I feel like I should tell you more of the personal side of the guy… If you read any of them, you know how well he could spin a story and think of clever things no one had thought of before. I was also impressed with what he did with others' characters like Batman and Superman and Spider-Man and most of the major ones. He was, of course, a fine writer who was responsible for co-creating many popular characters including Swamp Thing, the Human Target, Wolverine and many of the X-Men. He always did until, this morning, he didn't.

I guess I'd gotten it into my head that no matter how bad it looked for Len, he'd bounce back. The last few times I saw him - the last at Comic-Con, the time before that in a hospital - he looked like it could happen any minute. Not only did Len make it to the end of that month, he outlived Hanerfeld by a decade or two. I remember one day around 1975, our mutual friend Mark Hanerfeld phoned me to tell, in great seriousness, that Len was gravely ill and could not possibly make it to the end of that month. In those 47 years and change, I must have heard a dozen times that Len was at death's door and even before we met, there were times when his friends expected it to happen soon. I will probably spend the next week or two here remembering stories I can tell here and several I can't. We got along famously from the start, never quarreled and had many adventures together. So 47 years and two months…but we'd corresponded by mail (paper mail) for a year or two before that. I can tell you exactly where and when we first met in person: It was in the hallway outside Julius Schwartz's office in the DC Comics offices back at 909 Third Avenue in July of 1970. Len was a friend of mine - at times, a very good friend - for darn close to half a century. Comic book writer-editor Len Wein died this morning and it feels so odd to type those words even though I've known for a long time I would have to.

The dc universe by len wein