Commander Mark was the boss. Never did have the guts to send my drawings to him in fear he wouldn’t show it during an episode.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

He wore bright red military coveralls with a bandoleer filled with — not bullets, but magic markers.

Back in the 1980s and early '90s, millions of children tuned in to PBS to watch Commander Mark create magical worlds with his pen, teaching them how to draw along the way.

Born in Ohio, Mark Kistler grew up in Southern California, the youngest of five kids with a single mother who worked as a nurse.

In his approach, kids learn about composition, shading, foreshortening and other techniques in a fun environment that emphasizes practice over perfection.

He, too, believes it is a skill, not a talent, that humans have used to communicate for thousands of years, since they began making marks on cave walls long before formal written language.

His hope from the start was that his lessons might lay the groundwork for future engineers or scientists to design solutions to something big.

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