I always liked drawing. When I was a little child, I loved reading comics and drawing them, thinking that, in the future, some day, I would be good enough to draw comics on a professional level.

The first comics I remember I drew were when I was 7, in 1980. Back in these days, I was living in Argentina. 1980 was a great year to be 7 years old: it was the time of the Pocketeers, the first arcade games were on the arcade galleries, the Return of the Jedi was a success on the local theaters, and we were too young to get our minds absorbed by disco music. And, like most 7 year old kids, I LOVED drawing, and I LOVED Bic pens to doodle.

Back by then, I loved funny animals, like those I could watch on the pre-cable TV Saturday Morning Shows: Wally Gator, Mighty Mouse, Top Cat, Tom & Jerry, the WB family, and so on; and like those I could read on Walt Disney's Magazines. I loved funny animals, they were my favorite, and I loved cartoons over "realistic" drawings.

My first creatures were a horse and a rabbit. Well, something I believed that looked like a rabbit. His head was a circle with a naiveish face (uh, "minimalistic" sounds better) and a couple of ovals over his head, supposedly, the ears. This character was my "generic character" for many years, probably because he was simple to draw.

The horse was a little more complex. Or so I thought in the time. I don't have any surviving doodle of the time, but I've done a sketch of him as I used to draw him by then, there, at the left. The basic design of this horse survived the time and it's the same I use 'till now every time I draw a horse.

I'm very fond of these little creatures. They may look awkward and primitive, but they were my first characters. They were almost like real friends for the young person I was at the time, and I owe them the interest for anthropomorphic creatures I've kept since then. Without them, you wouldn't enjoy my comics, like Alice Otter, nor my drawings.