How I Got Here
I am still amazed we are doing this. Starting a business, let alone an indie comic book publishing company, is not something a younger me would’ve predicted. Yet, here we are. Band of Bards is no longer a “man it’d be so cool if we….”-idea. BoB is real and every day brings something new and exciting.
Thank you for being here! Thank you for being interested enough that you checked us out on social media, popped by the website, and decided to see what we were talking about on the BardBlog.
There’s lots to get to. But as we say on our In Your Service series ‘everyone has a story to tell’, so here is mine.
I grew up in Dunkirk, NY. A Rust Belt ghost of WNY-Past. It’s an ignored town in a forgotten about part of New York. I had a more or less typical white Catholic upbringing. Sheltered, isolated, force fed conservative ideas and prejudices. I did not make friends very easily but by high school I found comfort in the local punk scene. For a town of about 10,000 people Dunkirk had a surprisingly strong punk scene at the time. Probably because so many of us grew up feeling like shit-kickers with no identity. Outcasts of an outcast town. Here is where I began to see the world through different lenses, to rebel, to become a teenage anarchist.
Logically I then went on to a private Catholic university!
I knew from a young age that I would join the military as an adult. My high school had JROTC and that helped me win an ROTC scholarship to St. Bonaventure University. It’s a place of Catholic Franciscan tradition, the hippies of the Church for anyone unfamiliar. A true stroke of dumb luck for me. SBU laid a foundation of values based on love & respect for all life. It challenged and exposed everything I was taught as a child, things I had already begun to walk away from.
Basic training breaks down an individual and rebuilds them in a specific way. Bonas essentially did this for me from a philosophical and moral perspective. And then I went off into the Army as a second lieutenant in 2006 to face the challenge of military service through Franciscan values. That in itself is a much longer blog for another day!
After five years on active duty that took me all over the globe I resigned my commission and returned to civilian life. It didn’t take long to figure out my history degree and resume weren’t impressing anyone, so I went back to grad school. My wife saw an ad for a remote grad school program that Bonaventure offered, so I used my GI Bill benefits and slogged through three years of full time grad school and working full time (bills gotta get paid), earning an MBA. Trust me, it sounds a lot more impressive than it really is. Don’t let anyone bullshit ya.
That was 2014, a couple years later the idea for Band of Bards began to form. That too is something for a longer post, right now let’s just say the idea had legs…. tiny little Deadpool-regenerating legs. And it ran about as far as those legs could take it. Years later amidst the Pandemic Chris and I began talking about what a successful, self-sustaining Band of Bards would look like. After months of extensive research we decided to take the big plunge and launch this crazy idea.
So here I am, co-founder of an indie comic publisher, bewildered about how I ended up here kind of like George W. Bush in the White House. My desire to bridge the Civil/Military Gap through writing, through storytelling, has led to this point.
Outraged at the poor representation of Veterans in popular media, I began to tell my own story. I wanted other Vets to tell theirs as well. And over the years I saw how many other people saw themselves being pushed aside and poorly represented. I recognized an intersection of what Veterans experience along with many other social groups in America. Moreover the Veteran population is composed of people from each of these groups. Except that’s not really talked about outside of certain circles.
Popular perception of Veterans is skewed by action movies & TV, Vetbros selling coffee, and Conservative special interest groups parading us around as props. I wanted to correct that. I also saw the opportunity for Band of Bards to serve a much greater need in the comics industry of broader representation issues. Why address a small piece of this issue and not help everyone? Wouldn’t that just perpetuate the systemic issue and make us part of the problem? How do you lift one group while leaving the rest behind and claim some moral high ground? You can’t. If we are to succeed at one goal that goal needs to be broad-based.
If you approach an intersection and only repair one lane of one road the intersection is still broken. Band of Bards exists at an intersection of Representation, Inclusion, and Diversity. These three paths intersect leading forward to empathy and greater understanding in society.
Sounds pretty heavy for a comic publisher, huh? Well, I’ve never been one for doing something solely for the purpose of making money. I believe BoB can be successful only if we serve a greater purpose than profits. That’s how we have arrived at this point. I hope you’re still interested. I hope you’ll stick around and support us.
That’s probably more about me than you really cared for but I think it’s important to put myself out there for everyone to see. We’re asking a lot from comic fans, so I need to be an open book for you all to read. If you’re a straight, white, CIS guy from the suburbs talking about representation, inclusion, and diversity you better work your ass off to show everyone you’re for real.
Comics Doing Good.