As I’ve covered in the previous indexes, the majority of the books Comico published fall into three categories: Licensed properties, Elementals and books that had originated at other publishers.
So this index is about the rest of the books, which (at most other comics publishers at the time) would be the largest section: I.e., books that creators dreamed up, and then took to a publisher. But it’s a pretty small list here, eh?
Except for Mage (15 issues) and Grendel (46 issues) (and both from Matt Wagner), these “normal” books had short runs. Slaughterman/Az/Skrog were from the original publishers who then stopped doing comics. Evangeline’s and Next Man’s creators had a public fall-out with Comico.
It’s not until we get to 1988 we really start to see normal books start arriving at Comico, and that’s apparently due to editor Diana Schutz managing to entice creators to publish with Comico: Ginger Fox, The Maze Agency, Ribit!, The Amazon… These are all solid comics, and not initiated from within the company office walls.
But we’re talking less than a couple dozen issues in total of “normal” comics.
So I’ve been wondering while reading these comics over the last half a year whether Comico’s main problem was just that they didn’t have enough contacts in the comics world. They were located in Norristown, Pennsylvania, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of comics business, to put it mildly. Perhaps that had something to do with it?
