Michael Fleisher

Every October, I like to scour my own archives for the spookiest back issues available, but this year, one found me. It's like something out of a scary movie --- I went to my barber for a haircut and, mixed in with the regular magazines in the waiting area, they had an issue of The Brave and the Bold. It was one that I'd never read before, a terrifying team-up between Batman and the Spectre where they confront a mad sorcerer who wields the eldritch power of the Dragon God. And when I looked up from reading it, I discovered that the barber shop had closed down... ten years ago this very night!

Q: Remember Hex, where Jonah Hex was DC's Mad Max, and where Batman lives in the Statue of Liberty? What are your thoughts on that? -- @jomomma75 A: Hex is legitimately one of the most interesting comics of all time, largely because it's one of the greatest examples of how weird comics can get when they're built on the laws of the superhero genre. It's also not very good.

I don't know about you, but when I play Dungeons & Dragons, I'm looking for a very specific kind of quest. Storytelling and character development are nice, but really, at the end of the day, I want an epic that's full of magic swords, dragons, and a threat so huge that it puts an entire kingdom --- maybe even an entire world --- in the kind of dire peril that can only be thwarted by stout-hearted heroes who aren't above lying about their dice rolls when they need to. In other words, I need something that's a little more intense than helping some dude recover from being cursed with tiny little baby hands. But apparently, that is exactly what the gaming community wanted back in 1988, when Advanced Dungeons & Dragons devoted the entirety of its opening arc to one character's harrowing recovery from having his hands shrunk, a tragedy that drove him to drink, caused him to lose faith in his gods, and gave us lots of truly hilarious panels where he holds normal-sized objects that suddenly look huge.

Despite the pedigree of being created by Steve Ditko, the Creeper has never really caught on. You'd think he would --- if nothing else, "What if the Joker was a good guy?" seems like a question that could result in some pretty compelling stories, even if that doesn't quite explain the preponderance of bright red back hair that he ended up with. Still, there's some potential there. It's just a question of how you can go about tapping into it. Well, if you happen to be Michael Fleisher and Steve Ditko and you're writing 1st Issue Special #7 in 1975, you might think that the best way to go about that was to have him fight a third-string Batman villain and hope for the best. And needless to say, that didn't really work out.