I began to believe my career as a crime fighter wasn’t going to get off the ground.

But that writing thing, creating stories, I began to suspect it had chosen me, and that I had not chosen it, and that bitch was going to be a harsh but delightful mistress. Color poured into the world in a more constant fashion.

The reading of superhero comics led to my reading of other comics, and I suppose you could say more adult comics, like Classics Illustrated. These were wonderful and accurate and beautifully drawn and colored versions of classic literature. You’d be surprised what they adapted. Everything from H. G. Wells to Dickens, to all manner of books in-between; things a kid now wouldn’t bother to examine, and may never have heard of.

Classics Illustrated led me to read the books from which they were adapted, when I could get my hands on books. They weren’t readily available in small town East Texas. In fact, though I was born in Gladewater, my early years were spent in a town of 150 or so, called Mt. Enterprise. There was little enterprise to be found there, but I remember the place fondly, and it was a wonderful place for a kid to grow up. I felt like Huckleberry Finn, who didn’t mind going home. And, in fact, I preferred to wind up in my room in my bed at night, perhaps to slip secretly into the living room to watch a late night movie, preferably science fiction, and all the better yet if space aliens were involved. Even better if they were the sort that were frightening and pissed off, and no friend of Earth. It made for a better story, and I was always drawn to that more than the “they don’t really mean me any harm” aliens, though, on some level I liked it all.