Lucas over at Shotgun Reviews sent me a link to this on Friday, but with WonderCon going on I didn’t have time to follow it. In a post titled “This Lie’s Been Bothering Me…” on his LiveJournal, Hart D. Fisher of Boneyard Press says he published Gerard Way’s first comic:
The most troubling side of this lie is the collusion of the comics industry at large. Boneyard Press was not a small time publisher that was a flavor of the month that got flushed after one year. We published regularly for over 13 years. Boneyard Press was a unique publishing house and held it’s own place in the comics industry, one that has not been filled while I’ve been active in movies. I was listed two years in a fucking row on the Top One Hundred Most Important People In the Comics Industry, and that shit happened a couple years AFTER the Dahmer affair began.
So why was it so easy to pull one over on the public and hoodwink everyone in the comics world that good ol boy Gerard was doing his first published work at Dark Horse?
–snip–
So did a big company like Dark Horse knowingly commit fraud on the public in their advertisements touting these books by Gerard as his first foray into comics, or were they unknowing dupes. How many kids bought this comic book, The Umbrella Academy, because it was the FIRST. It’s a well known fact that the first issue of any new series is the best selling, or the first issue of a celebrity’s FIRST comic ever published. You see where I’m going with this? Sales for a book like that are going to be much higher than for a an old comics pro coming back to the fold now that he’s famous. You think Dark Horse had any part in this, I’ve already shown motive.
Shotgun Reviews contacted Scott Allie at Dark Horse and Gerard Way. Allie said he doesn’t think they ever billed The Umbrella Academy as Way’s first published work, noting that he did something for DC when he interned there. Way said:
I sent [Hart] an email years ago, before we finished ‘Revenge,’ thanking him for believing in me, and never got a response. I think I emailed him once again as well…never heard anything back. I’m not ashamed of what I did for him, and wanted to see him in person and thank him. I’ve never had the chance.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Wow, that’s Choc Full o’ Nuts. I don’t recall ever seeing the series listed as his first comic either. I think it did so well because its the first comic by Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance and not one from some kid Gerard Way. If he has the rights to publish this other comic, he should do it, because I know we’ve got MCR freaks at my store that will buy anything that he’s done. They’d be on it like something that’s all over something else.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:44 am
That’s a pretty unsound argument by Fisher.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Hart Fisher complaining about any hoaxes or supposed mistruths is high fucking irony indeed.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Yes, this is the Hart Fisher who faked his death in CBG. I know someone who worked with Hart in an office in L.A. a few years ago when Hart wasn’t making enough money from comics to support himself and he confessed to some bizarre things, like burning an artist’s original art when the artist wouldn’t return copies of a limited edition he signed because he didn’t think Hart could pay him for the published comic.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Much ado about nothing. Maybe interesting historically, but it’s irrelevant to the quality of The Umbrella Academy.
February 26th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Fisher proclaiming how he’s been twice-annually listed as a “Most Important” person smacks me as not too dissimilar to Milhouse Van Houten proclaiming, “My mom thinks I’m cool!”
February 26th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
This Fisher guy sounds like a bitter loony. He should just dry up & blow away like his company did…
MAKE MINE GERARD WAY!!! :p
February 26th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Didn’t Fisher once make and sell T-shirts that said “Marvel Can Suck My Cock?” Or was that someone else?
February 26th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
This is too funny not to comment…
Hey, Mr. Fisher: I think kids picked up Umbrella Academy because they like his band, not because they thought Umbrella Academy was his first book. The rest of us–we picked up Umbrella Academy because it rocks. It’s deliciously ironic that a one-time publisher would end up looking more emo than the lead singer of an emo band. Gotta love it.
-D
February 26th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
“Didn’t Fisher once make and sell T-shirts that said “Marvel Can Suck My Cock?” Or was that someone else?”
Yup, that’s him.
February 26th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
While I can’t speak for anyone else, I can assure mister Fisher that my purchasing of The Umbrella Academy had nothing to do with claims about it being Way’s first publication.
In matter of fact, I might have been less inclined to pick it up based on such a claim.
It was the content of the FCBD issue that pulled me in.
MAKE MINE GERARD WAY !!
February 26th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
http://www.schwapponline.com/2008/02/hart-fisher-disturbing-artist-with.html
In my blog, I run a YouTube from Hart where he’s pimping himself. At the 2:31 mark, he discusses how he’s trying to sell all his Boneyard Press stuff to pay for his wife’s recovery from cancer. He’s still irrational in all this, but I think his desperation might be because he’d appreciate any help moving the old Boneyard stuff he could get…like Way mentioning his first work.
I think Dark Horse and Gerard Way have done nothing wrong. I think that Fisher’s mistake is a little more understandable when looking at what personal crisis might have brought it on.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I love how Fisher doesn’t actually offer any quotes where Dark Horse ever said it was Way’s first work.
And Way even did another brief bit of comic work which I believe was before he worked at DC. He knew some friends of mine, Dave Roman and John Green, and actually drew a pin-up for one of their early issues of “Quicken Forbidden”. The art can be seen here:
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/johngreen/quicken/fanart.php?ID=145&do_this=view
February 26th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I met Hart Fisher (and his buddy Joe Monks) about 10 years ago while working at the The Laughing Ogre in Columbus.
He’s a pretty funny guy with a lot of great stories about the industry, so if you get the chance to meet him, I encourage you to do so.
Now, those of you making this a Fisher vs. Way popularity contest are way off base. That shouldn’t be the issue at all, I agree with what Kevin Huxford has said, yeah, it sure would have been nice for Way to mention his Boneyard Press stuff as a “thanks” to Fisher, but I don’t see him HAVING to do so.
Just my 2 cents.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
The closest is Dark Horse posting a review by J. Caleb Mozzocco (in his gig at the Las Vegas Weekly, rather than the Best Shots column on the mothership) here: http://www.darkhorse.com/reviews/archive.php?theid=543
Caleb says it is his first work and Dark Horse runs it without anything correcting it. They’re using the review as a form of advertisement, so you can stretch and say they are responsible for then putting it out as fact. But it is a far stretch.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
“Personal Crisis” or not, riding the coattails of someone with a bigger name than yours in order to pimp your merchandise is a low down dirty trick. The man can find finances elsewhere. It’s like a friend of mine once said… we can’t all live the punk rock lifestyle forever. We’ve all gotta grow up and get a real job sometime.
Now quit pimpin’ your blog in an article about Gerard Way and Hart Fisher, Huxford.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
The guy is apparently doing some real work out there. But I’m guessing part of his problem is that the work he has been doing doesn’t carry health insurance. One of the number one causes for bankruptcy in America is catastrophic illness.
He’s definitely wrong to try to paint Way and Dark Horse as putting forth a fraud, but I think digging a little deeper shows that he’s a man in a desperate situation rather than simply subhuman.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
…my god. I was one of the MILLIONS who bought the book assuming it was Gerard Way’s first real foray into comics. Because, after all, I don’t buy books for the writing, art, or even celebrity factor. I buy them for their marginal significance in the grand scheme of a writer’s career.
MY ENTIRE ENJOYMENT OF THE BOOK HAS BEEN A LIE!! I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE ANYMORE!!!
February 26th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Wow.
Quite the Mr. Crankypants, this Mr. Fischer is. Maybe meds are called for?
February 26th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Stop trying to class the thread up, Kevin. The people want their pound of flesh! They may love their villains three dimensional and sympathetic in their funny books, but heaven forbid anyone in real life do something wrong and/or misguided for any reason other than they’re nuts or a total a-hole.
February 26th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Ed said:
“Quite the Mr. Crankypants, this Mr. Fischer is. Maybe meds are called for?”
—
And maybe glasses for you? You spelled his name wrong even after seeing it many times in this article and the comments.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Class it up, James? With a typing goof like “ONE OF the NUMBER ONE causes…”, I’m certainly not raising the level of competency and intelligence here.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Well, Kevin, then I choose to lightly mock you for it, the same way I lightly mocked the over-outrage of the situation. Mock, mock.
Just seems silly. Dude’s going through a thing and said something dumb. And, yes, Umbrella Academy does, in fact, rock. I like the monkey.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:23 am
James,
While scanning your above comment in a hurried coffee-drive/pre-teaching haze, I briefly thought that you’d written “does, in fact, rock like a monkey.”
Thank you for your inspiration. I shall now appropriate my misread for the phrase:
“ShotgunReviews.com: We Rock Like a Monkey”.