Apologies to Brad Neely for the title, and to everyone else for bringing up something tangentially related to that other thing.

But it’s the perfect title for this newsletter! Because like most middle-aged men, I recently recorded a podcast about an internship I had 25 years ago.

No, wait…normal people don’t do that. But you know who does do that?

Wizard people, dear reader.

If you aren’t familiar, Wizard was a magazine about comics that was hugely influential in its time but is now largely forgotten. It was run by man-children and staffed by actual children and that was its charm. There were several spin-off magazines including one about action figures called ToyFare, and that’s the one I worked at for nearly a decade.

I know that most people don’t have a podcast dedicated to their old jobs, but I kind of feel like everyone should. It’s highly entertaining. That’s why I’m glad the guys at WIZARDS The Podcast Guide to Comics do what they do, especially when it comes to interviewing my former co-workers about our time at the weirdest, most wonderful slash problematic workplace anyone could ever have.

You can listen to me talk for nearly an hour about my time as a Wizard intern, then a ToyFare editor, then the FINAL ToyFare editor, at the link here.

I’m honestly glad these podcasts exist, because the farther I get away from that time, the more it feels like something that didn’t actually happen to me. Like maybe it’s something I read about or saw in a movie and then somehow took on as a memory. (Similar, in fact, to how I stole a thought/anecdote from Alejandro Arbona in my podcast interview and accidentally passed it off as my own. Sorry again, Alejandro!)

But no, it all really happened.

If you’re a Wizard and ToyFare fan, there were a bunch of stories I of course didn’t get to include in the podcast, so I figured I’d share a few below. If you’re not interested in Wizard or ToyFare, feel free to skip down to the Links to Cool Things section!

• When I was an intern, the internship was unpaid. However, they paid a mileage stipend based on how far you drove to get there. Because I was commuting from my mom’s house that was about an hour away, I actually ended up making a decent wage for the summer! I would later get hired full-time at a truly pathetic wage. I was so excited to get the job, however, that it didn’t even occur to me to counter-offer. I was nearing graduation and had no other prospects!

• ToyFare was obviously my first job out of college, but I had unfortunately managed to graduate college without learning how to work hard or apply myself. (Hey, I was an English major.) So when I started I was a good editor and a very good Twisted ToyFare Theatre writer, but I was not stupendous about sticking to deadlines. This made things difficult for a lot of people, not least our incredible design and research staffs, who were responsible for 4+ magazines every month and didn’t need me mucking things up. Zach Oat, who was the lead editor of the magazine at that point, was a lot like me - a very right-brained creative person who was not the most task-oriented. So at a certain point, they sent Joe Yanarella in to sit with us in the ToyFare office. Joe was - famously - the “adult” at Wizard; someone who’d had real journalism jobs and was not a huge comics fan. It was his job to keep things running, and now here he was, sitting in our office. It was also made clear to us at this point that Joe was going to help us shape up, and if we didn’t we probably wouldn’t be editors anymore. Reader, let me tell you I quickly learned hard work and how to apply myself. Joe moved out a bit later, but we later hired the wonderful Adam Tracey as our managing editor, who was both fun and not scary and could also help keep us on track.

• There are two things I miss most about working at Wizard. The first, obviously, is the people I worked with. Fortunately, I’m still friends with a whole lot of them. The other thing I miss, though, was being able to publish whatever the hell I wanted in a monthly magazine with national distribution. I tried to only use my powers for good, but we definitely indulged a lot of idiosyncratic interests in the pages of the mag. One of my favorite sections, as I mentioned in the podcast, was “Inside the Monkeyhouse,” which became a monthly comic strip, written by me, starring me and my friends. One time I turned an actual dream I had into a comic strip and then forced thousands of people to read it. I simply don’t have that kind of power anymore.

There’s so much more, of course, but I may make Wizard memories a semi-regular newsletter feature. So make sure to subscribe if you want to read more! (And even if you don’t. It’s a good newsletter.)

Links to Cool Things

• If you enjoy Wizard memories, I highly recommend the other episodes of The Wizard Files. Almost all of them are worth listening to, but none of us will ever touch former Magic Words columnist Chris Ward’s episode, which is a musical. Putting just about any of them on, though, is like spending time with a good friend. Or, at least, my good friends.

• If you enjoyed my recent piece on Pluribus, I highly recommend checking out this Reactor Mag column from the author Indrapramit Das. He explores some of the same ideas that I did, but from a viewpoint that adds quite a lot of depth. It’s a great piece!

• Accountability update: I’ve written basically nothing in 2026. I’m dealing with some adjustments in my day job that have thrown my work-life balance out of wack, and I need to re-calibrate and jump back into it. Hopefully I’ll have more to report in the next newsletter!

• I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but good buddy Alex Segura’s new Daredevil crime novel Enemy of My Enemy is getting rave reviews. Can’t wait to check it out!

• I’m always saying that ideas are a dime a dozen, and it’s really execution that matters when it comes to writing. That said, sometimes you see a concept that you know is going to be incredible. So congrats to buddy Neil Kleid on his upcoming novel Return to the Motherfreaking Fun Factory, which is described as “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets IT.” What a concept!

That’s it for now, but this represents the most writing I’ve done all year. Baby steps.