pages of comics. He died when I was 7, and he was just 25. As a young good looking guy, in Hollywood in the late 60s, his friends called him Black Fox. With his long black hair, they thought he was Native American and he played that up, though in reality he was Mexican and Anglo. Just a few short years later, he was so bloated and heavy - really, he looked like an entirely different person. He must have recognized that, as by then he was referring to himself as Brown Buffalo. From Black Fox to Brown Buffalo in just a few years.

Though I've thought about him a lot over the course of my life, the weeks spent drawing and painting those pages were undoubtedly the most (intensively) I've ever spent with my thoughts and feelings about him. Definitely a therapeutic experience! Here are a few of my favorite pages.