Every day this month I'm going to feature a current comic book writing "star," someone who I think is a very good writer.

I'm mostly going to try to keep from the biggest names as much as possible, because, really, do I need to talk more about the awesomeness of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis?

Here is the archive of previously featured writers.

Today we look at a nice offbeat mainstream writer.

Enjoy!

While Will Pfeifer produced comics all the way back to the 80s when he was still in college, he first came to my attention when he wrote the excellent mini-series for Vertigo with the great Jill Thompson called Finals.

Finals was a brilliantly dark satire about a group of college seniors who were taking rather...odd approaches to their senior thesis (a Comparative Religions major started her own cult, a Criminal Justice major became an armed robber, etc.).

Great series - it is astonishing to me that it is not collected.

Jill Thompson brought Pfeifer with her when she did a short story in X-Men Unlimited.

It was a neat look at Dazzler, Behind the Music style!

Pfeifer's next big project was two good series for DC.

One was the original project H.E.R.O. which was a take off on the Dial H for Hero series, only through different characters getting the dial.

One of my favorite Pfeifer projects from early on was his take on Aquaman along with Pat Gleason.

Now, I have no idea whose idea it was, but I really liked the idea of having a large part of San Diego become an underwater city, giving Aquaman, for the first time ever, really, his own city to patrol, like Batman had Gotham and Superman had Metropolis.

Sadly, he did not last long on the title.

Pfeifer's next project was his longest-lasting, as he became the regular writer on Catwoman for almost three years, working first with the esteemed Pete Woods and later David Lopez (who is also quite good).

He wrote the book until earlier this year when it was canceled.

He also did a Legends of the Dark Knight arc that I liked a lot (Chris Weston on art).

Recently, Pfeifer has collected a bunch of his indie self-published comics from the 80s into a collection, Late Nights at Kinkos.

Click here to purchase the book and take a look at some previews!

What I enjoy most about Pfeifer's work is likely his work with characterization - in H.E.R.O. for instance, he created intriguing personalities in quick bursts (as it was a sort of anthology). That characterization was of great help in Catwoman, where he was able to work with the book for a much longer period, so he was able to slowly bring things along.

In addition, I like Pfeifer's off-beat style - his new take on the Film Freak was delightfully morbid (and Finals was totally off-beat).

I can't wait until I see what he ends up writing next!

In the meantime, we can follow his work on his neat-o blog, X-Ray Spex, which you can find here!