Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dark horse, entertainment, gerard way, hart fisher, on ravens wings, scott allie, umbrella academy

Hart Fisher Kicks Off At Dark Horse Over Gerard Way. Again.

Published Sun, 16 Feb 2014 13:00:08 -0600

by Rich Johnston

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That's the young Gerard Way, or Garry Way as he was then, from My Chemical Romance. And Hart Fisher has a bone to pick.

Again.

He tells Bloody Disgusting,

Gerard Way is a liar and a fake who devalued Boneyard Press products and implied I was a liar by his deceits and instead of owning up to his deceptions he kept on lying and set his fans loose on me for an online hate campaign that hurt my wife's recovery from Chemo and Radiation therapy to combat her ovarian and cervical cancer.

In order to inflate orders on his upcoming comic book, "The Umbrella Academy", Dark Horse, editor Scott Allie & Gerard Way made a major press push stating the falsehood that "The Umbrella Academy" was Gerard's first published work in comics, which they knew was a lie.

Gerard's first published work was done over a decade earlier when Boneyard Press published his series, "On Raven's Wings". Issue #1 was published in April 1994, written by Gary Way, drawn by Jose Santos with inks by Dana Greene and a fully painted cover by Rob Nemeth. Issue #2 was published in September 1994 with Gary writing, Jose & Dana on the art, another great painted cover by Rob Nemeth. When Gary couldn't hold his art team together, we canceled the series, but that didn't stop me from schleppin' this kids books to convention after convention telling everyone what a great new writer this kid was and that yeah, he's got the goods. I did this for YEARS.

Dark Horse and its editorial staff knew all about this but decided to pump the numbers up with the lie about 'first published work'. They were even lying about it when directly asked by some members of Gerard's fan club. They claimed that Garry Way was not Gerard Way. According to Dark Horse, they were two different people.

He's talked about this at length repeatedly over the last six years. But this time he has given some details about exactly how he came to hire Way.

So it's the early 90's and I get a submission packet from a high school kid named Gary Way. He was a big fan of mine so he sent this comic book that he & his buddies were doing together to me. I thought it was pretty good. So I decided to invest my money & publish it. That's when I got to know him, when I took him under my wing.

I did this with a lot of the lost souls & angry young kids who found their way to me. I wasn't just their publisher, I was their friend, I cared about my guys. They were important to me and I wanted them to get stronger, to be stronger, to do the best work they could do. My philosophy at Boneyard Press was give me your stragglers, give me your battered & cast offs… I would rebuild them… I would forge them into wolves and together, we would own the shadows.

Gary was one of these kids.

I used to have talks with his mother about how to keep him from getting beat up & bullied at school where he lived in Jersey. I talked with Gary quite a bit too. This was before email & texting, so people actually talked to each other then… So… after Boneyard published the first issue of his on going series, I took a liking to the kid so much I got him on the Sally Jesse Raphael show as an "Official Boneyard Press Writer" and he got to stand up & ask a question on the air.

Pretty cool for the school punching bag, right?

Gary gets out of high school & stays in touch with me through his days in college. A lot of my interns & guys did that as they were growing up. When he called me from the offices of DC & told me about his new job at Vertigo, I thought, Fuck yeah, now one of my guys is rising up! Kick Ass!

911 happens, I don't hear from the kid again. Me, my life moves at light speed, so I don't think twice about it… a few years go by, I'm working full time in Adult films, then I get the youtube/mail from a fan who tells me all of her friends are calling her a liar over my book, On Raven's Wings, and it's author Gary Way.

You see… Apparently there was a Gerard Way with a new comic book coming out from Dark Horse comics & they were marketing it as the first published work of Gerard Way, the frontman for My Chemical Romance, which will have more value in the collectible comics market & would help them get a sales bump. My fan said to her friends, "Hey, that's not his first published work, he did a series for Boneyard Press as Gary Way, that's his first published work." She contacts me to get the truth. I go fucking ballastic.

No motherfucker is going to make a liar out of one of my fans. Fucking no one.

I write a blog on my Live Journal account wondering if Dark Horse is a knowing partner of Garry Way's charade to game the fans & the retailers or are they unwitting pawns. I was very, very, very angry. Then I got my hands on the My Chemical Romance video interview with all grown up Gerard Way telling people that he wished someone had taken a chance on him & published his comics when he was a teenager, that only someone believed in him enough to publish his work back then.

Yeah, he's not happy. At the time I wrote, that aside from one mention in the solicitation for the collection, "Gerard Way, of My Chemical Romance, makes his comics writing debut", most references stated this Umbrella Academy was Way's first comic series which is different to first comic.

That neither Gerard nor Dark Horse referred to Gerard's earlier work in publicity is not a failing. Hart should not have been hurt or betrayed by it. If anything, it should have been an opportunity to promote the original, but there were other aspects in Hart's life at the time that may have led him to invective.

The truth of the matter is, is that On Raven's Wings, wasn't very good. Which is probably the biggest reason Gerard has for not bringing it up in interviews, rather than a snub against Fisher or Boneyard Press.

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