Caliber Part 5- The Launch

On these missives about the beginning of Caliber, I have always found it interesting that so many people ask me how Caliber started.  I don’t know if other companies always get that as the first question and I’m not sure why it seems to be a special interest with Caliber.  So, that’s my attempt here…just to give an idea of how things played out.  Excuse my tendency to ramble but I think it’s important to understand the thought process I was going through.  I’m sure that I’m forgetting some precise details and perhaps some events totally but I do what I can. It was in late summer of 1988 when I was formulating the plans for Caliber.  I wasn’t sure of the exact launch date as I had to see how things came together.  Some of the titles came with work...

Read more »

Caliber Part 4-The decision

As I said previously, starting a publishing company was not a burning desire of mine. The decision to do so was a matter of circumstances that led to a path that was really never a consideration until I ended up doing it. I opened my first book store in the early 80’s while still a student in college. As I went on to my Master’s degree, I not only kept up my store but expanded to four stores by the time I graduated. The book store, over time, eventually became a comic shop. Two of the new stores I opened were just comics, no books. I had also started up conventions during those early years. The first two were held on the campus of Eastern Michigan and then outgrowing that, I moved it to Dearborn. The conventions were important to the start up of Caliber as I got a chance to meet...

Read more »

Caliber part 3

First off, I decided to just start numbering the posts specifically dealing with Caliber so I didn' t have to think of names for the post titles. So, obviously, this is the third with the first two immediately preceding this one. It’s interesting to see how the current call to action regarding creator owned comics is sort of repeating what happened at about the time that Caliber started in the late 1980’s. The circumstances aren’t the same, of course, and the world back then and today are so vastly different from each other that the only similarity that can be correlated is the creator visioned stories. Following the explosion of creator owned titles from both the black and white boom (and subsequent bust) as well as from the entry of publishers such as First, Comico, Pacific,...

Read more »