Brief Biography Julian Darius is the author of several books, including non-fiction, poetry, and graphic novel scripts. He has attended seven colleges (including two in France), holds a master's degree in English, and has presented at several international scholarly conferences. He is presently pursuing a doctorate in English and a second master's degree in French at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he also teaches. Childhood The son of a professor of film and theatre, Julian Darius was born Julian Darius Bukalski on 6 October 1976 in Carbondale, Illinois, where his father chaired the film department. His brother and only sibling Brendan was born in August 1978. In 1979, his family moved to Burke, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. -- then, in 1980, to Columbus, Ohio, before returning to Burke. His family next moved to Pasadena, California, outside Los Angeles -- then, in 1984, to Edwardsville, Illinois, where Darius attended third to twelfth grade. In third grade, he began skipping math class to work instead out of college textbooks, spotting mistakes in the same. School administrators offered his parents the chance to let Julian skip a grade, but they worried this would stunt his social development and refused. Taking extracurricular summer classes at his father's university, he learned the Apple Basic computer language and began designing simple movies and games, including one that simulated global thermonuclear war. In high school, Darius dedicated himself to becoming a writer, producing several thousand pages, mostly of novels and screenplays. He graduated Edwardsville High School in 1994. Antioch College After examining multiple schools in search of something different than what he saw as the assembly line method of high school education, Darius chose Antioch College (in Yellow Springs, Nebraska) -- one of the most liberal schools in the country. Depressed, in the summer of 1994 he visited the campus with his girlfriend and his mother in order to remember that the fall held something worthwhile. Antioch advertised itself as a safe haven for people who were different, and Darius began attendeding in the fall of 1994. It was a traumatic time for Darius, whose liberal views were severely challenged in this period. At Antioch, he encountered the darkness of political correctness. Seeing the hypocrisy of a place that stood for tolerance but only when it came to the most radical causes, he began making satirical propaganda directly reversing propaganda already on campus. These flyers were universally torn down. One, on his dormatory door, was torn down three times on the first day it was up, leading him each time to repost the flyer along with a new response. Soon he was being denounced in the school newspaper on a weekly basis, labeled with reactionary words like "fascistic" or "homophobic" when he was openly against the same. He began responding with letters to the editor and editorials of his own. In turn, he began receiving death threats, was pounded with snowballs, and had a group of angry students storm his dormatory room and refuse to leave until he explained why he was a fascist. Already a depressive, he began literally hanging out of windows and contemplating suicide. His friends began warning him to stop speaking for his own safety; one sent a copy of the most recent school newspaper to his parents, with the multiple attacks upon him circled along with a warning to take Julian away immediately, despite being in the middle of a term. Darius, however, decided to finish out his term, feeling a responsibility to campaign for reform as long as he was a part of the community needing that reform. Spring 1995 would be his last semester. Lawrence University Darius would deal with post-traumatic stress over his time at Antioch, which combined with his depression to paralyze him. Encouraged by his family, he transferred to Lawrence University (in Appleton, Wisconsin) for the Fall 1995 term. The 1995-1996 school year would be a period of adjustment, during which time he began seriously writing poetry and comic book scripts. During the summer of 1996, Darius tried something different: he cut his long hair and acquired a wardrobe of jackets and suits. The following school year would be triumphal. Darius joined the Yuais, a Bacchanalian coeducational fraternity of artists and social outsiders (that had once been a regular fraternity until its black and gay President and Vice-President had proposed letting women in). He also began acquiring a reputation on the small campus for his intellect. In 1995, while at Lawrence, Darius learned the HTML programming language and started JulianDarius.com. The site went through many incarnations, first as a student website, then as another, and finally in February 2001 as PersianCaesar.com. JulianDarius.com replaced PersianCaesar.com in 2004, although the former had automatically forwarded to the latter since August 2002. Darius graduated magna cum laude from Lawrence University in 1998 with a B.A. in English. He wrote a novel, entitled The Last Gospel, as an honors project and was awarded the Alice S. Diderrich Award for Literary Excellence. A Year Off Taking a year off during the 1998-1999 school year, Darius worked and informally studied French before living briefly in Omaha, Nebraska. Shortly after graduation from Lawrence, Darius began presenting at international academic conferences. From August 1998 to August 2002, he would present some fifteen papers on film, literature, and comic books. Carbondale From 1999-2002, Darius attended Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, teaching four classes and earning an M.A. in English. During this time, he also studied at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and in Lyon, France. He graduated with a perfect graduate grade point average of 4.0, taking almost a Ph.D. worth of coursework as well as classes in French and Philosophy. His 200-page master's thesis, entitled Early America in Milton: Miltonic Anxiety over America as Ideal State and Milton as "American", was judged of dissertation quality and length. During this time, Darius also continued his writing. In January 2002, his essay "Car Crash Crucifixion Culture" saw publication in Car Crash Culture (Saint Martin's Press): reviewers called it "thoughtful and persuasive" with "far-reaching interpretive panache." But Carbondale wasn't all roses. In his first term of graduate school, Julian fell off his bicycle while leaving school for the day. The next thing he remembered, he was strapped in an ambulance, not knowing which way was up and being told not to move lest he paralyze himself. As it turned out, he had a skull fracture. His skull was split from behind one ear to his sinus cavity behind his nose. One side of his brain was bleeding through his ear, leaving thick blood on the white pillow in the hospital, and the other side of his brain was bruised. Along with portions of the skin on every limb, half his face had been scraped off, including more than half of his eyebrows, which he was told would not grow back. Witnesses would later say that he had gotten up after his spill, babbled, and collapsed in his own blood -- only to repeat the process. His blood had to be mopped up from the pavement. In the hospital, hoping he didn't have brain damage, he had come to terms with being horribly facially scarred for the rest of his life, thinking of all that would entail. He had not been wearing a helmet. Darius recovered from his injuries remarkably well. Feeling impotent, he (perhaps stupidly) returned to school and work after only one week. His brain was not permanently damaged, and his short term memory slowly returned. Though for a time he could not recognize himself in the mirror, his face eventually healed by itself. And he had learned from the experience. Julian was also in Carbondale when 9/11 happenned. His mother had telephoned him on 11 September 2001 to tell him. Empathically identifying with the dead and those affected, he was horrifically upset and can still be caught, on occasion, crying about it to this day. He could not go to classes for about a week, and even then the visions of people jumping from the towers plagued him. That term he would receive two incompletes for the first time since his first term of college. Hawaii In August 2002, Darius relocated to Hawaii to study for his Ph.D. in English at University of Hawaii at Manoa. In August 2004, he began working concurrently on an M.A. in French. He also studied again in France, this time in Annecy during Summer 2003. In August 2002, during his first month in Hawaii, he started Sequart.com, a website devoted to comic book scholarship, using his own online comic writing as the basis. Originally called ContinuityPages.com, the site changed its name in April 2004. It is expected to exceed 500,000 visitors in 2004. In February 2004, he scored a perfect score on the Analytical Writing portion of the Graduate Record Exam (or GRE, the test of record for prospective graduate students).

MORE INFORMATION Curriculum Vitae (Microsoft Word file) My résumé. Presently incomplete. Class History A summary of all college courses I have taken or taught. Julian Darius Chronology, 1976-1988 (76K or 399K JPEG file) A relic from my childhood, made for a class assignment in 1988 from photographs and print-outs from an Apple II computer on construction paper.