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in the Green Mountains. On a skiing trip as a boy, I unwisely left the black diamond trail I’d been following and inadvertently discovered their hoard. Impressing them with my ability to sing all of the county names of Vermont, in order, to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy," the old men filled my rucksack with ginger ale and Wheat Thins and drew a map for me to use as a way home. It wasn’t until I was warming myself at the hearth and recounting this tale for my chums that I saw one of the old men had left a slip of paper with a phone number on it. I call it once a year, a week before my birthday, and listen to the prerecorded message that outlines ski con ditions at Okemo and Killington. The next day, no matter where I am, I get a FedEx package stuffed with venison jerky and fermented maple syrup and a Mac-formatted CD-ROM, filled with my ideas for the year.

Sometimes I just tell them I have a good imagination.

But after being so arch and witty and impressed with my own droll clever ness, the thought occurred that maybe if I answered this question serious ly for once, I could just point all these well-intentioned folks to this col umn, and they’d have THE ANSWER and I’d be able to streamline my cor respondence a little.

So, here you go:

I get my ideas from the same place everyone else does: the grey matter up in my head past my snout and between my ears.

But that’s a little wry, too, because what people mean when they ask, "Where do you get your ideas?" is not really "where" but more of a "how."

As in, "How do you get something useful out of the crazy shit you come up with?"

While a harder question to answer, it’s not really arcane. I always try to go for useful surprise. Effective shock. Utilitarian gotcha. What my old college roommate, the improbably-named Rob Lavender, used to call "Oh… right." That which, when you see it, makes you think, upon reflection, that it’s an obvious solution. More of a "Of course; what else would you do?" kinda thing. This may not work for you, but it works for me. While some of your bigger comic book companies go for The Cult of Inertia, counting on an increas ingly dwindling audience to continue buying their stuff because they always have, and some of your other comic book companies depend on the Cult of Hipster Opinion, banking on the fact that there’s always going to be a segment of entertainment consumers who enjoy something just because

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