Joshua Wolverine MacAlistaire convention drawing

A Short-ish Personal History on the Availability of “Journey – The Adventures of Joshua ‘Wolverine’ MacAlistaire” Original Art

I first started to buy, read and enjoy Cerebus with issue 44 – the first of a run of landscape-format issues – and although I had missed over 40 issues of narrative continuity I was willing to join the dots. They say that men, generally speaking, are more visually oriented than women and so are quite willing to make allowances when something (or someone) is “real purty”, and 100% Dave Sim artwork was very pleasing to look at. I mention that I was a devoted reader of Cerebus around that time because that meant that I saw the two part/eight page Journey preview that appeared as backups in issues 48 and 49 of Cerebus. At the time I did not think them especially better or noticeably worse than any of the other stories that Cerebus would showcase at the end of the book. I probably would not have picked up the first two issues of the regular title if they had not been ecstatically reviewed in the fan press at the time. They were okay but not good enough for me to go beyond the second issue. To put my cards on the table I was not too keen on the art. The reigning comic kings at the time were Byrne, Miller, Pérez and Sienkiewicz, and William Messner-Loebs’ artwork was nothing like those; it was too cartoony for something naturalistic, and too naturalistic for something cartoony. It was only after Fantagraphics picked up the reins of publishing the book with number 15 that I decided to give it another go. That Fantagraphics was publishing the title was for me a mark of quality, as it had passed the rigourous critical scrutiny of publishers Gary Groth and Kim Thompson, who were notoriously hard taskmasters. Even though I had missed 12 issues of narrative buildup there was a synopsis of previous events as well as a character guide on the first interior page of the new Fantagraphics title. For some reason I now “got” the comic and the heavily-worked artwork grew on me such that I picked up all the back issues that I missed out on. People of a certain age who were alive during the summer of 1985 will remember it as the summer of Live Aid, and even though I remember it as that I remember it also as the summer I binge-read Journey and that was as enjoyable if not more so but in a different way from Live Aid. I was a fan and I even subscribed to the comic directly from the publisher as the surface copy would sometimes arrive just as quickly as an airmail copy. Sadly the title came to an end two issues into a projected six-issue miniseries which kicked off when the original title came to an end with issue 27, but at least the storyline which started in the first issue (Josh has been hired to deliver a mysterious package) was satisfyingly wrapped up in the 27 issues of the main title.

Fast forward to 1998 and it is announced that William Messner-Loebs is to be a guest at that year’s United Kingdom Comic Art Convention. I look forward to meeting him in person. If you have not seen WML in any of those YouTube videos you may be wondering what he is like. There is a temptation to think that a comic creator’s signature creator-owned character is a stand-in for the creator – Daniel Clowes is Enid Coleslaw, Matt Wagner is Kevin Matchstick – and so it is with Bill Messner-Loebs and Josh MacAlistaire. Both are men-mountains, facially hirsute, warm, sociable, generous, carry their knowledge lightly, resilient, and could lay me out with a single punch. I am not sure how proficient Josh is with a blue pencil and ink pen but Bill was generous enough to produce for me two drawings (one on each day of the weekend) of my two favourite characters from the series. Notice the breaking of the fourth wall in the Wolverine drawing as the ink on the signature smudges from the rain drenching Josh. It would never have occurred to me to enquire about the purchase of original art and even if it had I probably would not have had the nerve as it was implying that the writing/drawing gigs he was getting had to be supplemented by selling what I thought would be his crown jewels. So I thought these two con sketches would be the closest I ever got to Journey original art.

[continued in the following post]