Andrew Bates : The Man, The Myth

Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair.

...Or Something.

I hear ya, Ozymandius. Sure, we're a global village and all, but even the bundle of tubes that is the World Wide Web has places of "lone and level sands" ...places like, say, my site. I may be a lone voice in the broadband wilderness, but that just means I can turn up the self-adulating volume without worrying about the neighbors pounding on the ceiling.

Mangled metaphors aside, here's where the personal stuff goes, such as:

Frequently Asked Questions

These, sadly, do not include "where do you get your ideas?", "how long have you been drawing?" or "are you single?" Instead, I get stuff like this:

What's with the "monkeys make stuff better"?

It's an observation I made a while back. Monkeys are inherently cool; you can't help but smile thinking about 'em. Heck, even the word "monkey" is funny. Serves as a reminder to look for what's fun in life, and not get bogged down in day-to-day drudgery.

(And, yes, I include our pals the ape family -- y'know, gorillas and chimpanzees. My apologies to any sensitive zoological types.)

So why "devilbear.net" instead of sticking with this monkey theme?

You can thank Cuddles for that. He's a possessed teddy bear. Came to life, kicking and screaming, in my college comic strip... and he's kept on kicking and screaming ever since. (You can check out the whole sordid tale of Cuddles and my comic here.) Think of him as my id wrapped in stuffing and covered in red felt.

Anyway, he's become the unofficial mascot of my life -- pretty much took over when I looked into securing a web site, hence the URL. It all works with the monkey philosophy anyway; teddy bears are the monkeys of the stuffed animal kingdom.

Besides, who wants to type "everythingisbetterwithamonkey" into a web browser?

Biography

Like the title says. Go here for a bit more on the man behind the myth. (Not as exciting as it sounds, but it'll pass the time.)

Credit Lists

You'll find samples of my work all over this site (go figure). As you'll see from my illustration and writing credits, that's the proverbial tip of the iceberg compared to all the stuff I've produced throughout my career.

Contact Information

CNN (the most trusted name in news) said a while back that about 90% of all email nowdays is spam. Looking at my in box, that's a conservative estimate. What with spambots and phishing and the like, I'm surprised when I get a legitimate email.

So, after all this, if you still want to drop me a line, use:

bates [at] devilbear [dot] net

(change the bracketed bits to "@" and ".", naturally). Anything else will get trapped in the spam filters.