Goodreads asked Bob Proehl:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Bob Proehl A Hundred Thousand Worlds is my big gooey love letter to comics. I've been a huge comic book geek since Superman died. It galls me to admit it, but I was a baseball card collector when I was a little kid, so I had this weird kid sense of speculator markets. And Superman #75 was supposed to be this huge collectors' item. So I made my dad drive me to go get a copy. But I ended up with a fourth print (not the black polybagged one), and the only thing you could do with it was read it. So I did, and I got to the end and it was basically "to be continued." (Grant Morrison makes the point that this is Superman's ultimate superpower, his ability to exist in a constant state of "to be continued"). My poor father had to drive me to the comic book store pretty much every week after that.

But all that's kindling. What sparked the story was my stepson. He was eight at the time, I was about thirty. We were still kind of figuring each other out. We were watching "Superman: The Movie". Which I love, but I couldn't stand the ending. It always felt too comic book-y. But as soon as Supes started flying backward around the earth, my stepson said "He's going to reverse time!" And I was fascinated by that overlap between kid-think and comic book-think. The way plausibility could become proof. The way a story that was good could be considered true. I wanted to put those two modes of thinking, those two modes of story-making, in proximity to one another.

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