My name is Andy Yanchus. I’m 77 years old, semi-retired and live in Brooklyn, New York.

I started building plastic model kits in the early 1950s. It was a hobby that grew into an obsession that lead to a full time occupation. For about nine years I worked in the Research & Development Dept. of Aurora Plastics/Products where I started by designing and sculpting the patterns for many HO scale Model Motoring slot cars. Eventually, I became a Project Manager for the hobby kit line and developed such series as Scene Machines, Snap-A-Roos, Prehistoric Scenes and Comic Scenes.

After Aurora, I switched gears and turned another hobby into full time work. I spent almost 17 years coloring comic books for Marvel, with significant runs on X-Men, Incredible Hulk, Alpha Flight, Doctor Who, Marvel Tales (reprints of early Spider-Man and Doctor Strange) and the Marvel Universe Handbook. I even did a little on G.I. Joe.

I’ve also been able to write about model building and kit collecting in both fan publications and professional magazines such as Starlog, Fantasy Modeling and Collecting Scale Models. In 2014 I co-authored a book on the creation of Aurora’s Monster Scenes. StarRunn, my business name and identity on Flickr, is derived from the titles of my first two regular columns.