Biographical Information:

The rumors that I was abandoned as a baby and raised by a pack of feral Procyon lotor are largely untrue. This does not, however, explain my love of Lone Ranger masks, digging through your garbage at 3:00 in the morning, and making facial expressions that make me appear nearly human.

After leaving the pack… herd… (hold on a second, googling…) gaze? A group of raccoons is called a gaze? Uh, yeah.

After leaving the gaze, I enlisted in the US Air Force and spent my time creatively defending Texas and fighting the War On The Breakdown Of Electronic Equipment. I was injured several times during my service, but was not cited for commendation, as the injuries were (A) mostly psychological, (B) partially fictional, and (C) incurred almost exclusively on my own time in various local bars.

With a successful run of being yelled at for my country under my belt, I needed a new career. I decided to go back to my second love, music. (My first love, of course, was Dom DeLuise. I don’t wanna talk about it.) I grew my hair back out until it resembled Robbie in Joe Dirt, screamed into a microphone and banged on various things for the better part of a decade, and unbelievably, people bought it. Eventually, I was afraid that I wasn’t becoming quite enough of a cartoon of myself, so we did the whole “band breaks up on the verge of success” story, because honestly, you’ve never heard THAT one before, have you?

I needed a new career. I grabbed my guitar and headed for a brick wall and a microphone, doing stand-up and musical comedy under the name “1 Mann Banned”. Had some pretty decent success, being named MP3.com’s Comedy Artist Of The Week eight times, and the same honor on Riffage.com three times. I performed both comedy bits like Whitey Brand Crackers and songs with such dubious titles as “Do Me Now”. Things seemed to be going in a good direction.

Went to bed one night with an earache. Woke up the next morning and all the bones in my left ear had turned into a volcanic-ash type substance and shattered. Strangely enough, it had absolutely nothing to do with standing next to a Marshall stack for most of my life. Just a weird random virus. Besides making me deaf in that ear, the little pieces of bone are still dancing around in my ear, which cause me intense pain if I’m around loud noises. Like nightclubs. Like crowds. Like applause.

I needed a new career. Detecting a pattern yet?

In my free time, I’d always dabbled in art & design. My father was a graphic artist, and I’d always made band posters, album covers, etc. when I was a musician. Using those few samples, I managed to get hired on as a staff artist at Excel Photo. My background in coding allowed me to see that I could make changes to their system to allow us to automate the production of graphics-enhanced products like trading cards and magazine covers. I was promoted to Art Director, a position I held until December 2011. That was over ten years ago, and I am now recognized in my admittedly very small industry as one of the best at automatic image generation. As I don’t hold much hope for the “school/sports team” photo industry as a whole, I’m starting to think I need a new ca… did we go over this?

I started Madmann Graphics in 2000 as an outlet for things I couldn’t do at Excel as well as a vehicle for my freelance work. I’ve done contract work for such websites as MediaLoper and StarTrek.com, and had my photoshops featured on websites like Fark & Cracked. I am available for interesting/profitable/interestingly profitable projects on a freelance basis.

I am fond of pie.