About Tabloid

Tabloid started off as a prose story that I did in my store newsletter, Tomorrow's News.  I had a partner in the store and he did a large chunk of the work on the newsletter.  But when he decided he wanted to get out of the comic business, I had to make a decision.   Do I cancel the newsletter or do I take it in a different direction.  I decided to keep the newsletter going as it was popular among the customers and made our store different from the competitors.  But without my partner, the whole newsletter became my responsibility.  I had to do all the reviews and news stories.  Before we had two reviews for each comic and that filled up the newsletter fast.  But now I had to figure out how to fill it.  One of the ideas I came up with was doing a prose story.  This is where Tabloid was born.

While I never read tabloid magazines, I did buy a few one time.  A relative of mine talked me into helping him sell some personal attack alarms and I figured we could look into putting an ad in the tabloid magazines.  So I bought a few of them to check out the ad rates, subscription numbers and stuff like that.  We found it was too cost prohibitive to do an ad.  But while I had the magazines, I started reading a few of the articles.  They had stories of a bat boy, demon faces in the clouds and other ridiculous stuff.  I started to think of a world where all this stuff was real and not just made up.  So when it came time to do a prose story, this idea popped up. 

Tabloid ran in the newsletter and did get some favorable feedback.  My customers liked the story and asked for another story in the newsletter.  The next time, I did a new Colt the Armadillo story and hired an artist to draw it.  But I always have a soft spot for Tabloid.  So I decided to rewrite the story because the original story was quite short.  I figured that I would get more involved in fleshing out the main character, Madeline as well as being more descriptive with the world of Tabloid.

About a year ago, I received an email from an artist named Kris Miller.  He wanted to do a comic and I sent him a list of stories I had.  After reading them, he found Tabloid to be the most interesting.  So we started working on a comic book.  Well, like many other times in the past, he was too busy with other projects to finish the comic book and after three pages, the project stopped.  Too bad as his cartoony style would have been perfect for the comic book.  I did put the three pages up here so you can see them. 

Recently, I decided to try and do a Tabloid comic book again.  But I decided that this time I would do it in small doses.  I would limit it to 4 to 6 pages a month.  This helps make it so I can easily afford it in my budget and it also makes it so it is not a big hardship on an artist.  I figure this way, I have a better chance of keeping an artist for an extended period of time.  I put up an ad on the internet for an artist and received over a dozen offers from various artists.  After viewing their artwork and corresponding with them, I finally chose AJ Bernardo as the artists.  He comes from the Philippines and I felt the combination of his art style and his enthusiasm for the story made him the top candidate.  So check out the comic version of Tabloid as it slowly grows.

Tom Zjaba

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