NCE: Kevin, please introduce yourself. Where are you from, and what do you do?

KY: I was born, raised, and still live in sunny southern California. In addition to my creative and editorial work with New Creation Entertainment, I also work full-time handling digital prepress troubleshooting for a large design/printing company servicing the entertainment industry. Iʼm blessed to have the support of my wife, Heather, through all the ups and downs of juggling both the creative and technical sides of my career.

 
NCE: Please share a little about your background that led you to where you are now.

KY: I was raised in a Christian home, born into a Lutheran church, and made a profession of faith in grade school, although it wasnʼt until my late teens that I began to explore what it truly meant to be a Christian. Since then, the churches Iʼve attended have ranged from Quaker to non-denominational Evangelical, to Southern Baptist, and I currently attend the Lake Avenue Congregational Church in Pasadena. I love learning about theological differences throughout church history, but try not to let them divide from whatʼs truly important in following Christ.

My educational background took many twists and turns: I was home-schooled through high school, I studied Christian apologetics at Simon Greenleaf University (now a part of Trinity International), then I changed gears to study graphic arts and printing technology. While these diverse areas of interest seemed unrelated to me at the time, they really came together when I began to be involved in the Christian comics movement. At last, here was religion (the subject) and art (the comic medium) and printing (the finished product) all tied together in one package.


NCE: What first got you interested in comics?

KY: I learned to read through my local libraryʼs collection of old hardcover Peanuts and Garfield comic strip treasuries. As a kid, I loved the various superhero cartoons on TV, and my watching those shows coincided with my newsstand discovery of the digest-sized reprint books of DCʼs Legion of Super-Heroes stories from the Silver Age. I was hooked! Since then, Iʼve drifted through most of the major (and many of the minor) superhero titles from DC & Marvel, from Captain America to Captain Carrot, from Superman to Power Pack, and everything in between.

From my interest in superheroes came my interest in science-fiction and fantasy, leading me to discover novelists like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ray Bradbury. Everything from my love of 1950s sci-fi B movies and Japanese giant monsters to an appreciation for the new pop culture imports of anime and manga, it all traces back to those early superhero reprint books I picked up off the newsstand. Who knew that Matter-Eater Lad could be such an inspiration?

NCE: How did you first discover Christian comics?

KY: As I was growing up, the amount of Christian comics available was very limited. Our family received Andre LeBlancʼs The Picture Bible as a gift, which I eagerly read cover-to-cover. My local Christian bookstore also carried a few random titles from the Spire line of Christian "Archie" and "Barney Bear" series, but very little else. A few years later I found the Archangel series, which I found to be very exciting when it first appeared, but also very disappointing after the distribution for the series dried up in my area and the bookstores stopped carrying the title. It wasn't until I was in my teens and more actively involved in comics fandom did I begin to learn about the many other Christian comics series that were being produced.

NCE: What led to you actively becoming involved in the Christian comics movement.

KY: An ad in the back of Comics Buyers Guide led to me to discover Alpha-Omega, an Amateur Press Association sponsored by the Christian Comic Arts Society. My response at discovering CCAS was "I thought I was the only one!". I joined Alpha-Omega in the late 1990s, and continue to be an active participant today.

Through Alpha-Omega, I was introduced to Don Ensign and Ralph Miley, both of whom (at the time) lived locally to me. We began meeting at each other's homes on a regular basis, at first just for fun and fellowship, but soon we began collaborating on projects together as well. Don, Ralph, and I published the New Creation newsletter, began hosting an annual CCAS ministry at the San Diego Comic-Con, and helped to organize the Proverbs & Parables comic anthology.

NCE: What other Christian comics projects have you worked on since then?

Since starting out with Proverbs & Parables, I went on to work with various friends from both the local Christian comic artist meetings and the convention activities. With the help of Don and Ralph, I wrote New Crew, a superhero parody; I published two tracts in association with CCAS; and I worked with Eric Jansen of God & Country Graphics as a part of their Christmas Treasury anthology and they also published my creator-owned series, Tales of Hemlock.

Looking back over the past several years, I see that many of the projects that originated at the humble meetings around our kitchen tables have since taken on a life of their own -- the local meetings have grown to include dozens of local Christian artists, the CCAS ministry at the San Diego has become a decade-long tradition, and our various publishing projects have grown to the point that we have come full circle: a group of talented artists whose friendship was started during the early days of the New Creation newsletter have now banded together to form New Creation Entertainment. I'm excited to see the projects currently under development, and I'm honored that I was invited to be a part of it!

NCE: What is your role as part of New Creation Entertainment?

KY: For the moment, my role is primarily editorial as I help organize and direct the projects that are already in production. Given my printing background, I'll also be heavily involved in the production end of our publishing projects as well.

Thankfully, I'm also getting to exercise my creative side too, as I collaborate with Ralph Miley on scripting a teen comedy series called Parallel Park, currently under development as part of the NCE roster of titles. (Keep checking the website for more news about it as it develops!)

NCE: What goals do you see for the future of New Creation and the Christian comics movement?

KY: The creative team here at New Creation is a talented group from a diverse background and with diverse range of artistic styles. Our goal is that we'll be able to harness that creativity and diversity in a positive and God-honoring way, and that amid a crowded comic book marketplace we can offer our readers stories that are both unique and entertaining.

I know that all of us at New Creation are proud to be a part of the Christian comics movement, and my personal hope is that our work will be able to build on the tradition of what's come before us in a way that will also be an encouragement to those who will come after us -- especially to those up-and-coming Christian artists and writers who (like me) may say to themselves "I thought I was the only one!"

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