About "Komodo Jazz"

Every once in a while, when someone sees my screen name, he/she asks me what "Komodo Jazz" means. I usually give them the short version of where I came up with that name.But in order to fully explain it, I'm going to have to start at the beginning.

I'm a visually-oriented person. Always have been. While some people are musically- or intellectually-inclined, I like to look at things. I appreciate things that are visually interesting. Not just beautiful things, but also grotesque or even ugly things. After all, I found the movie Silent Hill to be visually beautiful, even though the imagery was disturbing. One of my favorite places to visit is The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The fact that I can get in for free helps, too.

I've been drawing as long as I can remember. Sure, every little child draws, but I never stopped. I think the earliest memory of me drawing is of me bringing a crayon round and round in a circle for about a minute. I didn't set out to draw anything specific, but when I was done, it looked like the top view of a bird's nest, and I proudly told my grandmother that was what it was. I started drawing people. I don't really recall drawing objects like houses or cars or the like. But I did draw people quite a bit. They consisted of just a circle with a face, maybe some hair, and a pair of stick legs and arms.

My biggest achievement around that time still hangs on the wall to this day. We were sitting in church one Sunday, and my sister and I were both doing what young children do best during a service, not paying an ounce of attention to what the preacher was saying. Instead, we were drawing. She ended up drawing two little girls, one taller than the other and wearing a wreath of flowers on her head. I think she said they were characters from Little House on the Prairie. I could be wrong; she'll probably correct me later on. It was actually really good, and I'm still impressed by it.

I drew a king. He was wearing a simple crown and a green suit. What's impressive is that he had a full body with arms, legs, hands and feet. I had given him mass. Up till then, I had only been drawing heads with stick arms and legs. Then to do something like that is amazing, especially for a four-year-old. (I think I was four. I could be wrong.) Our mother was so impressed by our drawings that she saved them and hung them on the living room wall.

I remember drawing a lot back then. I would draw dragons that were just creatures with fins on their heads. I created a superhero named Zoom Man. I don't remember what his superpower was, just that he could defeat anything that my brother drew. "Zoom Man can kill your dinosaur!"

Sometime between 1984 and 1987, I stopped drawing. I think it was because I was always hanging out with my friend Kevin. We were obsessed with the movie Red Dawn, and we would always pretend that we were part of the Wolverines and would go around killing Russians. After elementary school I went to a private Christian school and he continued in a public junior high school. We didn't hang around as much. I became a super-religious young teenager (not a good combination) and ended up condemning him for his sinful ways.

In 1987, while in attending junior high school, I rediscovered drawing and tackled it with a vengeance. I drew all the time. Mostly I drew in various themes. I started out drawing dragons. One particular dragon stands out in my memory. I drew it out of anger at my mother. She was the dragon burning the landscape with her fire, and I was a little knight trying to fight her. I still have that drawing. Another theme I used was dragonized versions of actual animals such as turtles, octopi and T-rexes.

My next theme was probably the most important. It happened when Rambo was a big craze. I would make parodies such as Rambo Brite, Bambo and Hambo. They would be decked out in machine guns, grenades, knives and rocket lauchers. Then I drew a dinosaur that similarly equipped. He had helmet sorta like a triceratops, a tattoo of an anchor on his shoulder and a throwing star dangling from his helmet. I named him Dragonfire. I thought he was so cool that I made more like him, all with a different helmet, a different function (arctic, mountain, heavy-weapons, etc.) and bearing a name that started with "Dragon-". Dragonsnow. Dragonstone. Dragonshot. Over the years, Dragonfire has gone through many makeovers. The picture above is what he looks like today.

Before I knew it, I was creating a backstory for these creatures. They were aliens come to Earth two fight an evil army of aliens called SLASH. I had to draw what the villains looked like. They came in different sizes, but mainly the same shape: dragon-like. There was Cicada, R.I.P., Empirian, Gom, Icon and Blade to name a few. But there was one that really stuck out, really struck a chord with me. He was inspired by the book Into the Out Of by Alan Dean Foster. He was a gargoyle-like creature with dark blue skin, a V-shaped head and enormous black spikes on his elbows on his elbows and knees. When I finished drawing him, I needed a name. "Komodo" was the first that came to mind.

I began drawing him as much as I drew Dragonfire. It wasn't until years later that I came to the realization that Dragonfire and Komodo were actually self-portraits. They didn't look anything like me, but they represented two sides of me. Dragonfire was the noble side that strove to fight for good and just wanted to be a good person. Komodo represented all my anger that I felt inside. Not the kind that would kill people; Komodo had actually become a good guy. His was the kind of anger that could lash out at people who were trying to hurt me.

Because he was so cool looking and I liked him so much, I started using him as screen names. Unfortunately, "Komodo" is a pretty common screen name, so I would have to settle for Komodo284. I couldn't do that, so I used his alien birth name, K'Mroda. That became my e-mail address for a long time: kmroda@-------.com. But I was never completely satisfied with that. I wanted to use "Komodo" as a screen name, but I didn't want a number at the end. I needed something original.

My initials are J. A. S. When I was little, I remember wishing that my last name started with a Z because "JAZ" sounds a lot cooler than "JAS". I decided to do something about it. When I restarted my drawing abilities in 1987, I would sign my artwork JAZ '87 (or whatever year it happened to be). My parents started calling me Jaz. It lasted all the way through high school. I stopped using it as much in college. I still use it occasionally, mostly in video games and when carving my signature into rubber stamps. Every once in a while I will hear one of my parents or a friend call me Jaz, but mainly I've let it die down.

But when coming up with my screen name, I decided to use Jaz, another part of my identity. So I tacked it on to the end and gave it that extra z, because Komodo Jaz just looks odd. Komodo Jazz gives it a certain level of coolness.

So that's the story of how I came up with my screen name. I also have others I will sometimes use. Roedt Beist. Stinju. K-Jazz. But generally I stick with Komodo Jazz.

Komodo Jazz