I had a rough plot outline for Misspent Youths. It was intended to run 30 issues and have three main story arcs. The first ten issues had Brother Entropy and the Hounds of the Sixth Horseman of the Apocalypse as the main villains and took place in the Big Unnamed City.

The second ten issues were to take place in a small town. Moe and Detritus were to decide that they wanted to see what having a “normal” teenage life was like. So they went to high school – a high school populated by parodies of comic book/strip kids – the Archie Gang, teenaged versions of Peanuts and whatever other cartoon kids I felt like playing with. The main villain for that was to be a teenaged Antichrist.

The last ten issues were to be a road trip across America.

It’s hard to know whether the story would have played out as I imagined it. I quickly started diverging from my original outline. Throw away characters became interesting and got more pages; I started seeing new ways to structure the stories; things, as they say, evolved.