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Although characters from comics and graphic novels have never been more prominent in pop-culture consciousness, the comic book audience is graying. Competition from video games, movies and the Internet makes it difficult for comics to compete for 11-year-old attention spans, and publisher policies, cultural preconceptions and unsuitable content have consigned comic-book culture to specialty stores that appeal primarily to 30-something geeks. Scott Renshaw says comic books "have been a gateway drug for a passion for storytelling and for love of reading" and mourns the potential loss of a culture that is in danger of becoming an anthropological footnote.

Jeff Anderson has filed over 200 lawsuits against religious organizations, a majority of them sex-abuse complaints against the Catholic Church. Working in a "litigious blur," this recovering alcoholic has become the go-to guy for both clergy-abuse victims and reporters searching for the big picture on the unfolding scandal. Is he a wisecracking ambulance chaser with a reputation for hunting priests or a tireless champion of the bullied, obsessed with exposing monsters cloaked in piety? David Schimke reports.

Adrian Lano got his first computer, a venerable Commodore 64, at the tender age of six. Somewhere along the line, he developed a twisted, yet oddly romantic, view of electronic etiquette. Today, at age 22, Lano roams the country by Greyhound, flopping in abandoned buildings. But he's never far away from a Kinko's -- and another caper as the "homeless hacker," the criminal mastermind who's cracked corporate Web sites as prestigious as Yahoo!, where he once edited himself into news stories. Lano's always been a friendly pest -- he even helps companies repair the gaping holes through which he's driven his laptop. Nonetheless, he was born to hack, and he tells SF Weekly staff writer Matt Palmquist he's working on his biggest job yet.

Deb Berry takes a chilling and personal inside look at how crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) use public dollars from the Florida "Choose Life" license plate fund to push a religious, anti-abortion agenda through scare tactics and bad information. In a 1994 speech, anti-abortion zealot Robert Pearson, who wrote the manual on how to start such centers, declared: "Obviously, we're fighting Satan ... A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her [do that]."