So who exactly was this cantankerous fellow? And how did these friends end up looking for him in The Philippines' rural north?

To find the answers we seek, let's flashback to the early Nineties. Bill Clinton's in the White House. Grunge rock is on the airwaves. And twentysomething Gareth Morrow is a Scotsman in New York. He's just signed a deal with a major comic publisher to reinvent Entropy Lad, an oddball Silver Age superhero with uncontrollable reality-warping powers and an alien ferret as his spirit guide.

Through a mix of fortunate circumstance and genuine talent, Morrow's Entropy Lad became a cult hit among well-read fans in the direct market. Over the course of fifty-seven single issues and a 48-page annual, Morrow took doomed Byronic "E.L." on an epic road trip from a strip-mall parking lot in Nowheresville, USA, to a literal audience with The Almighty Itself. Along the way, he encounters cross-dressing Discordian priestesses, glowstick-toting raver monks, and a riot grrrl who may be the Sacred Feminine incarnate.

In the process, Morrow tapped into the vein of the Alternative Nation's zeitgeist, crafting a serialized existential psychodrama about mental health, cosmic angst, and Jungian archetypes. Indeed, the penultimate story arc, "Stop Making Sense" – in which "E.L." teams up with the voodoo queen Marie Laveau to uncover the Major Arcana's nefarious scheme – won the Eisner for Best Serialized Story in 1996.

By most accounts, writing Entropy Lad was a grueling experience for Morrow. Throughout its run, he experienced a less-than-civil divorce, frequent tranq-induced blackouts, not to mention the deaths of the aunt who raised him (to old age) and his on-off paramour, spoken word artist Gaspar Da Cunha (to AIDS). It's easy to imagine a parallel reality where he didn't make it to the end of the century.