In junior high school Fisher went to live with his father in Custer, South Dakota; his mother and stepfather soon moved back to Coronado, and he came every summer to visit.

[1] Fisher decided he wanted to be a comic book artist after attending his first San Diego Comic-Con when he was a freshman in college, circa 1991.

[1][2] After graduating from Colorado College in 1994[3] (with a degree in mathematics),[4] Fisher went to Japan with the JET Programme, to teach English in a rural Japanese high school on the small Oki Islands.

Fisher studied the intricacies of manga, and wanted to go to a country where an adult could read a comic book in public without feeling the need to hide it behind a copy of Newsweek.

[5]A lot of the editors said: “We love what you are doing, but it’s not like anything we have seen before so we don’t want to take the chance.”[7] Eventually, Happydale was picked up by Jim Valentino for his Non-Line imprint, which folded when the book was half-done.

[1][3] After the game was completed, Fisher came back to DC with art samples and a story idea he pitched to editor Joey Cavalieri.

However, after a brainstorming session, the idea was shelved and it was decided to have the presented art style as a starting point for a Hal Jordan story.

[8]At SDCC '00, Shelly Bond, Fisher's editor at Vertigo, introduced him to writer Jonathan Vankin and asked them to come up with a story set in Japan as she knew both of them had experience living there.

Tokyo as well as a Batman story with Dan Curtis Johnson and J. H. Williams III (that wouldn't be released until three years later as "Snow" arc of Legends of the Dark Knight series).

[11] After finishing those projects, he contributed two fill-in issues to his then-favorite ongoing,[2][10] John Arcudi and Tan Eng Huat's Doom Patrol.

[2][12] After the expiration of his exclusive contract with DC (signed in 2001,[13] renewed in 2002[14]), Fisher took another break from comics to focus on his marriage and, later, the birth of son.

[15] In the meantime, he produced album covers in Finland and his adopted home of Japan,[16][17] as well as some work for QuickJapan magazine and Dentsu ad agency.

Zeb Wells, writer of the eventual mini-series, recalled in an October 2005 interview, I got a call from Cory Sedlmeier at Marvel saying that they wanted to get a Fantastic Four/Iron Man story together for Seth to draw.