Usagi Yojimbo

Just like every other boy in Ms. Shine's 1989 kindergarten class, I was a huge fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I collected the action figures, and would collect all the action figures, play with them, and then leave them strewn across my bedroom floor, to which my mom would remark about how it looked like a tornado/hurricane/earthquake had hit my room. My room was apparently a bigger magnet for natural disasters than a Florida trailer park on the San Andreas fault.

Although I had a pretty sizable collection of TMNT action figures, there was one I always wanted, but never got

I'm not sure whether I liked him because he was a bunny, a samurai, or if it was because he had the name "Jimbo" embedded into his surname, but something about this character struck a chord with me. I was obsessed with him, despite the fact that I had never even seen him in the cartoon series.

At one point, my cat had a litter of kittens, and I named one of them Usagi Yojimbo. I remember that a couple of college girls came to adopt a kitten, and when they picked Usagi Yojimbo, I got upset and started crying, and in an effort of pacification, they told me that they would keep his name. I'm pretty sure that it didn't make me feel better at the time, but to this day, I get a perverse sense of pride thinking about how these girls were stuck with a really stupid name for their cat.

Experimenting around with a new style. Check out Javas.deviantart.com to see stuff from the guy I was trying to emulate.