From 2003 to 2006, he lived and worked in Japan as an assistant English teacher with the JET Program.
In 2007, he received a Xeric Grant for Comic Book Self-Publishers that allowed him to work on his graphic novel Tōnoharu.
[1] He went back to Japan in 2008 to study East Asian calligraphy with a two-year research scholarship from the Japanese government.
[3] Tōnoharu is the story of Dan Wells, an American assistant English teacher in rural Japan.
It is a self-deprecatory, tender and humorous description of the daily life of an isolated dull unimaginative foreigner in a country whose language he does not master.