Gerry is the guy on the right in orange

I just got a blast from the past. I got an email from Gerry Giovinco, the man that put Comico on the map. I first met Gerry working on Bob Schreck`s 1980 independent film The Incredible Hulk Meets the Ever Lovin` Blue Eyed Thing.

Bob, who is now a senior editor at DC comics, in those days was the bouncer at the Creation Comics Con. When Bob wanted to do a movie he got in touch with all of the people that had done cool costumes at Creation. Since I was doing slasher flicks and rubber suits at that time I was in that number.

We took over a bar on Long Island for 2 days and we filmed this movie that still holds up well today. Don`t look for it in the Internet Movie Data Base, none of my film work during this time made it to IMDB. I have a very dark VHS print of it and if you get me drunk sometime I might show it to you?

About a year later I got a letter from Gerry asking me to contribute to a new comic company he was putting together. I was doing Photo Comics with stop motion models at the time, and kick myself, I never sent him anything thinking that this was just another self published one shot. If I had only sent him something I would still be on the Right Coast starving in comics and covered in snow for 6 months out of the year.

Gerry, a high school friend of his, and the friends brother who was a dentist or accountant and owned a building and was looking for a tax write off, started Comico, but it was Gerry`s baby.

Gerry didn`t know from tax write offs, this was comics, this was what he wanted to do and do it he did. He got Mage, and Panda Kon, and Evangelina (bounty killer Nun in a leather habbit set in the future), Robotech, and Concrete. He built it up into the number 3 comic publisher in the country.

That is when the trouble really started. If the comic company was not a tax write off and was going to show a major profit then we can`t let some kid run it just because he built it. They took the company away from Gerry and gave it into the keeping of more mature looking people that Gerry had brought in to help him run the place.

The last time I saw Gerry I was on the East Coast visiting Chris Kalnick and we went in to Comico. I looked around and couldn`t find Gerry anywhere. I even asked and got a non answer. So I talked to other friends and stocked up on free sample comics.

Then when I was on my way out I ran into Gerry. I started talking to him. Just passing the time. Maybe 45 seconds in to the how are you doing? and the people that he had hired to help him run his company, who where now the bosses of the company he had created, came down on him like a ton of bricks like he was some dumb office boy off the street.

They soon turned Comico right back into the tax write off it was meant to be but both moved on and are still working in the field today. Gerry, I don`t know what happened to Gerry. I am waiting for a return email. This was the first time I saw this kind of dumb headed business planning. But it wasn`t the last time. And every time I see it I think of Gerry.  ¶ 7:51 PM