Four days until Brainiac hits shelves! My editor just e-mailed me to say that Brainiac has gone back for a third pre-publication-date printing, which made me happy. And Random House publicist Lisa Barnes, who asked me never to mention her on the blog, just called to say that, in the list of next week’s media appearances by Random House authors, my section was longer than all the other authors combined, which made me feel sleepy. (I’m sure they’re all, somehow, 5 a.m. radio interviews.)

I felt like I should blog about the book today, but nobody’s really read it yet, which sort of limits how interesting my thoughts would be. I’ve started a new forum on the message boards for conversation about the book, and you can already head on over there to see the parade of Stevens Point, Wisconsinites pointing out glitches in my description of their fair city. Then it hit me: post the never-completed Superman comic!

A little background: in Chapter 12 of Brainiac, I describe the surreal experience of secretly flying out to L.A. a couple times a month to win millions of dollars on TV, and then flying back to my dull office job the next day pretending nothing had happened. (The shows had taped already, but wouldn’t air for months.) I started to feel a little like Clark Kent at the Daily Planet, I wrote. And then I had a flash of inspiration: what if the book turned into a comic book at that moment and described my workday in the goofy style of late-’50s Superman?

So the first draft I turned in to my editor had the following strip attached. Keep in mind that this is a rough draft inked with pen, so you’ll just have to imagine it re-done with brush and India ink, in a (probably futile) attempt to recapture the smooth line of those old Curt Swan comics. I also would have added blotchy, off-register dot-screens for the grays.

To my surprise, Ben actually liked the strip. “What is this? Can we get the rights to this?” he asked, apparently under the impression that old DC Comics tended to focus on 21st-century game show contestants.

I quickly fell out of love with the device, though, because (a) it was sort of confusing for the book to suddenly change media at this point and only this point, for no apparent reason, (b) the homage is pretty obscure (if you don’t love Weisinger-era Superman as much as I do, it’s probably incomprehensible), but most importantly (c) it turned out I didn’t have the artistic chops to carry the joke (Superman fans might be able to spot the specific swipes from Curt Swan, Al Plastino, et. al. in the panels above). So I took it out, and this is the only place you’ll ever see it.

And no, my then-boss Glenda doesn’t really look much like Lois.