Rogers was born in the Flushing neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens, and raised there and in Ardsley, New York. He took up mechanical drawing in high school, and then attended Kent State University in Ohio, where he studied architecture. He said later that he felt this\n', '

He studied architectural drawing, and his work was characterized by detailed rendering of buildings and structures.\n', '

He left college in 1971 before graduating, and returned home to New York, where he discovered his family was moving to Denver, Colorado, where his father\'s employer, Johns Manville, was relocating. Opting to remain, he completed a 52-page story he had begun in college and presented it in 1972 as a sample to Marvel Comics production manager John Verpoorten, who found Rogers\' work wanting. To earn a living, Rogers did illustrations for men\'s magazines that he described as "[r]eal low-grade schlock sleazo magazines that had illustrations to precede the stories". When one client went bankrupt owing him at least $1,000, a friend, Jim Geraghty, offered him a rent-free house for the winter in Easthampton, New York, on Long Island, in exchange for "four or five illustrations" for a local art project. The following summer he worked in a hardware store for several months, was fired, and while living on unemployment benefits approached the short-lived Atlas/Seaboard Comics and, he said:\n', '

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