CaliberPart 8--- Not an Identity Crisis

As promised, an update within a few weeks!

Around the third year of Caliber, there was an incredible amount of changes occurring with the company as I said before. It was the nature of the company that creators would come with new ideas and a chance to showcase their talents and titles and often time, move on to the bigger guys. I realized that we were becoming a farm system.

But that was okay. Sales were decent and even though Caliber didn’t own most of the books, most of them were profitable, even if profits were small. In a long twisting route, I ended up owning Deadworld and the Realm and the Tome Press titles were mostly Caliber owned titles. At this time, there really wasn’t much thought or impetus to consider the exploitation of comics outside of just doing comics.

As was the norm for most of the company’s publishing life, I was bombarded with submissions. Actually, it’s kind of odd as even today, over ten years after Caliber stopped publishing, I still get submissions every month. I did understand that although I felt that a company shouldn’t be restricted to any kind of genre, the output from Caliber was over all the place. There was no such thing as a typical “Caliber” book and I knew that this could become problematic while at the same time, I didn’t want to limit what kind of material to do based on some perceived image of what we were.

The Tome Press line worked out fantastic and with those titles safely nestled under that imprint and fans as well as retailers, understanding what the line was, I decided to branch off with more imprints. I came up with Gauntlet for the more action/adventure type books and for the more introspective work or what is often referred to as the self reflective books, I created Iconografix.

Iconografix was our “artsy” line and Ed Brubaker’s Lowlife moved into that line, I believe. There were a number of different titles, many of them one shots and the talents that were published with Iconografix included the likes of Dame Darcy, Mary Fleener, Richard Sala, Jason Lutes, Paul Tobin, Joe Zabel, Eric Haven, Dennis Worden, Al Frank, David Chelsea, Mark Burby, Mark Badger, Mack White, Phil Hester, George Parsons, Lloyd Dangle, Gary Dumm, and Ashley Holt. A lot of those creators were involved in the anthology, Monkey Wrench. That was edited by Brubaker. However, when he contacted everyone, he offered them page rates which was something that Caliber didn’t do. I never saw the logic on giving page rates for creator owned books. That caused a slight flare-up and Brubaker disappeared for a while and the next thing I knew, he was writing mainstream comics.

For Gauntlet, I ventured into the world of superheroes. I blame Patrick Zircher for that. He really wanted to do his Samurai Seven and since Patrick was so willing to do anything I ever asked and do a great job of it, I conceded. He deserved that chance. So, in addition to that book, there were a few series, most notably UN Force (in color), Tekq, Beck and Caul, and the Berserker series written by Gary Carlson which was the big seller. Collecting some of the earlier work that had never seen print, it included story art or pinups by Angel Medina, Rob Liefeld, and Erik Larsen. The Big Bang line of comics also came out from Caliber but I don’t remember if those were under the Gauntlet banner or not. I think not because these were packaged for sale to Wal-Mart and we had established the Caliber identity with them. Same with the Stormquest title that we put together with Blue Line. However, both would have firmly fit in with the Gauntlet line.

That doesn’t mean that the Caliber line was forgotten about. Caliber releases included Bernie Mireault’s Mackenzie Queen (and later, we would release his classic series, The Jam), Gabriel Morrisette’s Gaijin, two color series in Sean Shaw’s Billy Nguyen and Michael Allred’s Graphik Muzik. Kevin VanHook’s Frost series was released after we compiled a one shot. This would eventually lead to his movie which was released years later.

It was about this time that a new influx of creators were coming into Caliber. There were creators like Ken Holewczynski and Rafael Nieves who contributed some and Raf became a good friend. When Kevin VanHook was still onboard, he saw a lot of promise in a young artist which would prove to be justified and Galen Showman did some key titles with Caliber. I had signed up Michael Lark’s Airwaves as a series and he also branched out to the Taken Under series which ran in Caliber Presents. Brian Bendis came on board with his Parts of a Hole, Spunky Todd, and Quivers. Mark Ricketts had an interesting series called Warp Walking that we did, and there were a couple of series from two guys from Kentucky which ended up being Happy the Clown and Young Dracula. Gary Francis was the writer and David Mack was the artist. Joe Pruett came to me with his Kilroy series and that would open a long relationship with him and his twin, Jim.

This last set of creators came at the right time. Caliber had entrenched itself for the long haul as we had ventured into a lot of different areas including record distribution as we did the magazine ARC and also the guys at Skingraft made some inroads with records.

The Caliber line started to solidify with a more stable lineup with the aid of the imprints absorbing some of the more specific genre titles. Many of the creators became good friends and Caliber embarked on a series of convention tours and it was during this time that titles such as AKA Goldfish, Kabuki, and Nowheresville started. With Galen, two series I wrote, Renfield and Sinergy both garnered quite a bit of attention. And the stage was set to move from the anthology of Caliber Presents to an all new anthology called Negative Burn.

It was a crazy time and it was about to get even crazier as Caliber merged with Stabur. Next time, I’ll discuss that and how the grandiose plans that caused the merger quickly fell apart all because a guy wanted to start up his own toy company.

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Interview From the Tomb

I had almost forgot about this interview from a couple of years ago but it does cover the early days of Caliber as well.

It's a good length and you may have to zoom in on the small print but the interview covers the early days of Caliber as well as the start up of Transfuzion.

http://www.garyreed.net/Deadworld/FromTomb/ReedInterFromTomb8.htm

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Caliber- Branching out

It’s been awhile since I last reflected on the early days of Caliber.  I’ve gotten quite a few requests to continue and so I figured I’d cover a little bit more.  It’s rather funny as when I was going through it, I knew I was busy but in looking back, it’s rather amazing how fast everything was occurring.

After the initial launch in 89, the core group at that time had started moving on.  Guy Davis and Vince Locke got hired by DC, O’Barr went to Tundra where everyone was going because of the high page rates, and Mark Bloodworth was hired by Marvel.  Guy, Vince, and Mark were still involved the next year or so but they were crossing over to the big time and soon would be gone for good.

The next group of creators that formed the bulk of Caliber’s output were Michael Allred, Bruce Zick, Michael Lark, Ed Brubaker, and Jim Calafiore.  Allred did a one shot called Creatures of the Id which introduced Frank Einstein who of course, would become Madman.  Brubaker had his Lowlife comic, Lark brought his Airwaves series and also did the Taken Under serial for Caliber Presents.  Bruce Zick worked in animation and I believe he did some Marvel work, I think it was an adaptation of an animated feature but showed a whole different look with his atmospheric Zone Continuum.  Calafiore did a couple of creator owned projects such as Progeny and God’s Hammer before tackling Camelot Eternal.  There was also Patrick Zircher who worked on a number of different titles as he was starting out.

As I mentioned previously, I had brought in Kevin VanHook and Caliber released our best selling adaptation of Rocky Horror Picture Show.  But we also licensed another property and this was Kevin Siembieda’s Mechanoids from Palladium Books.  Kevin had become a friend as he shopped at my stores so over this period, we did an adaptation of one of his games, he started the ball rolling on adapting some of our comics (such as Deadworld) but never materialized.  I even wrote a role playing game supplement.  It was on Robotech and I didn’t follow Robotech nor did I role play…but it worked out okay.  Mainly the writers just had to come up with stories and scenarios.

Caliber also produced a comic for Troma Films.  It was called Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo.  It was supposed to be a 3 issue series but we only did one issue but I don’t remember why.  I think it was because they wanted to pass out 5,000 copies at Cannes Film Festival and I told them that was not part of our publishing strategy.

At about this time, I was figuring out what to do with Caliber.  We were now in our third year and had put out some significant titles and were attracting some new talent that had an opportunity to showcase their skills.  But I had felt that comics were extremely limited in their appeal.  Having four comic stores at the same time, I realized that the market was bound by its reliance on superheroes.  In order for comics to truly grow into a mass market appeal, there had to be something for everyone.  So, I created a line of comics based on literature, history, and reference.  That was Tome Press.

I loved the Tome Press line and devoted most of my writing over the next couple of years to it.  My problem…and Tome’s problem…was deciding what to do as there were so many choices.  The output was varied, not only in subject matter but presentation.  Some were full comics, others were full prose, and many a hybrid between the two.  We did classic artists such as Mucha, Beardsley, Remington, Currier & Ives to print series based on Dore, Goya, Holbein and others.  There were literature adaptations of Jack London, Jason and the Argonauts, Honest Thief, A Modest Proposal and Pied Pieper of Hamelin, to biographies of notable such as Amelia Earhart, Jeremiah Johnson, and others.  I loved the historical stuff such as Henry V, The Alamo, Russian Revolution, El Cid, the Zulu Wars, etc.  In all, about 80-90 titles were released.  The H.P. Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes titles did quite well and there was a great response to the new translation of Dante’s Inferno that utilized Dore’s classic imagery.

The Tome line continued throughout the rest of Caliber’s days, some 8-9 years more since the launch although production stopped for a year or two.  The sales in the comics market weren’t exceptional but they outsold some of the creator owned line yet we also had substantial re-orders.  Many comic shops would frequently order every few months so the Tome line always had to have large over-printings.  When Caliber launched its internet store, and we were one of the very first, almost all the sales were Tome Press titles.  Later, we worked out a deal with Wal-Mart where about a dozen or so titles were mass produced for the chain and I think we sold 10,000-20,000 of each to them.  We would later produce a Frankenstein adaptation for them that had sales of 80,000 copies.

Those were busy times.  After Kevin had his one year at editor, I didn’t replace him for awhile.  The production team consisted of me and others.  Mark Winfrey and Guy Davis took their turn at production but eventually, they moved on and Nate Pride, who worked at one of my stores, eventually took on a full time role and he remained until the end days of Caliber.  Most of the accounting was done at the stores as it was all one company, but later, Caliber and the store chain would separate completely.   I think one month, Nate and I put together about 20 issues and got them out the door and that was in an era that was all paste up.  The days of computers and design programs were still a way off.

The situation at Caliber was that it was always in flux.   Creators and titles came but so many of the creators were hired away by other companies that I knew we were a pretty transient company.  A lot of people had trouble pegging what kind of company we were and to be honest, I don’t know if I could’ve explained it.  We were essentially a company of diversity and a company of change.  That was just the way it was.

Next time, and I promise it will be sooner than the last update, I’ll talk about the next set of creators that came in and the expansion into even more imprints.

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