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projects to dinner parties with Patrick Stewart and Wendy Neuss. Warren’s almost superhuman, I tell you.

So, not to be too maudlin, I’m going to sign off, here, and remember what the world was like last week at this time.

Maybe I’ll go get a New York Strip steak from the grocery store, and a six pack of Red Stripe, and grill myself up a steak dinner and drink five of those beers. I’ll leave the last one in the back of the fridge for a while, in honor of my brother-in-law’s best pal, J.P., and how that tattooed, drunken delinquent would come over to my house and cause trouble and tell lies in a too-loud voice while he ate all my food and drank all my beer…

…but he never would take the last one.

The Last Boy on Earth September 21, 2001

Back in 1996, when I was working on the Casual Heroes series bible for Image/Motown editor Tom Fassbender, and putting the finishing touches on the script for the never-produced Casual Heroes #4, I started to get real ly interested in retro-fitting my imagination into existing superheroes. As an exercise, really, because I’m not too keen on following the path others have already trod… I just wanted to see if I could do it. The problem was, I don’t really dig on the superheroes. The missus tried to get me over this problem by asking me what stuff I did like. Back then, I really was enjoying Neil Gaiman’s work on Sandman ; I was really inter ested in his reimagination of an entire worldview… I mean, Neil didn’t retain much of anything of the first Sandman . Tied in loosely, it became its own thing. I really admired that, and set out to do the same thing to one of the comics I liked quite a bit as a kid: Kamandi . I figured I’d keep the whole teen-out-of-his-element thing. I also figured I couldn’t not have talk ing animals. Right? I sent it to a few folks over at DC; my pal Patty Jeres, for one, couldn’t have been more enthusiastic and helpful. The notes she gave on this thing has informed nearly everything I’ve written since then. She’s one smart cook ie. But for several reasons, ol’ Mike Carlin gave it a pass. I noodled around with it for a few years, thinking I could do something with it for my own publishing house, but… there are just some things that are too strongly their own thing, and I couldn’t make it work in any other setting. I figured

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