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work from DC editors that way, anyway, so what’s the big deal? Hey, it does n’t matter if somebody tells you that you can’t eat here when there’s no food on the plate, right?

Folks got worked up about it anyway.

If you’re interested, there’s an extremely long but ultimatelyentertaining thread about this on Warren Ellis’ superlative forum on delphi, where Vertigo editor Heidi McDonald, and Brian Wood, and Kurt Busiek, and Warren Ellis try to explain that if you want to do comics, you really should just go ahead and do it. You’d think that the message there would be self evident, and yet the thread went on for 528 messages.

That was something.

Anyway, it got me thinking about back when I was trying to get into comics. I worked up a Kamandi revamp, and a Batman Elseworlds proposal, both of which you’ve probably read here. Neither went anywhere. So, instead of constantly hitting against that brick wall, and continue to pitch things that were never going to be used, or, conversely, have some editor get so sick of talking to me for eight years that they just give in and let me do something just to shut me up, I, of course, decided to go ahead and do it myself. And the thing, is, if you want to do comics, you should do this, too. Your own fate in your own hands, as it were. If you want to do comics, do comics. No one is stopping you. So I recalled the minicomic that I had written and drawn and produced. How my then-girlfriend (and now-wife) and I rented some movies and ordered some pizza and ran six hours of videos as we collated and folded and stapled and counted and boxed and shipped 2430 copies of the little twelve-pager to Capital City Distribution.

Just because I really wanted to do comics.

And then I made some T-shirts up, and some stickers, and some baseball caps, and some jackets… all to promote my little comic, and people heard about the comic because they saw the stickers and wondered where the hats came from and watched some of my pals walking around conventions with the jackets on and after a while it turned into the vast, multimedia empire we know today as AiT/Planet Lar.

I was going to tell a Rockwellian tale of inspiration with an underlying mes sage of hope with this you-can-do-it-too column, but I was having some

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