You want to know about Ben McBrayer?

I’ll tell you about Ben McBrayer.

When I was a pre-preschool-age kid in Georgetown, a bunch of moms (mine included) somehow ended up putting their children in a play group together. It would later turn out that (me excepted) the group was composed entirely of future geniuses, but that’s an entry for another time. One of the kids in that group was Ben McBrayer, and so we were friends from literally before I can remember.

The McBrayers moved to Hawaii for a while, then back to Kentucky–to Richmond, by strange coincidence, where the Adkinses had moved in the meantime. We went to middle school together, hung out less in high school, lost track except for holiday stuff in college, and then after a long time I saw him again at my mother’s wedding. He’s also in grad school, it turns out, pursuing a MFA-or-maybe-PhD in music history at Cincinnati.

The thing about Ben McBrayer is that he tends to like the same things that I like, only he likes them ten years before I do. I feel like I’m constantly growing up to be Ben McBrayer, and by the time I do, he’s already an even more advanced scholar / critic / artisan. If I’m ever cool enough to be a rock star, Ben McBrayer will be so cool he’ll be dead.

This is the perfect example: Ben McBrayer and I used to draw comic books together in Georgetown. Our chief focus was on a group called The Challengers, with a roster that included Cat-Man, Slasher and The Pilot (Cat-Man is still probably my favorite superhero). It was fun, standard kid stuff.

When Ben McBrayer moved back from Hawaii, we were in sixth grade, and I was pretty excited about getting to draw The Challengers with him again. When I broached the subject, Ben McBrayer got a sage and faraway look in his eyes, and said “Oh, yeah, that? Sure, we could draw that again. As kind of a satire.”

And that’s what it is about Ben McBrayer.