"He gave up a job...": Chapter 2

What I was reading became what I wrote. Initially, I wanted to be a mystery writer. Why? 'Cause Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys were my favorite books to read. By the fifth grade I had written several Brown mysteries, come up with my own boy detective, and created Idom the Wonder Worm, who solved mysteries (and looked a lot like Richard Scary's worm character wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat).
Notice the inclusion of "wonder" in the title, a very comic-bookish term. Comic books still had a hold on me. So, it's no shock that my first original comic book superhero team was a group of super powered crime solvers, not necessarily crime fighters, called…The Detecters. Hey, I was young, subtlety was not my forte.
The Detecters remained largely character profiles until the seventh grade when my crew and I decided to do our own comic: we’d write it, draw it, mimeograph it at school – yes, I said mimeo not copy machine; our teachers even gave us some of the carbon paper to draw on – and sell it to our classmates. The selling idea quickly went by the way side and I didn't complete my section in time for the "press run." But going through the process and having a real-life book at the end of it, made the idea of creating comics as real for me as writing the next-great mystery novel. The seeds for the "Modi Comics Group" had been planted, but their germination period would be a long one -- like 9 years.