About the Artist

Rich Rodriguez is a webmaster, a returning college student and the creator of RICKI LEE & TONY. He first conceived the characters as an undergraduate at Chapman University in Orange, California in 1993, the year the Anaheim Ducks hockey team joined the NHL as the Disney-owned Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Rich became an instant Ducks fan after seeing his first home game at the Honda Center (aka The Pond) and created RICKI LEE, her twin brother Richard (nicknamed Rico), and her boyfriend and future husband TONY in cartoons as teammates of Chapman's fictional ice hockey team. Proving that life often imitates art and embarrassed that Rich was making up stories about their athletic program, Chapman put together a real ice hockey team in the late 2000's, and like RICKI LEE on the fictional Chapman team it briefly had a lone female player among the all-male ranks.

Rich has been drawing at least since kindergarten, when his parents got him a storybook about "The Gingerbread Man" and he started drawing gingerbread men on any and every piece of paper he could find. When he learned how to draw fingers on those gingerbread hands, all hell broke loose and he was unstoppable. His drawing jones was further aided and abetted by the drawing talents of his draftsman father, Hanna-Barbera cartoons on TV, newspaper comic strips, and Mad magazine (particularly artists Don Martin and Sergio Aragones). He has lost track of how many square miles of forests he has destroyed from all the paper he's drawn and animated on since.

While at Chapman he took a class in animation from Dave Master of the renowned Rowland Animation program and killed yet more trees in learning the principles of classic animation. In recent years he has been atoning for his past transgressions against the trees by creating all-digital Adobe Flash animated videos. The Lorax gave Rich his approval and gave him a thneedle tree, which he subsequently used as firewood for family barbecues.

Recently Rich has been studying web page design at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, California. He is currently the webmaster of Immanuel First Lutheran Church in nearby West Covina, and participates in the men's ministries and choir at Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, his new church home. He hopes to move to Honolulu, Hawaii (Lord willing) after graduation from Mt. SAC. In the meantime, he does not hesitate to answer persistent questions about why RICKI LEE & TONY are written in capital letters on this page--it's actually an advertising tradition.  :)