My friend, Jeff

We all have someone we look up to, someone who inspires and awes you, who motivates and challenges you by their example.

 

Mine was my best friend.

 

I met Jeff Vlaming when we both worked in the advertising department of our college newspaper. We hit it off right from the start, and for the next 40 years, we kept each other laughing and endlessly discussing movies, TV shows, books, comics, and music.

 

I’ve never known anyone else like him, his talent bursting out in all directions at once. 

 

Jeff sold his first TV script while still living in Minneapolis. When he and his wife, Kathy, made the move to California, he beat the odds by getting his first staff writer position on the critical favorite, Northern Exposure. From there, he moved to The X-Files and began a long career writing and producing for many popular sci-fi and horror genre shows, including Weird Science; Xena, Warrior Princess; Battlestar Galactica; Reaper; Fringe; Teen Wolf; Hannibal; Outcast; The 100; and Debris.

 

He was a success in Hollywood, but he could have been an artist, a cartoonist, a musician, a comedian, a model-maker – he was, in fact, all those things at one point or another – and more. 

 

He made super-8 movies from junior high through college – epic movies with costumes and sets he created, and locations cleverly chosen to suggest futuristic structures, medieval times, or jungle and desert landscapes – wherever his story needed to be set.

 

He was in two different garage bands, and wrote and recorded his own songs. He played the piano like he was born with his fingers on the keys.

 

He dabbled in standup comedy and performed in an improv troupe.

 

He wrote a two-act play as the thesis for the Masters degree he earned in 2018. He turned an unsold screenplay into a full-length novel.

 

He had a movie script optioned, and when the production didn’t happen, he filmed a preview for investors in hopes of making it himself.

 

Most recently, he fulfilled a long ambition by writing and illustrating a graphic novel that combined his interests in detective stories, monsters, and period storytelling.

 

And through everything, year in, year out, there was the doodling – the quirky drawings, caricatures, and non sequitur gags that would gush like a firehose from his pen onto whatever paper or napkin was in front him. 

 

He was fearless in attempting new things and humble despite all of his abilities, with a warmth and good humor and vibrancy that attracted people to him like moths drawn irresistibly to a bright light.

 

To know Jeff was to be inspired, encouraged, and supported by him in all the things you attempted. I will always be in awe of him – and never more so than in knowing how hard he fought for every day of the last two years before he was taken from us all by cancer at the end of January.

 

I've had, and will have, other inspirations, other role models. But there will never be another one like Jeff. 

 

Thank you for everything, my friend.