ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE FALL OF 1999, I received a most unusual e-mail from Peter Franco, an assistant editor of Marvel Comics. He and his boss, editor Mark Powers, had read a trilogy of vampire novels I had written for White Wolf Books, and they wondered if I might be interested in scripting a four-part supernatural comic book miniseries for Marvel. Needless to say, as both a professional writer and a longtime comic book fan, I found the idea intriguing. The next morning I called Mark. We talked for an hour, and a deal was made. Thus began my three-year stint as a comic book writer.

Powers and Franco, I soon learned, were the lead editors for the X-Men titles, which were, at that time, the best-selling comic books in the world. They wanted me to write a story in which a half dozen of the mutant heroes and heroines battled some new, incredibly evil menace so powerful that it threatened to wipe out all life on Earth. The miniseries was scheduled for the following October.

Cannibalizing an old idea of mine for a novel never written, I came up with a four-part saga I titled “The Citadel of Night.” The script featured a vast, living cube, a mile on each side, that traveled from dimension to dimension, gobbling up all life on each version of Earth it landed upon. In my story, the cube materializes in the middle of an Indiana wheat field a week before Halloween. Only a  …