Take a Journey

Not much tonight, just a recommendation. Back twenty-five years ago, a cartoonist named William Messner-Loebs started a comic called simply Journey. It was an engaging and engrossing series about a fur trapper in the 1810s in what is now present-day Michigan. According to Loebs, it was a lot different two hundred years ago. I'll admit that this little capsule description wouldn't have been enough to draw me in back when the series was coming out, but consistent good reviews of the book were, and I was glad to have jumped on when I finally did. Journey brought Loebs mainstream attention, and it wasn't too long until he jumped over to big boys as a super-hero writer. For reasons I don't know, he focused on writing over drawing (he doesn't have an obvious super-hero style, but it's abundantly charming and appealing). For my money, although he did some good work for DC and Marvel, he never came close to matching Journey. As comics creators do, unfortunately, Loebs fell out of favor, and his work stopped appearing as frequently. Somewhere along the way, Journey seems to have been mostly forgotten. It was an important book in the development of independent comics, and although the name comes up every now and again, I'm not sure how many people nowadays have had a chance to see the work.

Now IDW has remedied that problem. They've released the first of two volumes that will collect the series. Go buy it.