I keep seeing reference online to an unpublished FINAL FANTASY comic written by me and drawn by Mike Mignola, with a note that four issues were completed and never published.

This is not true. It’s close, but it’s not true.

For the record: Four issues were outlined, two or three written. One and a half drawn, I think — by Dell Barras. Lettered by John Costanza.

Four gorgeous covers drawn by Mike Mignola.

But it was never finished, and Mike didn’t do any interior art.

If it was dug up today (and I have Xeroxes of it, somewhere), I don’t think Final Fantasy fans would like it.

The FF franchise has developed in some very specific ways, and we did this when there was only one FF game out in the US. The second was being readied, but the...

…character names weren’t even decided on yet. I thought a bunch of them were bad names, and got the okay to rename a few. Squaresoft even interviewed me with an eye toward me being their in-house “Americanizer,” for lack of a better word.

But I didn’t take the job, and the...

…game came out very different from the comic. So I think FF fans would read it and think, “What the hell?”

In any case, there was a project there. It just wasn’t what gets described online.

Here’s an ad drawn by Dell and one of Mike’s covers. The dragons in the story did not look like what Mike drew (much more conventional), but Mike’s covers were all stunning.

I remember thinking that “Cecil” was not a heroic-sounding name, and “Cain” was possibly the worst “loyal friend” name in the history of history.

And there was some weaponsmith or inventor character I renamed “Lord Blast,” in homage to Admiral Boom of the Mary Poppins stories.

Today, all this stuff is revered canon; back then it was just a pile of Xeroxes and notes, and they’d encouraged me to suggest changes if I thought they’d be beneficial.