Update: David House and the Wizard of Time!

Double Holy Crap! I got an email from David House, artist/author of the Wizard of Time the other day! He's still around and writing sci-fi! I wanted to wait until I had the presence of mind to formulate a proper response and ask for permission to post it, or I would have had it up much sooner, but here it is:

"I ran across your Aug. 19, 2007, post asking for information about The Wizard of Time and its creator, David House. Well, that's me. I wrote, drew and published the comic book. I did it all, from working with the printers to boxing and shipping orders to distributors. I ended up needing a small second printing of the first issue - distinguished by the letter "TIME" in blue instead of red on the cover. The covers of the first two issues were only black plus spot color, but the third issue had a full-color cover.
The venture collapsed just as I got started with what they came to call the "black and white boom-bust" of 1986. Suddenly, I wasn't getting paid for orders for No. 3, and my capital was gone. I had to quit.
I attempted to start an anthology title called "Animal Universe" with two other funny-animal cartoonists in late 1986. I intended to continue The Wizard of Time story that way. We produced a preview edition and distributed over a thousand to comic shops through distributors. But by this time, the industry was buried in unsold independent comics. We got zero orders.
So in 1987 I did produce about 40 copies of a photocopied edition of The Wizard of Time No. 4 that was 5.5 by 8.5 inches. It had only six additional pages of the story. On the flip side it had an unrelated 8-page story. I have only one copy, and it's part of my portfolio.
What's ironic is that The Wizard of Time was not the story I wanted to write. It's an alternate-reality story with the same villain as in my main story. The story I really wanted to write is about an Oregon boy who goes on amazing adventures across the galaxy under a secret get-to-know-humans program with advanced aliens. I developed the story and individual episodes during college from 1981 to 1985. The title would be Space-Worthy with the main character a teenager named Jess Worthy.
But as you can see, I don't draw very well! I could do OK with animal
characters, but not people. So I figured that if I wrote a related, alternate-universe story with animal characters, and made money at it, I could then pay an artist to do the main story. Hoping to push on even with the failure of The Wizard of Time, I penciled out a sample opening page and gave it to one of the cartoonists from the Animal Universe fiasco in 1987. But he wasn't interested. He moved on to the computer game industry. And I moved into journalism and public affairs.
Amazingly, When I visited him in 2006, he gave back that penciled page untouched. He'd kept it all these years!
And I kept Space-Worthy in the back of my mind all these years but never got any new project launched. Until 2004, that is. At that time, I decided I'd write and self-publish the main story as a series of novels instead of comic book format. The result is much better than the comic book in so many ways. As you saw in the comic book, the expansive story line in The Wizard of Time didn't work well spread out over many, many issues, as I'd envisioned. The novel format is much, much better for an epic-length story.
I published The Key to Space, Book 1 of the Space-Worthy Chronicles, in March 2006, and a short novella that goes with the series called Survivor Planet in March 2007. I'm now working on Book 2, The UFO and the Wizard, as well as other short stories for the chronicles. It's a thousand times better than The Wizard of Time, in my opinion.
You can learn all about it, read sample chapters and order the books at www.space-worthy.com. Both books are also available at Amazon.com.
David"

That's awesome! I never really expected my blog to get anyone's attention, let alone an actual reply from the author. Anyway, this guy was a HUGE influence on me and you should at least take the time to go check out his site space-worthy.com. This I command!