Every kid worries about making friends at a new school, but when nine-year-old Bud accidentally catches the wrong bus and finds himself launched into deep space, new friends are the least of his problems! At Cosmos Academy, Bud learns that Earthlings are the most feared creatures in the galaxy, and even Earth's location has been hidden! With the help of his new friend, Gort, Bud goes undercover as a Tenarian exchange student. Unfortunately that means everyone thinks he's a pro at anti-gravity Zero-Ball (even though he's really only a pro at watching sports). And with paranoid Principal Lepton threat ening to expel any Earthlings (into outer space) and only Gort's hacked Blip computer to help them determine Earth's co-ordinates, will Bud ever find his way home?
Raised by a pack of wild geese, Mark learned to fly at an early age. No? How about - raised by gophers Mark learned to dig extremely fast at a young age. No matter the truth of those first statements I can say that I grew up near St. Paul Minnesota and ended up graduating from The University of Wisconsin, Madison. I enjoyed studying ancient art history, comparative literature and Chinese, but ended up with a BFA focused on design. I proceeded to work in politics, advertising and graphic design in Madison until I transferred myself to Los Angeles where I worked in graphic design, motion graphics, video games, animation for TV and film and created several TV shows that never saw the light of day or even the glow of a TV. I later attend the MFA program in animation at UCLA where I made The Thing with No Head. The best animated short ever made. Ever. OK. That's subjective.
I ended up working as an art director for Sony Online, a new media creative director for Pearson Television and a current production manager for Walt Disney TV Animation.
Along the way I was writing and illustrating books. Sending them out and enjoying the resulting letters that varied between condemnation 'you should never work in children's books' to, 'send more samples'.
In 2007 a small publisher in Long Beach published several of my comic books. In 2009, Tricycle Press published The Book That Eats People, which I illustrated and since then I have been fortunate enough to work on 7 additional books including The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot from Random House, Earthling!, a graphic novel for readers 8 and up from Chronicle Books and So You Want To Catch Bigfoot from Candlewick Press.
My favorite genres are science fiction, horror and humor. Or a combination of all three.
And oddly enough, geese didn't teach me to fly. It was the gophers that taught me that. Who'd a guessed!?
