"Before you can start writing, you have to have something to write about." This is sound advice, though not strictly true. If you really wanted to, you could just start writing, and if you were lucky--and you kept writing long enough--you might just stumble onto something resembling a good idea.
Then again, you might not.
So all things being equal, it's always better to start with the idea. Now, people are always asking writers where they get these ideas from. Personally, I don't think there's anything all that mysterious about it.
 Read books. Watch the news. Observe the world around you. Stop and think every once in a while. And if you see things that are funny, dramatic, scary, or exciting, take a minute to figure out why.
(If you're holding out for an example of this strategy in action, keep reading.)
Hopefully, rather than having this "Where do ideas come from?" problem, you have the problem that I have. That's the "Where does the time to write about all these ideas come from?" problem.
It is closely related, though not identical, to my "Why is your column late again?" problem. (I'm still working on that one.)
I have many, many ideas. Some are surely crap. Some are genius. Hopefully. At times the glut has gotten so bad that I've actively farmed out ideas to other writer friends. One of them still owes me a screenplay.
And yet his columns always upload on time, so who am I to judge?
So if you have a million ideas, how do you pick just one? Well, first off, skip anything that's obviously crap. And, for that matter, anything that's just plain obvious. Then:
 Consider your media. "This is a great idea, but would it make a great comic?"
Consider your mood. "This is a great idea, but I just can't write a romance comic this soon after my girlfriend dumped me."
Consider your strengths and weaknesses. "This is a great idea, but am I really the right person to write a giant fold-out poster comic explaining the true nature of space and time*?"
So. Me. Idea. Now.
Starting this week, THINK LIKE TOMORROW will begin tracking a new comic project that I am developing. My plan is essentially the plan I laid out for all of you last week:
Write a killer one shot. Attract a killer creative team. Make a killer book. Impress a lot of people. Become rich and famous. Build a giant laser and point it at--
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
The idea. It all begins with a notion I touched on a few weeks ago, when I was tracing the history of the superhero.
(See? There's a madness to the method, after all.)
I said it all began with The Scarlet Pimpernel, a work of fiction that introduced us to the modern secret identity: the daper playboy is secretly a swashbuckling crimefighter. This concept of the secret identity fused with the ancient tradition of the larger-than-life hero to give us the modern superhero.
 But what if these two ideas came together in a different way?
I've made the obvious point before that The Scarlet Pimpernel wasn't the first story to deal with secrets and disguises. For example, every third Shakespeare play hinges on these ideas. It's just that The Scarlet Pimpernel was the first story to set up all the rules and conventions we know today.
But what if we junked those rules? How could we approach the secret identity in a new way?
This is where I got stuck for ideas, so I figured I'd just steal from Shakespeare. He's dead, so I don't think he can sue me. Plus, he can't even prove he wrote his OWN plays, so why is he coming after me?
(The big bully.)
Sorry. Where was I? Right. Shakespearian comics. Now, I wasn't looking to write a comic in iambic pentameter, but I figured that old Will had to have some interesting ideas that I could st--er, "pay homage to." So:
At it's core, our story is a romance between a mortal and a god (i.e. superhero). The god has a servant (i.e. best pal), who introduces him to a beautiful woman (i.e. a beautiful woman--some things don't change). But the beautiful woman isn't impressed by this god, because everything comes too easily to him. This, of course, just makes him want her more, so he disguises himself as a mortal (i.e. a mild-mannered type) in order to trick her into falling in love with him.
Wacky hi-jinx ensues.
Or, as the Bard himself put it, "The course of true love never did run smooth."
So there we have it. There are plenty of superhero stories where the secret identity is the disguise. Clark Kent is just pretending to be meek. Bruce Wayne is just pretending to be happy-go-lucky. Bruce Banner is just pretending he's not big and--
 Okay, bad example.
But in almost every case, there is the mortal first. Then something happens, and the mortal becomes extraordinary. The hero pretends to be what he once was, or what he otherwise would have been. But here we have the opposite. Here we have the hero first. The mortal life is a fabrication from the beginning. And that changes everything.
Hopefully.
I'm sure a hundred people will email me in the next week, pointing out some perfectly common superhero who has already broken this mold. But that's okay. Mine will have a cooler, um... superpower... or... something.
Next week, turning a premise into a plot.
 This is one of Drew's classic Think Like Tomorrow columns.
* A good rule of thumb answer for this last question is "No. Not even if your name rhymes with 'gal in store.'"
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