Okay, okay, I'm only kidding. Actually, I've been a comics reader since I was four years old and for a large portion of years between four years old and 43 years old, I've been friends with Brian Augustyn, formerly a DC Comics editor and now a comics free-lancer. When we were 10 or 11, Brian would force me to write stories for him to draw. Many years later, after college for me and art school for him, he forced me to kibitz on comics again. He was helping a couple of kids developing a comic book called TROLLORDS (Scott Beaderstadt and Paul Frice) and asked me to offer comments. It was a rare chance to use my M.A. in Creative Writing, so what the heck!

A little later on, Brian pitched the idea of a charity comic book for the Literacy Volunteers of Chicago and asked me to script a story for the book, to be drawn by another kid he and Willie Schubert discovered--a tall, skinny, red-haired fellow named Mike Parobeck. That got me started and then Brian became an editor at NOW Comics and eventually at DC.

Low sales came only after DC had withdrawn support for the books by the way. The company never provided distribution that would put the books in the hands of the target market, i.e. young readers who had never read comics. Instead, DC just slopped the books into the direct market, adding to a growing glut. It was reported to me that when a retailer asked a DC direct market rep if he should order a lot of !mpact books, the retailer was told not to order high, but to buy more Superman instead.

The world was held together by the imagination of this team, which is why it bit the dust when the Founders were driven out of the project by Marvel editorial leadership and young Malibu editors who were desperate to keep their jobs. They lost their jobs anyway.

I shouldn't complain because I got my first assignments by being friends with an editor. But as you can see, I no longer fit into any of the above categories.