The Writing (and Publishing) Life.

         I’ve been writing professionally for nearly 50 years,

My first published work was as a radio ad copywriter, for a number of radio stations in Fairfield and New Haven County. I had gotten an internship at a local radio station in 1977, during my senior year in college, as I had been working as a DJ in my college radio station and our station manager referred me to the station.

While that phase of my writing career only lasted a few years, I soon moved into a phase that is—on at least some level—is still with me. In 1981 my first published article appeared in print in Amazing Heroes, a comicbook-themed publication, this was followed by articles in numerous other comicbook, trading card and similar-themed publications, kicking off a nearly two-decade run of articles, interviews, and reviews making me one of the most prolific journalist in the field of comicbook reporting.

I even spent a goodly amount of time writing marketing and PR material for most of the major comicbook companies. This, of course, led to me creating and writing a comic of my own for an Indie company, in 1986. That comicbook was Agent Unknown, for Renegade Press. Unfortunately, that comic only lasted three issues, as there was a massive crash of B&W comics in ’87, so we canceled the comic, and sadly it would be nearly 20 years before I created another comic.

In 2006 I was approached to contribute a short story to a horror comic entitled Psychosis. From there I started contributing stories to several other Indie comicbook companies, including Pronto, Main Enterprises, Red Anvil, and others. In 2025 I inked a publishing deal with Dark Fire Press to produce comics and prose novels. It was here that my comicbook Wülf Girlz, and its accompanying novella Taste the Moon have appeared.

Meanwhile, unwilling to allow my past comicbook stories to disappear into the dustbin of comicbook history, I decided to gather together some of my older work into omnibus editions. The first such edition was Funnybook City, Jump the Shark issue, which collected stories I had published over at Main Enterprises (Funnybook City being the name of my self-publishing company, chosen because my Uncle always referred to comics as “Funnybooks”).

 My second book (which just dropped to Amazon) is titled Funnybook City Yesterday’s Neurosis and contains wok that originally appeared in Guild Works Publications, Atlas Unleashed, and elsewhere. Rounding out this issue are a handful of 500-word flash fiction and other prose stories that I penned. This volume will be followed by a third Funnybook City collection titled Lickety Split Tales which reprints stories I wrote for Pronto Comics. 

I also reprinted two articles from the beginning of my print career entitled Remembering Steve Ditko which covered both Steve Ditko and John Romita Sr.’s respective runs on Spider-Man, which ran in a book I put together for my appearance at the 2025 DitkoCon in Johnstown, PA. A second compilation I produced is called Wings of Man, which gathered together several “flight” stories, including a couple that involved a German Immigrant named Gustave Whitehead who not only lived in my home town, but built and flew a plane two years before the Wright brothers.

Future issues I am planning on publishing include a collection that reprints my Renegade Press Agent Unknown comics, as well as some related stories. I’m also compiling a number of short prose stories for an anthology, as well as writing and producing more Wülf Girlz stories and comics. Hope to see you when they arrive.

Four (no, wait, five) new books of mine

I’ve been a writer all my life. It was in 1978 that I went pro. I started working at a local radio station as a copywriter. Over the next few years, I worked at a couple of different stations in Conn. Then, in 1981 I got my first print article published (Ditko Days, Amazing Heroes #5). From there I went on to spend the next nearly 20 or so years writing for virtually every comic magazine being published. In addition to all that I was also penning marketing and PR material for most of the major (and several mid-level) comicbook companies (Marvel, DC, Valient, Dark Horse, Extreme, others).

In ’85 I took over the writing the writing of a comic strip (Video Victor) in Videogaming Illustrated, the magazine for which I was then the managing editor. In ‘86 I was able to convince Deni Lobert (Renegade Press) to publish a comic concept of mine (Agent Unknown). In 2011 I began writing short, illustrated stories for several of Jim Main’s Main Enterprises publications. Between 2011 and 2021 I wrote 17 stories. Recently I gathered those stories together and compiled them into a massive omnibus, which is now available on Amazon. The book is called Funnybook City Omnibus: Jump the Shark Issue. The cover was done by my friend Scott Barnett. 

Also available on Amazon is Writers Unite! Dimensions of Superheroes, a prose superhero anthology that I not only designed and assembled, but where I had three short stories and wrote the forward. The book has 14 writers (including me, but more importantly, Gary Cohn, Paul Kupperberg (both of whom worked for DC and other comic companies) and William Patrick Murray, who not only writes amazing prose novels, but created Squirrel Girl for Marvel) telling 20 stories about a myriad number of superheroes, not all of them the kind you read in those funnybooks, wrapped in colorful spandex, and looking all pretty for the masses. These heroes come from all walks of life, and all have strange and unusual powers. It’s well worth the read, if you know what I mean.

Another book I recently assembled is Wings of Man, a comic that combines a number of stories I wrote about flying. Those stories include one about Gustave Whitehead, a German immigrant who flew two years before the Wright brothers, and lived in my hometown of Fairfield CT. I was originally told Gustave’s story by my high school science teacher. At the time, I was in high school and said that Gustave’s story would make a good comicbook. Then it took me 35 years to make it happen. This story was followed by me penning more stories about flight (some of them peripherally involving references to Gustave).

Earlier this year I learned about Ditko Con, which takes place in Johnstown, PA. I’ve been a fan of Steve’s work since I first saw it in Amazing Fantasy #15. Will was already attending the con, and I asked him to introduce me to the showrunner, whereupon I got myself invited. To prepare for the event, I took the first two articles I wrote for publication and combined them into a Spidey-mag. Those articles (from way back in ’81 & ’82) were about Steve Ditko’s and John Romita, Sr.’s runs on Amazing Spider-Man. (John’s article appeared in The FantaCo Chronicles, and it included a checklist to the first 120 issues of the comic, as well as all of the related Spidey titles being published at the time. Then for good measure I tossed in a review I wrote about a Ditko Kickstarter that he did with Robin Snyder. I’m hoping to sell a few copies of this mag at the con.

All of those books were produced over the past couple of months. Oh, and not to leave anything out, I also wrote a 500-word flash fiction story for Weird Fiction Quarterly. The writing prompt for this issue was The King in Yellow an H.P. Lovecraft-adjacent story. So I now have five new books to sell at shows.

Welcome to my funnybook column.