Marc Siry

I started in the comics biz pretty much fresh out of the gate. A high school intern at Marvel Comics, I spent a year getting coffee, sorting mail and making photocopies. However, they were photocopies of original comic book artwork- and I was thrilled just to be in proximity to the original pages!

Since my first few years of Marvel work were interspersed with sessions of out-of-town college, I bounced back between different internships before landing back at Marvel (and NYC) as an "editorial assistant" in Mark Gruenwald's office. There, I helped Mark and his assistant Howard Mackie put together the encylopedic Handbook of the Marvel Universe. My next stop on Marvel's Editorial Row was the office of Ralph Macchio, where I served as assistant editor on Marvel's "old school" titles- Fantastic Four, Captain America, Thor, Daredevil, and Doctor Strange.

A vacation in California mesmerized me into moving there in 1989, with the idea of continuing to work at freelance color guides from the West Coast. Once I was out in Hollywood (having moved with my high school pal David Wohl) I found myself moving into different fields- including a stint as an illustrator with Secret clearance at the RAND Corporation.

In 1993 I teamed up with Steve Buccellato to color comics with then new concept of digital separations using Photoshop. This effort morphed into a company, Electric Crayon, which enjoyed a relatively successful year and a half run. Marvel then bought Malibu Comics and all their excess coloring capacity, and Steve and I figured the time was ripe to move on. We sold EC to our third partner and opened up shop as Mad Science Media (the present -day publishers of Comiculture).

At Mad Science, we worked on the concept of Internet Comics- but the technology of both the Internet and computers of the day was too limited to create a viable experience (this was before Flash existed). Years later, companies like Icebox and Stan Lee Media would burn through millions of dollars trying to get the same thing off the ground- perhaps it's for the best that we didn't make much headway.

I eventually drifted back into the corporate world when I accepted a position at Mattel, as a concept designer for their Media division. I moved into their ToyLab division, where I helped to design concepts for futuristic toys. Nothing like a room full of headless, talking Barbies to start the workday right!

Mattel eventually dissolved the ToyLab division, and I jumped into the "dot.com" world as the Creative Director for ToyTime.com, an eToys ripoff. Considering that the original eToys went down the tubes despite their popularity, I figure ToyTime never had a chance. I have plenty of great stories from those days of Internet insanity, so it makes up for the worthless stock option agreement I still have filed away.

My stint at ToyTime eventually led to a Creative Director position at FoxKids.com, the website for the now-defunct Fox Kids TV network. It was a blast working on websites of such popular properties as Digimon and Power Rangers, and especially getting feedback from kids about what they want from a website (the answer: more games!).

As of this writing, I'm back in the freelance world, and part of that involves my new project, An Alien Ate My Brain. I'm looking forward to developing more projects in both the print and the online space- and I'm pretty sure Comiculture is where you'll see them first!