I don't know how these thoughts come to me. It occurs to me that if I had been able to follow through on my original idea for superhero Myke Phoenix, then Myke Phoenix Magazine #445 would have come out this month.

Why it came to me is fairly simple — I saw that Amazing Spider-Man #1,000 is due at the comic book stores later this month, and that got me thinking about what an amazing milestone that is.

I have always been a fan of Lester Dent, the pulp writer who produced most of the 182 Doc Savage novels that were published from 1933 to 1949 in a magazine that was monthly for most of its run. In the late 1980s I imagined a monthly magazine that would feature a superhero of my own creation.

Myke Phoenix was/is the alter ego of Paul Phillips, a radio reporter who gains the ability to inhabit the body of a super-powered ancient hero named Mychus. Myke became the protector of Astor City, a medium-sized city somewhere in the Midwest.

Because I had a day job, I didn't think I could pump out a 50,000-word novel every month, but 10,000 words felt doable, and I figured that since comic books had displaced pulp magazines in the marketplace, maybe I could manage a pulp that takes about as long to read as the average comic book, to accommodate modern attention spans.

Starting around January 1990, I finished four episodes and a short story, and I conceived a fifth story, "The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur," which would reveal and introduce the arch-villain Deinonychus who had been behind much of the mayhem that had plagued Astor City in the first four stories. But in those days there was no way to self-publish books or magazines without expending a great deal of money, and so I let logistics scuttle the project before that fifth adventure, and I tucked it all away until I would have the money or the world changed, whichever came first.

I still didn't have the money in 2008, but the world changed. Print-on-demand services and the Kindle allowed me to publish The Adventures of Myke Phoenix for basically zero upfront cash, and the idea of a monthly feature tickled the back of my mind again.

It stayed back there until 2013, when I finally wrote a new Myke Phoenix story, "Song of the Serial Kisser." Not long afterward I came up with "Firespiders," which is now known as "Spiders of Fire" for reasons I forget. And then my brain finally shifted to a place where my original concept might kick in.

I wrote down 10 more story titles for what would be a 12-story arc, and in 2014 I wrote and published Myke Phoenix ebooks once a month from February through November, including by the way The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur. "I can do this," I realized, and I was having a grand old time until I failed to come up with a clear idea of where to take the series after that 12th episode. I did create a paperback edition of all 12 novelettes called Year of the Dinosaur, so named because Deinonychus was again the central villain.

When the corporation eliminated my day job in late 2016, I started publishing the novelettes in short books, most of them 64 pages, and developed the first 12 before I was offered a new newspaper job, so that plan stalled before I could begin actively marketing it.

Three more years went by, and by 2019 I figured I was done with Myke, so with a bit of rewriting, I collected all 16 novelettes and two short stories into a 732-page behemoth titled Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, which is still available on print-on-demand to this day.

I think about Myke from time to time — I've even tinkered with the idea of a novel or two, so that I don't turn "The Complete Novelettes" into false advertising. Will he ever return? I can't say — not because I'm being coy, I just don't know where the muse is taking me these days.

Part of me is disappointed I was only able to maintain a monthly schedule for 10 months. Part of me is proud to have maintained a monthly schedule for 10 months. Those are the conflicting ways of looking at the idea of Myke Phoenix Magazine #445.