Today, I spend most of my time writing comic books, but twenty-plus years ago, I was a copywriter at an advertising agency.

My days were occupied with churning out TV and radio spots for savings and loan associations ("Deposit $5,000 and get an omelet pan—FREE!"), magazine ads for industrial heaters (they're used to keep the O-rings warm on intercontinental ballistic missiles), and commercials for a spray-on fabric wrinkle remover (it got rid of the wrinkles by eating the fabric).

As creatively stimulating as this material was, I nonetheless found myself desperate for a diversion—any diversion. And so, with my office door locked and the lights dimmed, I began writing, on company time, a series of bizarre little tales to keep my mind alive...

   Elves Against Hitler - Part One: A Moat is as Good as a Dolt to a Blind Goat. Beginning the strange tale of a clan of elves, a goat, a retired schoolteacher, and their courageous stand against the Third Reich.

  Travel up a polluted stream of consciousness without a paddle in Poem in A-Flat...or Was It a Bungalow?

  Ya gots yer Starship Troopers, ya gots yer Lensmen, ya gots yer hostsie-totsie Federation—and now ya gots The Shaman of Poogundagar (pronounced: pooh-GUN-duh-gar), a space operetta like youse never seen.

   In Fabotnik: One Man's Ragnarok, a human being dismantles himself on a whim.

  The state of contemporary relationships is ill-considered in the free-form sword & sorcery meditation, In Prudence Is the Better Part of Valerie.

  Conversion in a Terminal Subway abandons all laws of physics, logic, and language in an effort to explain the real reason people want government, and the world, off their backs.

NOTE: Curiously, I've been asked several times whether these stories are really almost three decades old. The answer is "yes." Except for a few minor edits made while retyping the text, all of them date back to around 1971, and the circumstances surrounding their creation were exactly as described.