Ken Mitchroney and I have been friends for well over 30 years. We’ve worked on a lot of projects together — comic books, animated shorts, screenplays, feature films. We’ve created catalog copy and bubblegum cards together. Hell, I once made a didgeridoo that Ken pinstriped and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth auctioned.
These are gigs that came Ken’s way that he included me on. Even the original screenplays we’ve done have tended to be in areas I wouldn’t have ventured (baseball, NASCAR racing) without Ken’s involvement. Until I began to DJ and podcast, my work had always been fiction — pretty much a solo endeavor, and not easy to involve Ken with.
Which is why, all these many years later, it’s a source of great joy to me to see Ken — who has drawn, managed, directed, or supervised for Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Spielberg, Marvel, Archie, Cartoon Network, and tons more places — light up like a kid at a Christmas tree when he got his author copies of the published hardcover of Fata Morgana, our first novel together.
However much you envision that finished book — and we had an amazing amount of input on the look & feel of the final product, thanks to the amazingly collaborative approach of our publisher, Blackstone — nothing prepares you for finally holding the thing in your hands. Ken was babbling when he got it.
So, congratulations to my friend Ken. Here’s to another first in our friendship and long collaboration. Cheers, mate!