Created to Create

BIO.

AKA More than you ever wanted to know about the art of Steven Griffin!

 

As a little kid I drew a lot of comic strips cuz I thought my jokes were better than what was in the paper.

I sent off submissions to newspaper syndicates, eventually receiving rejection letters, but didn't give up my goal to be a professional cartoonist!

 

Then when I was 14 I picked up Jim Lee's X-Men #1 in a newsagent, immediately realising that comics were a far more challenging artform to master then anything else I'd discovered (hence greater chance for showing off!) and became obsessed with comic book art and making it my career.

All my teenage money went into the cash registers of Perth comic book stores.

I worked long hours for years to be good enough to be published.

Before that happened,
in 1995,

I made use of my comic strip skills by creating the first ever internet game with graphics,

BIG HEAD'S AMAZING COMIC STRIP ADVENTURE GAME!

(Though the lead character is female, Big Head is inspired by my own huge cranium.)

 

I grew up enjoying choose-your-own adventure books

and Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games

(and had already programmed my first adventure game in Basic when I was 8)

so wanted to make use of the interactivity of the internet to make something

as entertaining online.

The biggest problem was that the internet crawled back then, so there's no way I could program a traditional, animated adventure game and have it run at a playable speed on dial-up.

So I came up with the solution of using B&W comic strips

that I got down to a size of only around 8KB each to portray the action,

so it ran as fast as an offline game, with short wait times (excluding the wait time for me to create more of the game! Which angered a lot of passionate fans, whoops!)

But rock n' roll is bumpy business.

 

With hundreds of thousands of players,

Big Head was extremely popular for a 1996-sized internet population.

But as it was designed for Netscape circa 1995, it's sadly now long gone from the internet!

 

In 1998, I already had the fanciest, funnest Flash websites on the internet, and a failed online video game store

(cuz I didn't think to first invent Paypal and lost all my money to credit card fraud.)

So I moved on to a new challenge and created the first ever Flash game, a virtual pet/tamagotchi parody called Virtual Staph, where you raise a pet

Staphylococcus bacteria!

Creating a game aimed purely at microbiologists

seemed funny to me at the time.

It was written in the then-barely functioning Flash Actionscript language.

It was such a pain in the butt (a bigger challenge than even Assembler!) that I didn't make another game after that.

I then did some Flash animation cartooning, just because I hadn't done animation before, then turned my focus back to breaking into the comic book industry.

In 2003 my first comic book HAWAIIAN DICK was released through Image Comics

to universal praise,

but due to long, long hours of daily work and severe injuries I'd accumulated since childhood,

I couldn't keep up with the fan demand for new issues and eventually had to move onto focusing purely on my health and healing,

work I'd never had the chance to dedicate time and energy to before.

Since I was little my focus had always been primarily on lifting the mood of others with my artistic entertainment. It's still a big motivator, but I now give far more thought to my own health than I used to, having learnt to be at least a bit selfish (which in the long run will help others, once I'm healthy enough to be of better use than when I'm overworked, sick and injured.)

These days I eat like I'm an injured athlete on steroids,

and it's working quite well for me.

 

This is the most serious thing I've ever written.

Which is why I've never written a bio before.