Yesterday was a strange day. Good, but strange. At around 9:30 am I received a call from someone claiming to be Burt Colt, who also claimed to be in town and available to meet for lunch. I immediately played along with this practical joker, since as everyone knows…Burt never travels far from his home. I told the caller that we could get together at a nearby Ruby Tuesdays at noon. The caller responded that that was fine, and that I should bring the new batch of pages for him to look over.

After hanging up and resuming work, I started thinking about that call. The voice did sound familiar, although I've only met Burt once, back in 2004 when I was living in Lexington, Kentucky. I decided to call him back, because I had to be sure.

We spoke again over the phone. The caller began talking about our first meeting, which is something I've never publicly written or spoken about. No reason why, it's just one of those things. So, on the phone again, he recounted the 1-day comic show in Lexington, where Burt was a guest, where I bought 2 original strips from his Sky Zephyr newspaper strip and mistakenly overpaid him by twenty bucks. That's where I first learned about this man's integrity, because he scoured the convention floor and eventually found me and returned the money. I ended up giving it back to him, to buy one of his Sunday strips. That's where our conversation turned to Voyager Comics 'unfinished business', and that Burt was looking for help breathing new life into the final story arc from Union Of Justice.

By the time this second phone conversation ended, I was sure that this was the real Burt Colt, the retired comics veteran who, like me as a younger incarnation, spent much of his career cranking out comic pages in relative obscurity. I look at Burt, and I see reflections of my own life in his. Burt is the kind of guy that wouldn't acknowledge any of this, of course. He's not 'in touch with his feelings', and he's proud of it. He's a man's man, from the old OLD school. His face somehow conveys an expression of common sense , and the only jokes he knows are 40 years stale, probably the same age and condition as every tie in his closet. So we aren't really that much alike, actually. Forget all about that stuff.

So we met at Ruby Tuesdays at noon. I brought my latest batch of pages, and had a generally pleasant time. I invited him to check out my home studio, so we spent most of the afternoon discussing my progress on the second chapter, and I revealed to him preliminary roughs for issue 3, along with a cover concept for issue 2. He sort of grunted at them. And that was it. He was gone by around 4, and I probably won't hear from him again for 2 or 3 more months, at the earliest. Thanks for lunch, Burt.