The mind behind A Return to Normalcy has a knack for making the bizarre feel familiar, like if Kafka had a meme account and a Wacom tablet.
“I was raised by a magician,” the artist shares, half-laughing, half-resigned. “Not a particularly good one—but theatricality and storytelling were prized in our house. My dad wasn’t great at the tricks, or parenting, but the drama? That stuck with me.”
After what they describe as some “awkward teenage years,” they went on to study Sequential Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design. That dream lasted until the reality of ten-hour comic workdays in a dark room hit. “I didn’t have the patience,” they admit, “so I escaped with a film degree and a passion for screenwriting.”
And that pivot paid off. In 2013, they co-founded Some Nerve Productions, a political media company that won a CPAC award for creative messaging across the political spectrum. While they eventually left to chase bigger creative dreams, they stayed on as a consultant and kept honing their voice in other projects.
In 2021, they produced Superhuman Public Radio, a tongue-in-cheek audio drama imagining NPR in a superhero-infested world. “It was an absolute blast,” they say—and the show went on to win Outstanding Comedy Podcast 2022 at the Catalyst Story Institute. Their screenwriting also took off, with several contest placements including a win for their pilot Profit at the San Francisco International Screenwriting Festival.
But behind all the accolades is a chaotic, heartfelt reality: “Most days, I’m just running after my son Milo, trying to keep him from terrorizing our dog Spencer, while my wife Brenna grades papers in the middle of the bombshell that is our happy home.”
