It's the first Monday of the month which means it's time for me to take your questions and answer them as best I can. So, "Ask Me Anything."
You can ask me any questions you'd like, whether it's about my work, opinions, influences, favorites, least favorites, my summer reading, which summer movies I've seen, or avoided, or anything else you think I might have an answer for. Questions can be posted in the comments section below, and I'll either answer them there, or in a separate post sometime later in the month.
Please take the time to view the previous questions so that we don't wind up with a lot of repetition. I've been asked a lot of good, thought provoking questions in the past as well as some really banal ones, all of which I tried to answer. You can see the previous questions by visiting Ask Me Anything #1, #2 , #3, #4, #5, #6 , #7 , #8, #9, #10, #11, #12 , #13, #14, #15 , #16, #17 , #18 , #19, #20, #21, #22, #23, #24, #25, #26, #27, #28, #29, and #30. Answers not found following the questions can be found in the archives section for each associated month under Ask Me Anything.
Now ask away.
Why is it that no original artwork to Xombi appears to be available anywhere?
ReplyDeleteDid JJ never part with any of it?
I only have a double page spread from the final issue.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is I don't know, but I do have some ideas, and they're not good ones.
No one I've asked, and I've asked around plenty, seems to know what happened to J.J. Birch. He was something of a luddite, so there was going to be little chance of him generating an online presence considering he never wanted to touch a computer. That in itself would make it unlikely that he'd be offering up pages via a website or ebay.
The last contact I had with him was around the year 2000, and he was having some health problems and moved back in with his mother. He was also a New Yorker without a car,and I suspect he may have just thrown all of the artwork away when he moved, since he had no way to transport all of his possessions. He was never particularly attached to his pages, other than part of the process to becoming a finished comic book, so it's easy for me to imagine him just tossing them in a dumpster.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that he may be dead now, so we'll probably never know for sure.
I'd sure like to have some of those pages myself.
I can't even begin to describe how depressing this speculation is to me. Even though I've buffered myself for the possibility of a talent like Joseph Brozowski could be dead since I haven't seen anything of his in print since 1998. The idea of all those Xombi pages being discarded or/and destroyed is just disgusting.
ReplyDelete