Starhawk comix

07/13/2026

06/19/2026

FEEL MY PAIN — The Birth of a Warrior Made From Fire and Loss. Back in 1990, sitting in a community‑college classroom I barely cared about, something hit me harder than any lecture ever could. I was young, on my own for the first time, staring down a future I didn’t understand. And like it always did when life got confusing, my hand started moving across the page.

That’s when he appeared.

A figure in green and yellow — masked head‑to‑toe like Spawn or Spider‑Man, but unmistakably mine. The truth is, he was green for the simplest reason imaginable:
That was the only Prismacolor pencil I had enough of to finish the drawing.
But necessity has a way of becoming destiny. That green became his identity, and that moment became mine.

Every time life knocked me sideways — losing a job, losing a relationship, losing my sense of direction — I went back to the comic.
When I didn’t know who I was, I drew.
When I didn’t know where I fit, I created a world where I did.
Every page, every panel, every new character was a map leading me back to myself.

But the piece that changed everything came later — in Las Vegas, during one of the darkest chapters of my life. Divorce. Loss. Watching dreams, property, and years of work get liquidated like they were nothing. The kind of pain that doesn’t just sit in your chest — it burns.

I couldn’t absorb any more of it.
So I did the only thing I’ve ever known how to do.
I channeled it.

And out of that pressure, out of that heartbreak, out of that fire, I created one of the most powerful images of my entire artistic life:

FEEL MY PAIN.

It wasn’t just a drawing.
It was a scream.
A purge.
A transformation.

That illustration became the moment where everything sharpened — my style, my purpose, my identity as an artist. It was the proof that even when life tries to break you, you can take the wreckage and forge something stronger than what existed before.

Because that’s what heroes do.
And that’s what I did.
I turned pain into power.
I turned loss into creation. I turned bad into good.
I turned a broken moment into one of purpose, direction, and healing. This illustration was inspired by the music of Orff: Carmina Burana, Introduction: No. 1, O Fortuna

06/12/2026

LEARNING TO FLY. In 2002, just after the Winter Olympics, I found myself in Park City, Utah, surrounded by world‑class athletes still wearing their team jackets and those iconic Roots hats everyone seemed to own. I was there for a sports medicine conference, earning credits for my Sports Massage Therapist certifications, studying anatomy by day and wandering art galleries by night. That little mountain town was buzzing with Olympic afterglow — movie stars, heads of state, elite competitors — and then there was me, a kid from a small Illinois town who suddenly realized he’d climbed into a much bigger world. My digital art was taking shape in Adobe, my therapy career was rising fast, and I was on the edge of being accepted into the Las Vegas Art Institute, eventually studying in Italy and seeing my comic work printed in newspapers and magazines. It was in that rustic downtown, walking past glowing galleries and snow‑dusted rooftops, that the first sketches for this image came to me. I was fueled by the pulse of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” Pink Floyd’s “Learning to Fly,” and The Doors’ “Break On Through.” That mix of altitude, ambition, and raw possibility hit me all at once — overwhelming, exhilarating, terrifying. I didn’t want to blow it. But doubt couldn’t be the thing I focused on. Not there. Not then. I had to look skyward, trust the momentum, and go for it. That’s where this picture was born — a moment when a small‑town kid realized his dreams weren’t just possible… they were taking flight. That is why I call this page from my comic book called Learning to Fly.

06/11/2026

WITH ARMS WIDE OPEN, I created this page of my comic book during a very specific moment in my life — the moment when “With Arms Wide Open” by Creed hit the top of the charts in 2000. That song wasn’t just background noise; it was a spark. The lyrics about beginnings, transformation, and stepping into an uncertain future with courage hit me right in the chest. It felt like the universe handing me permission to create something new — a hero born from lifelessness, stepping forward into a world that desperately needed someone to rise.

This page started humbly, just raw pencil lines on paper, the way all my early ideas did. Then came the ink, tightening the form, sharpening the silhouette. Eventually, I took a leap I’d been avoiding for years: I moved from my familiar Prismacolor pencils and markers into the world of full digital color. It was one of my first real attempts at digital painting, and it felt like crossing a threshold — just like the character in the image.

My influences were all standing behind me as I worked:
Boris Vallejo’s mythic anatomy,
Ernie Chan’s bold, confident linework,
Todd McFarlane’s kinetic energy and dramatic posing.

All of them fed into this moment, this page, this character.

Looking back, it wasn’t just a drawing — it was a snapshot of my own evolution. I was growing as an artist, but also as a person. I was learning to face life with my chest forward, my hands open, ready to take whatever came next. The page became a symbol of that era: a declaration that I was stepping into the future with arms wide open, willing to face everything with everything I had.

This page will always carry that name.
And it will always carry that meaning.

05/25/2026

My hero.. Forever and always...

04/07/2026

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03/12/2026

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