Phase 1: Comics

When I was 18 years old, I walked into San Diego Comic-Con with a portfolio in hand.

At the time, I didn’t know if becoming a professional comic book artist was actually possible for someone like me. I had grown up dreaming about drawing comics, but I had never shown my work to a professional artist before. I had no real idea where I stood.

My portfolio was simple. A handful of sequential pages. A few pinup drawings. A lot of hope.
I went to the biggest comic convention in the world with one goal: to get honest feedback.
I wanted to know if this dream I had carried since childhood had any chance of becoming real.
What happened next felt like something out of a movie.

I showed my work to one of the founders of Image Comics, Rob Liefeld, and he offered me an internship at his Extreme Studios.

I had gone to SDCC with hope for some honest feedback. An actual job opportunity wasn’t even on my radar.

I was floored. 

But it didn’t happen immediately.

For the next several months, Rob and his art director, Marat Mychaels, gave me scripts and assignments to draw from before they felt like I was ready to join their studio. I worked on sample pages, short stories, layouts, and storytelling exercises.

I drew more comic book pages in those several months than I ever had before.

Then I got the call.

I joined the bullpen at Extreme Studios.

For the next two years, I was surrounded every day in a bullpen full of other young hungry artists—all of us drawing, learning, competing, laughing, eating late-night meals, going to conventions, and living inside this wild, exciting world of comics.

It was wild. And it was everything I had dreamed of.

But to my surprise, something inside me started to shift.

Up to that point, I had mostly only drawn with a pencil. I drew in a comic book style. And while I loved comics, I began to feel the limitations of only knowing one way to make art. I admired painters. I admired animation artists. I admired artists who understood color, design, composition, and illustration on a deeper level.

I didn’t want to draw comics because that was the only thing I knew how to do.

I wanted to draw comics because I chose to.

That difference mattered to me.

So I made a decision that didn’t make sense to everyone around me. I stepped away from a growing career and went to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California to study illustration.

Some of my peers thought I was crazy. I was being offered great opportunities at the studio, including major books (like The Avengers, but that’s a story for another time).

But for me, the decision was rooted in something deeper than career momentum.

It was about growth.

I wanted to become the best artist I could become.

Art Center challenged me in ways I had never experienced before. Figure drawing. Color theory. Design. Composition. Painting. Mediums I had never touched. Ideas I had never considered.

It opened my eyes to a much larger world of art.

To this day, I still consider it one of, if not the best career decisions I’ve ever made.

And then, when I was about a couple semesters away from graduating, comics called me back. I was asked to draw the first ever ongoing Tomb Raider comic book series by Top Cow Productions.

There are moments in life when a choice barely feels like a choice. You just know.

I said yes.

Tomb Raider #1 came out in November of 1999 and became a massive success. I spent the next few years drawing the adventures of Lara Croft, traveling to conventions, working with an incredible writer in Dan Jurgens, collaborating with great artists, and experiencing what it felt like to be the artist on a hit book.

It was a dream.

But eventually, even that chapter reached its natural ending as I found myself wanting to explore something new.

I had gone to art school to grow beyond pencil drawing, and after years of interiors, I found myself wanting to paint again.

So I moved into cover illustration for Marvel Comics, working on titles like Excalibur and Weapon X.

And then another creative pull began to form.

I started seeing portfolios online from artists doing something called concept art. Digital paintings. Character designs. Creatures. Vehicles. Worlds. Visual development for games and films. I was mesmerized.

I didn’t know yet where that path would lead. But concept art felt like a new creative path — one that could bring together my love of storytelling, illustration, and design in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

And once again, I felt myself being pulled toward the unknown.

I didn’t know it yet, but that pull was about to take me completely out of comic books and into a world I knew almost nothing about.

Video games.

That was Phase 2.

— Andy Park

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