John Howe was born in
Vancouver, British Columbia. He was drawing from pre-school age, with his mother's help. Around primary school age he found his mother's ability no longer living up to his expectations, and even got frustrated once at both his mother and himself at not being able to draw a cow to his expectations. Howe's school years were complicated by moves which took place with a timing that left the art classes full, and left him in classes like power mechanics. He did find his ability as a draughtsman to be profitable in biology class though, where he and a friend would produce renderings of microscopic organisms for classmates at fifty cents each. As a child, he collected the covers of paperbacks. His collection included items from
Frank Frazetta,
Barry Smith, and
Bernie Wrightson. In his adolescence, Howe read
The Lord of the Rings trilogy by
J. R. R. Tolkien. He said he got "a real spark" from the
Tolkien Calendars of paintings by
the Brothers Hildebrandt, which showed him that
Tolkien's books could be illustrated. Howe made drawings of his own versions of the scenes depicted in the calendar. These drawings, according to Howe, may not have survived. A year after his high school graduation, Howe moved to
Strasbourg, France to attend college. The following year, he enrolled into the
École des arts décoratifs. He cites his experience of this period as follows: Throughout his first years in Europe, Howe was taking in as much as he could in the way of art, architecture and everything that was "simultaneously ancient and novel." He says the only piece of his art work that survived from this period is his "The Lieutenant of the Black Tower of
Barad-dûr", a piece inspired by Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings. He says if this is not his first published piece, it must certainly be the earliest. Howe's earliest commissions included political cartoons, magazine illustrations, comics, animated films, advertising, of which he says were nightmares. He said that he would end up redoing sketches so many times that there was nothing left of "his" in them. This frustrated him, and he wondered how he would ever make it in the profession. ==Career==