A Not-So-Cheery Blast from My Past

When I became serious about collecting comic books in high school--which is to say, when I stopped buying just from the local drugstore and went to actual shops that not only got Marvel and DC three weeks earlier, but got all sorts of great independent books--one of my early favorite writer-artists was a guy named William Messner-Loebs, whose black-and-white series Journey was a great yarn about an American frontiersman: no superheroes, no crazy battles, just some really fun storytelling. Heck, I was such a Messner-Loebs fan I even bought issues of the official Jonny Quest comic book because he wrote it. Though Messner-Loebs went on to do a lot of stuff for DC, he was never quite a fanboy idol like, say, John Byrne, so his personal life was to a large extent a mystery. It wasn't until I followed a link from Mark Evanier's blog yesterday to a profile of Messner-Loebs in the Detroit News that I discovered he had lost his right arm shortly after he was born.

Apparently the last four years have been very rough for Loebs, beginning with a car wreck and snowballing to include foreclosure and the theft of the mobile home he and his wife got afterwards.

"To make matters worse [the article adds], when he lost the house, Messner-Loebs was not working. 'I thought I'd be getting a job any day, but it didn't work out,' he said. His last comic book work was in early 2000. He speculated that he hasn't gotten work because of leadership changes at Marvel and DC Comics. 'There are very few people in comics who remember who I am--it's been over four years.'"

That's a real shame, considering that a lot of the editors at those houses have to be around my age, maybe a little older, and must have seen his work both at the big houses and for the indies at some point. (My personal favorite is his graphic novel Epicurus the Sage; good luck tracking it down, though.) Newsarama says that current A-list author Mark Millar's trying to get Messner-Loebs a Marvel job, but you might also want to look at ACTOR (A Commitment to Our Roots), a not-for-profit established to offer financial assistance to comic book creators in need.

photo: John Galloway