T. Motley has devoted his life to creating comics and encouraging others to do the same. The creator of Hector, Aline The Alien, and much more, he has been creating comics for more than two decades and is also a sought-after cartooning instructor.

While studying at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1980s, Mot had a chance encounter with minicomics genius Matt Feazell. This inspired him, upon returning to Denver, to gather local aspiring comic artists and form the Acme Comics workshop. He soon convinced the Acme head honcho, Dennis Pimple, to spin off a minicomic distributorship, Fandom House. You can read Dennis's recollections here. In 1997, Acme morphed into the Squid Works, which is still going strong under the supervision of Mot's friend and one-time student, Stan Yan.

During the Fandom House years, Mot used up his savings publishing four issues of an ironic action comic, Steel Pulse pro-wrestling adventures, which Australia's Betty Paginated magazine recently ranked second on their list of the best wrestling comics of all time.

In the late 1980s Mot began teaching courses in Comic Strip Cartooning -- first teaching adults and teens at Colorado Free University, and later developing curricula for children through ArtReach and many other agencies in the Denver area.

In the early 1990s he hand-picked a team of cartoonists and fine artists to form Hector, an experimental comic strip in which artists took turns sharing a masthead and creating jams under various constraints. Hector strips appeared in weekly papers, literary journals, and small press zines, and was named one of Westword's Best of Denver 2000.

In 2000, Mot was invited to join the steering committee of Matt Madden's formalist group, Oubapo-America, and in 2003 he served as a consultant on the landmark comic art exhibition, No Joke: the Spirit of American Comic Books at the Mizel Center For Arts and Culture.

What is it about comics that has T. Motley so captivated? Is it that they at once move forward and yet stand still? Is it that one can show the reader one thing and tell them something else? Is it the way they seem to welcome artists and writers of every style, field of interest, and level of ability? Mot's own comics have been, well, a motley melange of lowbrow slapstick, highbrow allusions, and oddball formal play. He remains committed to the ideal of the amateur-- one who pursues a craft for the sheer love of doing it.

T. Motley lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two small daughters.