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Brian W. Schoeneman AFTERWORD

There are a couple of important things to remember when you’re the guy writing an afterword for somebody else’s book. First, nobody reads the afterword. Okay, let me caveat that: Nobody but weirdos like me who have a thing that the kids these days call a “completionist” video game player archetype ever read the afterword. So, honestly, if you’ve gotten this far, I’m already impressed. Second, if they’re reading the afterword that means they already bought the book, and they didn’t buy it for the afterword, so I can say whatever I want, which is fun. Normally, you want somebody who is well known or an expert in the field to write an outro to your book. As anybody who knows Larry Young knows, he doesn’t play by the rules (there’s a great column on page 60 that goes into more detail about this), so of course he decided that the best person to write the adios to his book is a maritime lawyer who moonlights as a minor video game celebrity, and whose relationship to the comics business is about the same as Paul Sorvino’s relationship to the restaurant business in Goodfellas . To paraphrase, I don’t know nuttin’ about the comics busi ness … I know how to go into the shop and buy a book and read it. But one of the best things about comics is you don’t need to be a certified dive instructor to have an opinion about them. This is stuff any red-blooded