Sadly, I can’t tell you much, as it would spoil some of the stuff going on in the book before my issues!

No. I knew nothing about that until it happened in the comic. I had a lot of potential stories for Bloodstorm. A reunion/first encounter with the Dracula of this world was high on the list. More trouble with the Hex Men and the Goblin Queen. It would have been cool to see her become less of an alternate universe Storm and more of her own character. 

Elixir would have been dealing with the conflicted nature of his powers, the balance between life and death. I don’t remember everything I had planned for him right now, but I DID have plans somewhere to take him and a number of the absolute most power mutants (Tempus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, for example) and put them in their own team called the X-Ternals. 

I don’t remember anything about Magneto being editorially driven. 

Yeah, I had a much longer story in mind dealing with Psylocke’s “possession” by Emplate. It would have mirrored Sabretooth’s own descent. When X-Men Blue came out, I didn’t know there were plans for Monet, and I would have resolved that in the pages of Blue at some point. I’m glad it was resolved somewhere. 

Tough to say. That was the ending I wrote based on knowing the book was finished. If, for some reason, I needed to pick it up from there, it might have been cool to see Psylocke following Magneto’s team as an outsider. 

That’s correct. Her story was unfolding at the time. 

I had big ideas for Pixie… and I really wanted to do a Hex-Men series focused on magical X-Men. Pixie would have been a big part of that. Surge is a cool character, too, and it would have been awesome to write a story where she could shine.

Yeah, I know I need to update my website. I’ve got a massive overhaul planned for this year. 

In the meantime, this is my current convention appearance list:

March 22 - 24 - C2E2 in Chicago

March 29 - 31 - Planet Comic Con in Kansas City

April 6 - 7 - Dallas Comic Show in Dallas

June 14 - 16 - HeroesCon in Charlotte

There will likely be a few more added as we go along. 

I think I’ve always been interested in horror. As a young kid, I used to sneak into the living room late at night and hide behind the couch while my older siblings watched Hammer horror movies on the late show. I was fascinated by stories of the Headless Horseman. I loved going to haunted houses on Halloween. I read tons of horror anthology comics. I remember Aurora horror models and tee shirts with the Wolfman or the Mummy on them. Famous Monsters of Filmland was on the shelf at the pharmacy, along with cool horror magazines. Hell, even breakfast cereal dug into horror with Freakies. And once I got a spooky record of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on the back of a cereal box. I loved ghost stories, and there were plenty of legends of drowned boys crawling out of lakes and mysterious lights at the railroad tracks. I just liked the idea of being scared, and it seemed like the world around me was rewarding me with plenty of creepiness. 

Maybe that all stuck with me.

Over time, I became a little less interested in horror, I suppose. I turned toward the idea of writing fantasy. Thanks D&D! 

But in middle school I discovered Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard’s horror stories and Stephen King novels. That started to rekindle that interest. Some friends and I had dreams of creating a horror anthology movie we could share with our friends. We also started kicking around the idea of starting a haunted house out in the woods near a friend’s house. 

It all just sort of rushed back. 

I had dreams of becoming a special effects makeup artist for horror movies. I dug deeper into horror movies and horror fiction. At some point, I lost interest in special effects, but I didn’t give up on the idea of telling stories. 

I started submitting short stories to horror magazines and the rest… as they say… is history. 

But, really, why horror?

I’ve always felt that horror was, strangely, one of the most hopeful of genres. As I’m reading a story or watching a movie or writing about some awful occurrence, I think of the protagonists, struggling against these terrible forces. Sometimes they survive, sometimes they die. But they fight. And if they can fight against the insurmountable horrors they are facing, then I can damn sure face the general BS of the world around me.