The Binderwood saga began when I was in high school, born of an obsession with Edward Gorey and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. What started as an ambitious attempt to write a surreal novel of weird horror, ended up as several chapter fragments, and eventually turned into my first serious attempt at writing a comic strip script using lessons gleaned from an article in Writer’s Digest. The first version of the script ended with an image the editor at Warren considered too surreal, so I rewrote to make the meaning of the ending inescapable. They bought it, but changed the names of my invented mythic characters to be more palatable to their presumed market (“Tladlima” became “Pan”). The art style was intended to be English Victorian, but in the hands of the Warren illustrator, it took on the vibe of a low budget Aztec Studios gothic movie. Still…I had dreamed of writing for Creepy and Eerie for years, and this was a door opening into a comic-book writing career…which creaked shut again after I sold one more story to Vampirella.