You ever have the experience of KNOWING that you’ve got a great idea or a great name for a character– the perfect scenario for a super cool genre comic….. a super cool name that no one else has thought of yet…? And you hope against hope that no one else will think of that same idea or name before you can get old enough and/or good enough– skilled enough– to actually publish your comic with that character or idea? But that hope gets dashed cruelly as you see the exact same idea or name in use by a professional creator or company– and your idea just shrivels and dies on the vine of disappointment. This happened to both my brother Matt and me when we were much younger and still living with our parents. For Matt, it was much worse. He had been working on a particular idea about a police officer who dies violently at the hands of criminals and is brought back to life by the forces of Hell to battle that very evil element in our world (I think I have that right…. Matt?). We were buying the COMICS BUYERS GUIDE at the time to get our comics news (many, many years before the internet– how in the hell did we ever get along without the Web…?)– and after buying one fateful issue and seeing the news about Todd MacFarlane’s SPAWN comic debuting from IMAGE COMICS…. to say that Matt’s reaction at being beaten to the punch was angry would be a great understatement. My own experience wasn’t nearly so traumatic…. but I felt a great sinking feeling when seeing the first picture of a new Marvel character called QUASAR (oddly enough drawn by Barry Windsor Smith, though I can’t recall every having seen him draw QUASAR again after that)– thus killing my enthusiasm for my OWN character of that name. My young self had plans for using that name when I got good enough (and old enough) to publish my own comics. That, as they say, is how the cookie crumbles. So I thought I would at the very least give MY QUASAR this exposure on my blog. It’s funny that I ended up actually drawing QUASAR professionally in his guest starring appearance in the GALACTUS arc in FANTASTIC FOUR.

See you back here soon.

Mike