RIP: Brian Clifton

Sometimes it seems the universe takes a perverse pleasure in balancing the bad with the good.  I just came home tonight from the Wizard World New Orleans Con and sat down at my computer to see an email from Mike Zeck.  Mike and Brian Clifton are old friends from the days before either of them were in comics.  He was writing to tell me that Brian had died this past Friday.  Brian had a rare form of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid cancer and has been battling if for the past few years.  As Mike said it in his email
“a good man died young, and that always seems somehow unfair.”

I met Brian back in the nineties when I put an ad in the classified section of the than weekly Comic Buyers Guide.  I was looking for artists to collaborate with and Brian was looking for writers.  It was a great match.  We hit it off immediately.  Brian sent me pages and pages from his sketch book and from that Diebold grew.  The stories I could tell about what we went through getting this comic out would curl your hair.  We went through three different publishers before we decided to self publish it ourself.   We met up at conventions in Florida, Philadelphia and even San Diego.  Thanks to the wonderful folks at Einstein’s Comics we were part of their independent comic booth in San Diego.  I’m terrible with years, so I’m not going to try and pinpoint the exact ones.

Brian was a few years older than I was.  I would show up at these Cons in a t shirt, sandals and that was when I was sporting a small pony tail.  Brian would always be so much better dressed than I was, always in a sports coat.  Another constant with Brian was his wonderful wife Barbara.  If Brian was there she was too.  She traveled to all the Cons with him.  Getting to know Brian I got to know Barbara also and she was a special person.

We had such hopes for the future of Diebold.  Sam Kieth and Mike Zeck provided us covers.  Drew Hayes promised us one in the future.  After the first issue came out all the comic magazines at the time, and this was when there were quite a few, gave us good reviews.  Hero Illustrated did a page on it.  Even Wizard plugged it with praise.

When we decided to self publish Diebold we both knew we were going to need a source of money, neither of us had money laying around gathering dust.  Brian came up with an inventive way to raise the money.  He pre-sold the pages of artwork from the first issue.  The buyer had their name put in the comic under the artwork that they had purchased as well as the original page of artwork.  It worked.  He sold out of all the artwork and we were able to publish the comic.

Somehow we only ended up doing only two issues of Diebold.  I think if we had stuck with it we could have made a go of it, but for both of us other concerns of life interfered with our plans for the book and we never made it to a third issue.  And as we didn’t have the comic to keep us connected we started to lose touch with each other.  We’d manage an email and than forget for awhile.  About a year back I emailed him and we’ve been corresponding on a somewhat regular basis.  My last email to him was in November of the past year and he told me had just gotten back from the hospital and a new round of medical tests.

There’s a lot more I could say about Brian.  He was an avid EC Comics fan.  In one of his emails he mentioned that he had a drawing of his in the old EC comic Creepy and that it had been reprinted in Volume 5 of the reprint series.  As Brian got sick he found it difficult to hold a pencil to draw with.  Some of the medicine he was taking made his hands and feet swell up and he had trouble holding a pen.  But when he could he would still doodle.  And he would send me some of those doodles.  Brian was an amazing artist and to the end he lost none of that talent.  The picture with this post is of one of his last doodles to me.  I love it.

Brian and Barbara were able to go to DragonCon in Atlanta this past year.  They asked me if I could make it, but I wasn’t able to.  I wish I had been able to now.  Like I said I could say a lot about Brian.  But mostly I want to say he was a wonderful husband and father and a great friend.  He will be missed.