EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of a series of Saturday profiles of area residents and their stories. To suggest a profile, contact features editor Burton Cole at bcole@tribtoday.com.

BOARDMAN — At 11, Andrew Rostan, now 36, discovered his life’s calling while navigating his way around Monkey Island.

One of the first of a second generation of graphic role-playing computer games, the Monkey Island series told interactive stories. The player’s choices along the way would determine the outcome of the story.

“You’re a pirate-in-training in these games, and you have all these crazy adventures in the Caribbean. They were games that required a lot of thought. They were big stories,” Rostan said.

“I realized that somebody had written those stories, somebody had written that dialogue. I’d been sketching out ideas for things like that all my life. I thought, ‘I could do that. I want to be a writer.”

So a writer he became.

Rostan’s first graphic novel, “An Elegy for Amelia Johnson,” was listed as a top 10 graphic novel of 2011 by USA Today.

The novel is illustrated by Kate Kasenow. “She is one of the most brilliant artists in the country,” Rostan proclaimed.

In March 2006, the television game show “Jeopardy!” allowed, for the first time ever, prospective contestants to take their initial tests online. Before then, they would have to travel to Los Angeles or another big city just to have a shot at the show.

“I was a junior in college,” Rostan said, “I was living in Boston, Mass., and I always wanted to be on the game. I had been on the Academic Challenge team at Boardman High School back in the day, and I’d always loved anything that involved trivia.”

After passing that initial online test, the producers invited Rostan to a personal audition in Boston, where he played a mock game.

“They had the real buzzers like they used on TV,” he said. “They wanted people who could play the game and had personality.”

Seven months of silence followed. Rostan moved to L.A. for his last semester of college in 2007. He was unpacking his belongings in his new apartment when the call came.

“‘We want you on ‘Jeopardy!’ next month,'” they said. “Instead of flying across the country to be on the show, it was just a 45-minute” jaunt.

Rostan won five shows in a row, losing on the sixth but then making a seventh appearance on the Tournament of Champions.

“The funny thing is that I am, to this day, very good friends with the two guys who beat me,” he said.

This experience became the basis for Rostan’s second graphic novel with Kasenow. Published by Archaic Comics in the fall of 2018, it’s a memoir of his “Jeopardy” adventure. It is appropriately titled “Form of a Question.”

Rostan is a 2003 graduate of Boardman High School. He followed that with undergraduate studies at Emerson College in Boston.

“My initial goal was to write a movie. I went to Emerson to learn the basics of film production and took all the screenwriting courses I could take,” he said.

In Los Angeles, Rostan found that “it takes a certain type of temperament to make a film and I did not have that. That’s when I fell into comics. I had learned how to tell stories using visuals and dialogue. So many of those lessons perfectly applied to the comics world. It was not a big leap.”

In September 2009, Rostan moved to Chicago, where he now serves as a legal assistant at a law firm. “It’s strictly clerical work,” he said. “It pays well enough but more importantly, it doesn’t overtax me mentally. It leaves me time and mental energy to write.”

Recently, Rostan visited his family in Boardman for the holidays. Boardman remains close to his heart.

“I grew up in the suburbs where it was nice and quiet. I learned to appreciate a nice quiet life in a quiet space. In Boardman, I had room to do the things I wanted and needed to do without many pressures,” he said.

Last year, Rostan participated in book signings at comic conventions in Chicago, Seattle, San Diego and New York. He continues to work on his third graphic novel.