From Writer to Publisher: Disney, The Muppets & Evil Ernie | My Origin Story (Part 4)

Very famously, Nikki Berucci had been sitting down with Alex Ross at a dinner shortly after my Hulk Let the Battle Begin comic had come out.

And Alex really liked it.

He read it and was speaking positively about me as a new name that Alex had never come across before.

And he was very impressed by the story that I wrote.

I'm so proud to be able to say that to you.

Alex Ross is one of my artistic idols.

And to get that passed to me, that was how I got on Dynamite's radar, was because Alex Ross said something nice about something I wrote, which was just...

I feel guilty actually even sharing that with you because I have so much pride for the fact that that happened and that was told to me.

But that was the beginning of us having a conversation about possibly working on something.

At the time, they didn't really have anything that I was super passionate about.

A lot of the licenses for characters that Dynamite Entertainment held at the time that we first met They just were a lot of really classic characters that I was not aware of enough, and I saw it as a lot of work.

I was like, oh man, in order to write these characters, I'm going to have to do so much research, and I'm not super into it.

I'm not super into the job of trying to go research some of these classic characters that came out long, long before I was ever reading comics, and I had not... found my way to having an interest in.

I didn't necessarily want to invent an interest just for a job.

So I was waiting until Dynamite had something that maybe I could pitch.

And one day I found out that they had gotten the rights to the Chaos Comics universe.

Not all of the characters, not Lady Death, but a lot of the characters from Chaos.

Purgatory, Chastity, and Evil Ernie in particular.

Evil Ernie had always been, at the very least, a visual favorite of mine and a character that I had a lot of fond memories about and for because I adored its creator, Brian Polito.

Brian Polito is one of my oldest friends in comics.

It just so happened that my father had produced a little mini Strangeland comic book that was a promotional thing that went inside the DVDs for this horror movie that he made years ago.

If you really like sick, disturbing horror films, worth checking out, Dee Snider's Strangeland.

This comic is pretty hard to find.

Not very many copies of it were made in the first place.

But it was produced by Chaos Comics.