GRAND BLANC, MI -- The best career move Ryan Stegman ever made was getting a degree in English, rendering himself virtually unemployable, and sitting in his bedroom drawing pictures of superheroes.

Stegman, 31, of Grand Blanc, draws Spider-Man -- and not just for fun anymore.

The Marvel Comics artist recently achieved a lifelong dream, drawing the first three issues of the brand new "Superior Spiderman" series that launched this year.

"I always told people that (drawing comic books) was what I wanted to do. And even before college I had the discussion with my dad and he said, 'Well, you should go to college because you worked hard enough to go to a good school and you'll always have a fallback.' And obviously my fallback wasn’t a fallback," he said with a laugh.

Stegman, who grew up in Troy, had always wanted to draw comic books--especially Spider-Man. It was a goal he let fall to the wayside during his five years at Michigan State University while he bounced between majors, but once school was almost through he found himself, quite literally, back at the drawing board.

"When I was in my fifth year, I got really serious about it then and started drawing again. And my skills that I developed in high school had actually regressed and I had to relearn a lot of things, and I had to spend a lot of long hours in my bedroom trying to figure it out," he said.

The long hours paid off, but not without plenty of continued hard work. Stegman first teamed up with a writer to launch a small, five-issue series that was picked up by a British publisher. He later found work drawing the comic book adaptation of the fantasy novel, "The Magician's Apprentice."

Soon after he started, that company was bought by Marvel--the company Stegman had always wanted to work for and that publishes some of the most well-known superheroes of all time, including The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and, of course, Spider-Man.

He's not sure how it happened, but at one point he was called upon to fill in and draw for an issue -- #665 -- of "The Amazing Spider-Man."

Though he said he never thought of Spider-Man as his favorite character, looking back he realizes it must have been because of all the times he'd drawn the character as a kid.

"As soon as I started drawing it I felt like I was home," he said.

When Marvel published the final issue, #700 of "The Amazing Spider-Man," the cover listed all the artists and writers who had worked on it over the years. Some names were bigger than others, but Stegman's was one of them, right along some of the artists he'd looked up to as a kid.

"I believe that it’s the greatest comic book series ever, and I had worked on it," he said.

From then on out, he kept telling his bosses that he wanted to continue work on Spider-Man.

His work on the one Spider-Man issue he'd done caught the attention of one Marvel editor in charge of Spider-Man and led to him working on a spin-off series called "Scarlet Spider."

He had no idea what was in the works, but when "The Amazing Spider-Man" came to an end, Marvel launched a new series -- "Superior Spider-Man"-- and that he would be the one to draw issue one.

He called the experience, "insane."

Grand Blanc native Kiel Phegley, a comic book expert who writes for the website Comic Book Resource, said he thinks part of the reason Stegman was chosen was because he was so popular with the fans in his "Scarlet Spider" work. He thinks it was a wise choice since the new "Superior" series is controversial among fans. In it, Spider-Man's enemy Dr. Octopus has taken over Spider-Man's body and is functioning as the new Spider-Man.

"Here’s this controversial story but we’re putting a fan favorite artist to lead the way," is how Phegley described the situation.

Now Stegman works six days a week from a studio in the basement of his Grand Blanc home. He said his studio is typically littered with spent coffee mugs and piles of sketches and other comic books that are there for inspiration.

He had the honor of launching the "Superior Spider-Man" series, but he's a member of a team of artists who work on the book. New issues come out twice a month, a schedule Stegman said no artist would be able to keep up with.

He's responsible for drawing every fifth issue of the series. Marvel sends him a movie-like script that breaks down the story panel-by-panel. Stegman's job is to bring that to life.

It's work, but it's still also play.

"There’s pages where you’re just getting through story stuff, where you’re not getting to draw a big action scene, and that can get tedious at times, but it’s still fun because it’s still drawing," he said.

It's so fun, in fact, that he had to force himself to take one day a week off.

"I had to talk myself into taking Saturdays off. I had to put a cap on how much I was going to work every day, and to be honest I, would just keep doing it if I had my way because I just really doing it. But with family and everything I have to get myself to stop," he said.

Stegman has kept the traditional Spider-Man look, he said, but "tweaked it" in places. Spider-Man's eyes now have a more goggle-like look to them in honor of Dr. Octopus, and Spider-Man now has retractable talons as part of the suit.

Since the story revolves a bad guy trying to redeem himself in a good guy's body -- and struggling with that -- he said he tried to give the series a "darker" feel with his art.

Despite the controversial twist to the Spider-Man story, Stegman said he's still happy to be on the job, and that it continues for some time.

"I’d like to just have a long run on it where that can kind of be my career-defining work, but beyond that I’d like to won my own stuff and create my own characters," he said.