Talking Terminal Lance and White Donkey, with Maximilian Uriarte

Military Veterans in Creative Careers

Maximilian Uriarte shares his experience going from an 0351 in the Marines to having an insane number of followers due to his military comic, "Terminal Lance." He studied art after the military at the California College of the Arts, and hopes to one day have an animation studio of his own.

What is Terminal Lance? Check him out at: http://terminallance.com

Terminal Lance is a comic created by Lance Corporal Maximilian Uriarte, USMC. The idea behind Terminal Lance is to poke fun at the Marine Corps with an emphasis on the grunt Lance Corporal’s point of view. As an 0351, this is a point of view he's very familiar with.

Here's what he has to say about who he is: My name is Max, I was an 0351 Assaultman stationed in Hawaii. I’ve been to Iraq twice, first as a turret gunner of an MRAP in 2007-2008 in the Zaidon region. My second deployment in 2009, my artistic talents brought me to the world of Combat Art and Combat Photography. I worked with our ComCam shop for the entire deployment and got to travel all over Iraq shooting photos and sketching Marines at work. Aside from that, in my 4 years in the Corps I’ve been a SMAW Gunner, Team Leader, Squad Leader, .50Cal Gunner, Combat Photographer, and a Combat Artist.

I have since moved on, I EAS’d in May of 2010 and am currently residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. I recently received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation at the California College of the Arts in Oakland and am seeking to make a career out of animating and storyboarding.

Max ran an amazing Kickstarter campaign, which you can see here.

And now you can buy the book on Amazon!

THE BOOK: A graphic novel of war and its aftermath.

A powerful, compulsively page-turning, vivid, and moving tribute to the experience of war and PTSD, The White Donkey tells the story of Abe, a young Marine recruit who experiences the ugly, pedestrian, and often meaningless side of military service in rural Iraq. He enlists in hopes of finding that missing something in his life but comes to find out that it's not quite what he expected. Abe gets more than he bargained for when his journey takes him to the middle east in war-torn Iraq.