As a young child I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes. In elementary school, there was a classmate of mine who owned the entire english collection of Inu Yasha, and another student owned Fruits Basket, and were known to loan books out to their classmates, including me. In retrospect, these books weren’t exactly age appropriate for 8-year-olds, but nonetheless they were my first exposure to Japanese manga, which would go on to be the majority of what I read in the sequential art format.

Throughout middle school and early high school, I bought nearly every single manga and comic book title being sold at my school’s Scholastic Book fair. Me and my two closest friends in middle school were known for carrying journals around at all times, inside of which we were all working on our own fantasy novels. One of these friends gifted me a handmade sketchbook for my birthday, inside of which I wrote my first manga. Meanwhile, I was drawing obsessively, especially because I found school incredibly boring and it kept me entertained. By high school, these two interests converged, and I’ve been writing comics ever since.  

Around the internet I’m known as EnchantedPencil, which reflects my love of fantasy stories. Angels, demons, magical curses, and fantasy creatures. To a lesser extent I also love to read and write science fiction, and even my fantasy stories have magic systems which follow strict and logical rules. I like smaller stories. Stakes are low, characters fight for the sake of their lives and relationships more often than they fight for the sake of the world. All of my stories, in one way or another, explore themes of identity, gender, and the relationship between the body and the mind, which isn’t too surprising given my trans non-binary identity.

During a normal work week, I spend 6-10 hours a day drawing comics. On the weekends, I spend that same amount of time working on commissions, writing, or drawing fun art for myself. Sometimes I stream my work on Twitch, especially when I’m drawing pages from Cursed, my graphic novel series. During my free time I’m playing video games or performing music.

I’m fast at drawing, but comic books still take a long time to produce. A page can take anywhere from 2 to 20 hours to draw, but on average, my webcomic The Roommate From Hell takes 4 hours per page, while Cursed pages take 8. Writing, revising, storyboarding and thumbnailing adds even more time. 

I identify as non-binary- neither male nor female. I use the gender neutral pronoun "they" instead of "he" or "she." Grammatically, you use "they" the same way you would when talking about a person whose gender you don't know. "Yesterday I found $20 on the ground. I didn't know who it belonged to, otherwise I would have returned it to them." Optionally, you can use the word "themself" in place of "themselves." "Micah describes themself as a comic creator."  You can read more about gender neutral personal pronouns here.