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ness if it did not have a background of discord," but he may very well could have been.

I was talking to my pal Joe Casey on the phone the other day, sorting out the trials and tribulations of getting the latest Double Image to the print er, kibitzing about his latest work on The X-Men , and trying to convince him to let me collect his first Pop Comic, The Harvest King , into a handy trade paperback. And it began to occur to me that one of the things I like best about the comic book industry is how putting a comic book in your hand is like bring ing Order out of Chaos. I mean, think about it: when you go to the comic book store to pick up your latest stash, even the comic in your pile that you enjoyed the least… or worse, absolutely hated, had a team creators going through an uncommon amount of work to bring its fragile minutes of ephemeral entertainment to your unfeeling carcass. The comic book industry is Discord and Chaos wherever you look, what with publishers with large markets-share seemingly throwing "product" at the proverbial wall to see what will stick; high profile Old Guard and Flavor Of The Month spitting epithets at each other like somebody skinned his knee playing kick-ball; the merest mention of the word "distributor" can have real-world aftershocks for companies without a firm hand on the rud der… But every once in a while, it’s good to pause in the eye of the self-referen tial hurricane that is the comic book industry and think about all the brain juice, muscle pulls, and sleepless nights that went into that copy of Crapfest Monthly that you’ve just bagged and boarded and will never look at again. For example, when I first thought about getting into comics, way back in early 1995, I didn’t just say to myself, "Astronauts are big; let’s do an astronaut book." I mean, in early 1995, I was working as a laboratory tech nician in a biomedical manufacturing facility. Ever see The Andromeda Strain ? You know that bit at the end where they’re running around the Wildfire compound in those containment suits? That was me, formulating vaccines and other medicines for injection in a Class 100 clean room, swathed head-to-toe in an anti-static, low-shedding coated paper suit for eight hours a day. …and I’m sure you can fill in your own tales of pathos and intrigue and stupidity and dropped balls, as well.

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