Snippets #5: April 25, 1983

This is from an April 25, 1983 letter to my brother, Bruce Laird:

       "I've got a bunch of things occupying my time at the moment. Foremost among them is a new comic-book project that I am working on with my friend Kevin; it's called FUGITOID, and is the story of… naw, I'll let you wait and read it when it comes out. The really exciting thing, though, is the format that we have chosen for this project: Instead of being a traditional comic "book", with a bound spine and separate pages, this will be a one-sheet (measuring 17" by 22") folded in quarters, so what you end up with is an 8 1/2" by 11" booklet that can unfold to its original size. (I'll try to include with this letter a piece of paper folded in the way I'm describing so you can see exactly what I mean.) The neat thing about this format -- or should I say the neatest thing -- is that you can have four pages of standard comic-book size in which to tell the first part of the story, and the last page would be on the unfolded 22" by 17" sheet -- in essence, a poster! Every issue of this comic will have as its final page a poster-sized piece of artwork suitable for framing, hanging or whatever is done with posters. We will try to work if so that that last page is always one big, dramatic panel, with few word balloons, and every one will be a cliff-hanger type of ending. What do you think? This is, by the way, somewhat hush-hush, because we don't want anyone to get the jump on us; so keep it under your hat, otay? This has not, as far as I know, ever been done using the comic book idiom, and I think it would be wildly successful. Of course, it could just as easily flop, but that sort of thinking will get us exactly nowhere. We are planning on two issues each month; the initial print run will be 5000, and we are hoping to have it on the market by this December. I'll keep you posted!

       Other than that, Kevin and I are going ahead with our plans for Mirage Studios -- he's already done a number of color renditions of some of my drawings, and they look pretty groovy. At the moment, we're trying to get a camera to start taking slides or photos of these works so that we can start sending them out and then start raking in the bucks. Kevin is living in Ogunquit now, and he'll be working at a lobster restaurant this summer, but this fall he's thinking of moving down to Dover -- which I think would be great!"

        [As all Fugitoid fans know, the Fugitoid "poster comic" idea never took flight... at least from Mirage Studios. I wonder if anyone else ever tried it? I still think it's a neat idea.

       "Raking in the bucks"... HAH! I'm pretty sure Mirage Studios never even had ONE paying job, with the possible exception of the "Fighters for Justice" superhero role-playing game those kids in Portsmouth put together... although with that one, even though Kevin apparently did some work on the cover, it might not, technically-speaking, have been a Mirage Studios job. Forgive me -- it's been a long time. Some of the details are a bit fuzzy.

       It was pretty exciting to see Kevin'c color work on my black and white drawings -- especially when he took one and blew it up to about four times its original size and did a fully painted version. -- PL]