About Me

Hi, I’m Michael Snead, writer and artist of Harold. 

I am a high school English & Journalism teacher in Virginia, and increasingly a comics artist on the side, squeezing it all in alongside being a husband and a dad.

I have a lifelong love of comics, going back to the age of three or four, when my father handed me some of his old comic books--Action Comics, Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos, Green Lantern, and a bunch of other random things (some of which I still have!).

My pursuit of art largely springs from that early exposure to comic books, I think; I have always wanted to be able to draw those pictures, and to try and create my own iconic characters. By the end of high school, my plan was to go to art school, and then work in comics.

This was not, as it turned out, what happened.

I left art school after one semester, for a variety of reasons, and went on to get a degree in English. The new plan was that art would continue to be the thing I did on my own, without professors telling me what to do and how to do it (Oh, the arrogance of 18-year-old me).

This was also not what happened.

During my college years, I continued to read comics, but did less and less art as I became busier with school work (and video games, if we’re being totally honest here). Random doodles in notebooks became the extent of my artistic endeavors.

 I largely drifted away from reading comics in my post-college years, both because I didn’t have the money for them, and because I lost interest in many of the stories (a notable exception is Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series, which I’ve never stopped following). 

That might have been the end of that--abandoning the things we love because we get older and busier is kind of a normal thing, isn’t it?--but a number of factors brought me back to both comics and art after the better part of a decade away from both. (I’ll elaborate on those factors in the next few weeks.)

www.haroldcomic.com represents my return to that old dream, with characters I love, and a story I’d want to read. Thanks for being a part of that--I hope you’ll stick around!

Like I said, future blog updates will explore the process I go through as I work on each page, lessons I’ve learned along the way, the influences that brought me back to art and comics, the comics I love the best, and more. Come back every Thursday for more.

Thanks!