Tree' however, was one of the most successful independent comics, running fifty issues and then a series of graphic novels for DC Comics, under editor Mike Gold.' But sometimes I did mainstream stuff, notably an ill-fated year or so on 'Batman' under Denny O'Neill. Mostly I created my own features, often in collaboration with artist Terry Beatty (a fellow Muscatine, Iowa native). But initially my updated take on 'Dick Tracy' attracted quite a bit of favorable attention, some of it in the comic book industry, and my phone started to ring. I had a fifteen-year run, before I ran afoul of an incompetent editor who hated my work almost as much as I hated him. 'I was given the opportunity to try out for the strip, wrote a sample story and pretty much got the job on the spot as a 'Tracy' fanatic, this was a job I'd been unwittingly preparing for since childhood. But he put in a good word for me at the Trib.' This attracted the attention of an editor at the Chicago Tribune Syndicate, who was looking for a mystery writer to take over the 'Dick Tracy' strip for Chester Gould also, about a year before that, I'd done a strip for editor Rick Marschall at Field Enterprises - a private eye feature called 'Heaven and Heller,' which Rick bought but which never saw the light of day, 'cause he unfortunately lost his position there.

A series followed - Nolan and Jon, I think around eight books to date - and all of the entries are filled with comics references. My first novel, 'Bait Money' (1973), was about a fifty-ish bank robber and his young, unlikely accomplice, a comic book collector in his early twenties. I was kind of a black sheep at that prestigious writer's school, with my 'commercial' goals but I wrote three mystery novels there, and sold all of them - the first two, literally, in the last week of class. I began writing mystery novels in junior high, kept at it in high school - sending a manuscript out, getting it rejected, starting another - and continued the process at the University of Iowa, where I was in both the undergrad and graduate Writers Workshop. 'But around the seventh grade, I got interested in mystery fiction my favorite comic books were 'Dick Tracy' and 'Batman,' so the jump to hardboiled private eyes was a short one. 'I grew up in Iowa a kid loving and reading comics, and dreaming of being a cartoonist,' Collins told CBR News.

The road to perdition graphic novel