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Bio
I was born on September 18, 1979 in Nashville,
TN, but have lived most of my
life in Texas. I have brown hair and eyes and a fairly dark
complexion due to my half-Iranian heritage. I’ve
been short and pretty skinny for about as long as I
can remember
(fortunately, my puny physique stopped being a social issue as I got
older),
finally topping out just shy of 5’8’’ and I’d guess around 160 lbs. I graduated from Keller
High School in North
Texas in 1997 and
went directly into undergraduate studies at The University of Texas at Austin. I started drawing OFF CAMPUS
as a comic strip
for the school newspaper, The Daily
Texan, during my fourth year and
continued
it until I graduated with a BS in Microbiology in May 2002. Currently, I’m still living in Austin, TX,
unmarried but in a long-term relationship with a wonderful woman, and
still
drawing OFF
CAMPUS as a
webcomic as much as my day job permits.
The genesis of OFF CAMPUS
So, I decided to do a comic strip, and that’s really most
of
the thought that went into the project. Now,
I did have this vague goal that my strip should be
something that
would appeal to men and women, but that was pretty much all I had as a
starting point. At the time I sat down
to do this (the summer of 2000), The
Daily Texan’s comic strip line-up
was
widely regarded as fairly terrible, so even though I had no real idea
of
what I was
doing, I figured worst case I’d just be another bad strip (as it would
turn
out, a number of strong comics would debut that same year, so that
notion went
straight out the window). Another thing
that struck me was the lack of comics about college students in a
college newspaper,
which I perceived as a niche that I could fill if I so desired. I designed seven undergraduate characters
and began working from a series concept of a relationship-based
situational-comedy
(so as to draw in the ladies); the hope was that if the perceived
audience was
indeed there, I’d have something fairly unique to bring to the table.
My influences
As most artists are want to do, I tend to cannibalize any
small bit or piece of another artists’ style that I come across and
like. That being said, there is definitely
a short
list of artists who have had a larger impact on my stuff, the earliest
of whom
were Erik Larsen and Jim Balent; at
the time I started trying to learn
to draw,
I procured a handful of comics and their stuff was by far my favorite
(years
later, I would learn that in an industry noted for drawing
large-chested
females, Larsen and Balent were among the most notorious offenders). The Disney style that permeated most of their
cartoons during the 90’s was another biggie around this time, as I’m
definitely
a fan of clean artwork with nice, bold lines. I
discovered Frank Cho (another breast fiend, by the way)
and his superb
comic strip, Liberty Meadows, at the end of
the decade and fell in love
with
his inks, and have since tried to emulate his line as best I can. Last, but certainly not least, would have to
be Terry Moore,
whose work made it all look so deceptively easy that it
really
got me to start trying to push myself to attempt harder drawings and,
consequently, to get better.
This should theoretically be the
part where I discuss the
evolution of my writing style, but I have no idea how to even begin
tracking
that particular course. There are
certainly a number of writers I admire greatly, but to compare myself
to any of
them, even for the purposes of self-evaluation, strikes me as kind of
absurd.
My nom de plume
I’ve signed OFF CAMPUS
strips with the name “Seno” since the
comic’s inception (my full name is just too damn long), and more
recently,
started using Seno as a pen name in place of my real name in the
credits. Seno is a nickname I picked up in
8th
grade Spanish class; I actually chose it of my own volition, thinking
it meant
“sinus,” an English word that sounds quite a bit like my real given
name. A friend of mine would later
discover a Spanish-scripted
mammogram pamphlet that seemed to suggest it actually translated as
“breast,”
and while I don’t believe this is actually true, I don’t think I need
to say
that I never lived the incident down. I
adopted Seno as a more full-time pen name, so to speak, in order to
pursue day
jobs without fear of reprisal for the comic’s R-rated content.
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