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After high school he worked for a while as an apprentice at an ad agency, but eventually he gave up drawing, got married, and worked a series of factory and contractor jobs to support his family. For the past eight years he’s been a dock supervisor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He created a dummy comic book called The Circle Unleashed, a chronicle of the adventures of four African-American superheroes led by John, a 159-year-old ex-slave who’d been captured by aliens after the Civil War. McQuay brought the dummy to the 1995 Chicago Comicon, where he says everyone but publishers wanted to buy it.
“It’s a matter of setting priorities,” he says. “Some people just want to wear a pair of $150 tennis shoes. I tell them to save some of that money–buy a $50 pair, save $100, and put together your product or take an art class or learn to create a Web page. Use your money for something other than to put something on your back–so you have a future.”
