Twitters and Mayhem

Tyrese Gibson is an actor and musician and now he's getting into comic writing. Coming from Image comics in August is MAYHEM by Tyrese Gibson and co-created by Mike Le and Will Wilson with artist Tone Rodriguez. Mr. Gibson is taking advantage of his large Twitter following and urging them to go out and pre-order the comic. After starring in the new Transformers movie Mr. Gibson has a lot of people out there following him, so even if a small portion of that can be turned into readers of his comic book it should be a big help. I don't know if this is the first effort on Twitter to help sell a comic or not, but I'm all for taking different approaches to getting the word out there. I'll be interested to see how it works and if it makes a difference. From the word over at THE BEAT it's got a lot of people interested and has even convinced some store owners to order a few copies of the comic that they normally wouldn't have.

I'm for anything that can help get the word out and that is unique from the normal paths. The comic industry needs to find alternate methods to publicize their work. As an industry the comic book business seems to advertize mainly just for itself. Unless there's a big movie pushing the comic, you don't really see a lot of pr being driven towards people that aren't already picking up the latest issues of their favorite comics.

Granted a lot of Transformers fans might be into comics, but Mr. Gibson's apparel goes way beyond that. He's a singer and actor with a lot of diverse material under his belt, so it's a good bet that a lot of his fans may not be a comic buyer. So hopefully with his twittering it will introduce some of these fans to comics and maybe even persuade them to go give them a try.

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William Messener-Loebs

Journey is one of the best comic books every published. This comic was published years ago, it tells the story of a different Wolverine, Wolverine MacAllister, a frontiersman during the 1800s in the Middle American Wilderness. Mr. Loebs both wrote and drew the comic.

Lately Bill and his wife Nadine (it's hard to talk about Bill without Nadine, the two come as a unit) have fallen on hard times. Bill lost his right arm while an infant. After producing comics for Marvel and DC Bill found his talents no longer sought after. Changes in management meant changes on the talent. Bill found himself without work. Through some bad times Bill and Nadine ended up living in a Salvation Army shelter. Recently there have been some efforts made to help them out and from what I've read things have improved some.

But where are the new Bill Loebs stories? Where is new issues of Journey? Why have the past issues of Journey not been collected into trades? I've read recently that Fantagraphics was thinking of publishing a phone book edition of the series and more recently I've read that IDW is supposed to be doing a collection of the first twelve issues this summer. I'm not sure which is true, but I hope that there is a collection coming out from someone of this landmark comic series.

Bill or Nadine won't remember me, but some of my past comic book history is intertwined with them. My first published work was in the back of an issue of Journey. It was titled "The Duel" and was drawn by Sam Kieth. I would call and talk with Nadine about the story and she would offer advice before the story was done.

Years later when Sam Kieth was asked to contribute to the newly created Image Comics he came up with his character The Maxx and asked Bill Loebs to script it for him. At that time Bill said no. Sam came to me (and he might have asked a few others inbetween Bill and me) and asked if I wanted to help him with the scripts. It didn't take me long to say yes. At the time I think a lot of writers were seeing Image as an artist's company, most of the original founders were using friends and people that no one knew to write the series they were creating. I wasn't worried. This was the big time for me. I was doing a lot of short stories for a lot of small publishers, but nothing that was bringing in any real money.

Well, anyone that has read The Maxx knows my name was nowhere to be found on it. Sam was able to convince Bill to give it a go and decided to use Bill as the writer. I'm sure Bill has no idea that I was ever involved with the series, however briefly.

The first San Diego Con I ever went to I met Bill Loebs. It was the year that Sam Kieth, Wendi Lee and her boyfriend (I can't remember his name but he drew a few things for Eclipse) and I shared a room at the convention. Bill has always been a great guy.

Someone get JOURNEY in print. Let's collect those old issues and even better yet let's get some new issues of a JOURNEY comic out there.