Gary Bueno

Raised by the local library and the Sunday funny pages, Gary Bueno grew up in a small Midwestern town. An early life without cable television shoehorned Gary into learning how to copy characters from checked-out Garfield books. Years later, in a junior high full of puberty and punk rock, this skill came in handy by helping him make classmates laugh at sketches of popular comic strips with "accurate" anatomical parts. He evolved and started developing his own work, but the culmination of this effort was a short stack of lame editorial cartoons for the high school paper.

After stumbling his way to a BFA, Gary belatedly realized his illustration skills wouldn't pay his soon-to-be-due student loan bills. He took his degree and sidestepped into the world of graphic design. Jobs in Ohio, Nebraska, and Colorado dotted his path to Salt Lake City, Utah. Three-fifths of a quarter of a century were gone before he was inspired to give cartooning and junior high humor another go.