Rob Schamberger Makes Comix: On The Believer

January 25, 2007

On The Believer

'The Believer' was supposed to be my big break. But the Universe just didn't want it to happen.

The story starts in 1998. I was fresh out of high school without a clue of what I wanted to do with my life. I was drawing quite a bit, but I'd fallen off track considerably since graduation, and I was down to mostly sketchbook stuff. I'd gotten it into my mind that I really wanted to revamp The Shadow. Because, really, who doesn't want to? I was writing quite a bit at this point, too. Warren Ellis and Brian Bendis were really hitting their stride right around then, and it really seemed like a rock star sort of thing to do.

So, my long time mentor Phil Hester was doing a signing and I stopped in to BS with him. He was flipping through my sketchbook and came across the Shadow stuff and asked me what I was up to. I told him, and he just nonchalantly said, "I'd like to pitch that with you."

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

So, I wrote up a script for the first issue and shot it off to Phil. He liked it for the most part, and we started putting some feelers out. We were putting it together that it would be our main story and then have back-ups by other folks in the field. We had some Big Names attached to this. Really, make a top twenty list, and except for Ellis, Miller, and Moore, we had them. This was going to be capital C Cool.

Then Dark Horse told us they were going to let the license lapse. Then Phil got the Green Arrow gig. Then I was wondering what the hell I was going to do next.

Luckily, Phil put me in touch with KC local Thom Thurman. Thom and I hit it off right from the get go. We had totally similar tastes and Thom was just a hell of an artist. Phil had told me about how The Coffin was originally a pitch for revamping a comic called Rust, and told me I should do the same with the Shadow script. I did, and then we had The Believer.

We sent it out to several companies, but the one we wanted, Image, said they wanted it. Oh my god, I'd never been so excited in my life. That was the single best email I'd ever read. This was also a week after my 21st birthday. Hell of a present!

It turns out that Image was starting up a new line called Image Introduces, and they wanted to fast-track us to be in the second slot, following a book called Primate. (Primate, incidentally, was what funded the formation of IDW.)

We didn't realize at the time that we were Greg Brady fitting into the Johnny Bravo suit. Image needed a complete book for the second month, because the other people in the line weren't even close to completion.

We got pretty good press when the line was announced. But we started realizing pretty quick that Image just wasn't set up to be doing something like this. There were a lot of production things that they had never done before, and Thom being in production art noticed a lot of the kinks that were coming up. Like, on the cover above, do you notice how that awful red doesn't match the red on the scarf? Or that my name is mis-spelled? Yeah, stuff like that.

Also, the press release was really vague on what the line was. Everyone thought it was an anthology, and we all know anthologies don't sell. With us being the second release, retailers thought it was a second issue, so we got the kind of orders that the second issue of an anthology would get.

Also, our solicits went out in October of 2001, which just so happened to be the worst month in retail history due to the terrorist attacks in New York and DC.

On top of that, we weren't able to use our marketing plan because of the changed climate in the world. Our marketing plan? Personalized death certificates for people who helped promote our book and free minicomics for comic shops to hand out where the owner gets 'killed'. Image rightly said that while before 9/11 this was a great, cool idea, post-9/11 it would be in poor taste.

So, we were the second lowest selling book from Image that month. Due to poor planning, the Image Introduces line collapsed. The original idea was that if a book got positive word-of-mouth and/or positive sales, the book would become a series. We had very, very good reviews on the book. Even the Comics Journal liked us. But, the line got tanked, with the only book going on being Rex Mundi.

Jim Valentino told Thom and I that he liked what we did, but he didn't want more Believer. So, I went with my follow-up project, a Believer-style take on Doc Savage. But, by this point, Thom and his wife had brought a daughter into the world and Thom had gotten a job at Hallmark. He wasn't able to draw a book anymore. His desire to draw a book had gone away, too.

We had some really neat stuff going at our site, doing a free downloadable monthly anthology called FREE COMIX! that ran for six months or so before Thom finally wore out. We had some really cool stories in there from folks like Steve Lightle, Phil Hester and Steven Grant, plus a continuing story of our own called Confidence Man. We were getting AMAZING press on that, with several articles in Newsarama and a feature interview as well. But, all of that folded rather abruptly.

So, I found myself desperately trying to find another artist. I hooked up with several promising folks, but I found myself a constant victim of Art-Flake-itis. Finally, I came to a breaking down point where I had to decide between quitting or the long arduous journey of teaching myself to draw again. Obviously, I chose the latter.

The Believer is something that I'm still very proud of, though. I would have loved to really explore the concepts I'd planned in there, and I will some day in some other form, I'm sure. It was a strange set of circumstances where it was more that we were in the wrong place and time than that we had a bad book. Because the book most assuredly was not bad.

I'd love to continue to collaborate with other artists, but I am quite enjoying not having to worry about them, too.

Posted by Schamberger at January 25, 2007 10:37 AM