What a spread. I mean wow. Take your time with this.

The guy carrying the girl on his shoulders is me, and the girl is my beloved cousin Graham Whedon, who's in college studying nutrition as I write this. Many others walking around are friends of the Waltrips.

The six letters of the title are done in six different styles, each style representing one of Our Heroes, from left to right (H is calligraphic for Rumy, E is Olde Englishe for Katherine, R is typewriterish for Shanna, O is lumpy for Tim, E is Klingonlike for Will/Q'ikkit, and S is slanting boldly forward for Rikk, like his handwriting on the previous page). Yeah, kind of like explaining a joke, isn't it?

Truth to tell, I have always been a little bit afraid of crowds. I have trouble picking out individual voices when lots of people talk at once—I'm much better in one-on-one interactions or small groups. I don't think I'm alone in this, particularly not in fandom. So treating conventions as danger zones made good dramatic sense. We went a little overboard with that plot element in later stories, but it works here.

I'm sure the producers of the TV series HEROES picked its name in part because it sounded comicbooky, but not TOO comicbooky, and that was definitely a reason I picked it here. But I was also interested in the way we make heroes of professionals in the business, projecting our ideal selves onto them for better or worse. Rikk, Will and Rumy each have "heroes" to encounter in this story and the next, and their interactions with those heroes will change them, for better and for worse.