I kind of forgot that John actually had a career that started before I got to see him on Uncanny X-Men.  I actually recognized his work in that odd Rog2000 backup story in the pages of an E-Man comic my mother had picked up at a local supermarket.  I didn't know which comic was his actual first at Marvel, thinking that Iron Fist was the "big break" for him.

   The Chief was quite the prolific artist, even in those days, putting in pages for Marvel Two-In-One, Marvel Team-Up, Avengers, and Captain America.

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By my first year at the Alberta College of Art I had become pretty much known as "that weird guy who draws comic books". Not everybody thought it was entirely weird, however. Ron Moppett, who was the director of the Gallery, was sympathetic to my oddities, and brought in a traveling show of comicbook art. He also asked me to draw a comic book to serve as the "brochure" for the show. At that time, about four or five pages of DEATH'S HEAD were already drawn, so I showed them to Ron, and he agreed I should finish it and ACA would "publish" it.

This I did, and the College printed up some 500 copies, which were given away free at the door.

The show was a real eye opener for me. I had not previously seen any original comicbook art, and was amazed to see the different sizes of the boards on which the artists worked. There was a range of standard comic book art from the Golden and Silver Ages, some magazine art, and some newspaper strips. (There was a PRINCE VALIANT Sunday page that remains to this day the largest piece of original art I have seen, except for other VALIANT pieces.)

One of the people who visited the show was a fellow named John Mansfield, who picked up a copy of DEATH'S HEAD, got in touch with Stan Parrot (yes, his real name) who was the Head of the College, and thru him, me. It was John who posed that life-altering question "Is this something you want to do for a living?"

Up to that moment, it had not really occurred to me that such a thing was actually an option!

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STARLORD was almost a complete accident. I had no interest in the character -- hadn't even been aware of him until Chris told me he was working on something. Then he asked me if I would be interested in drawing it, and I said sure. We were all in a STAR WARS mood back then, so anything that smelled like space opera was immediately appealing.

As I recall, Terry's assignment to the book was pure luck of the draw. Then Archie Goodwin, who was E-i-C at the time, saw the results and decided he'd found a solution to his "X-Men problem".