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About the Creator

BJ HIORNS started drawing in junior high. Graduating from stick figures in high school, he then taught himself to draw using two battered old copies of How To Draw: Robotech (one was the Minmei issue!). That early stuff was not good. Ask Shannon.

But. In college he continued to draw here and there, finally cooking up a more realised continuation of his (often darkly) comic Wax Rhapsodic, which now exists almost solely in script form.

Jackie's Fridge came along in 1996, toward the end of his college career, and has continued to grow and evolve, with such mind-bogglingly revolutionary ideas as a black girl dressing as a white girl for Hallowe'en, a communally "adopted" daughter and a refrigerator that talks. That run-on sentence was brought to you by no sleep.

It is BJ's lifelong dream to one day get his act together and figure out where the heck he's going, ideally with the help of his gorgeous girlfriend and co-conspirator, Joey Hetzel, who will kill him upon reading this bio. BJ is six feet tall, not as thin as he used to be, not as young as he used to be, and just as blind as he's always been.

As far as influences go, BJ has been reading Charles Schultz's Peanuts and Walt Kelly's Pogo since before he was supposed to be able to read. Also on the list: Johnny Hart's BC and Tumbleweeds, by an extremely funny artist whose name escapes him.

BJ first became enamoured with manga by picking up a copy of Ben Dunn's Ninja High School, back when it was a three-issue miniseries. From there, he branched out into the works of Rumiko Takahashi, Hayao Miyazaki, Kosuke Fujishima and Art Baltazar (hi Art). He also really really likes Bone by Jeff Smith, but hey, who doesn't?

At the moment, BJ is involved in such activities as working full time, wishing he had more time to draw, championing the cause of Minidiscs, feeding his iguana, riding his motorcycle, referring to himself in the third person, spending time with Joey whenever possible, noodling ideas around for JoBeth! and Jackie's Fridge, collecting hand-held video games and trying to figure out what sort of tattoo to get at this year's Sturgis rally.

He is also extremely long-winded.