By JOESEPH SIMON – Associate Editor

The day following Tim Truman’s graduation from the famous Joe Kubert School of Art in 1981, he landed a job with popular gaming company SPI. This move would soon lead to Truman’s hiring at TSR Hobbies (the company which created Dungeons and Dragons) as an artist. A few years later, he’d team up with John Ostrander, gaining even more acclaim as the co-creator of Grimjack for First Comics.

While all of these exciting things happened in the mid 1980s, they would lay the groundwork and lead to developments in comics that would change how the industry worked – and many of these rumblings of the past are still felt in comics today.

First Comics played an important part in the independent comics movement that the direct market helped create. Grimjack helped pave the way for First and opened a readership for grim and gritty science fiction action.

Soon afterward, Tim created Scout for Eclipse Comics. Together with First and a number of other indie comic companies, Eclipse (partially due to the success of Tim’s books) remade the industry into much of what you see today.

Tim also created 4Winds, which was affiliated with Eclipse but published books independently. Through 4Winds (and Eclipse) Tim would work on series involving the pulp hero the Spider; golden age comic hero Airboy and the Prowler character. He would also publish work from South American and European creators (including material from Carlos Trillo, Enrique Breccia, Barreiro and Alcatena.)

This would delve into a wild career at DC, Marvel, Dark Horse (with a decade of being on Conan!), westerns, making music, creating more comic art and other fun. Decades of great work, including collaborations with other creators, were produced.

For me personally, Scout was always there as something to re-read and ponder. While created early in Tim’s career, Scout in many ways exploded into all that would come afterward. Science fiction with a western feel, research into the indigenous American cultures, a 45″ flexidisc (with Tim’s music) was inserted into one issue of Scout. Emanuel Santana (as Scout was known) comics could sit on the same shelf as other American comics as much is it could share shelf space with comics created overseas. It was a comic that in content resonates with what is going on in the modern world today and it is as exciting now as it was then!

Readers of Scout during its Eclipse run are no doubt excited by the announcement of the new Kickstarter for Scout: Marauder, as well as the news of a possible Scout motion picture. And readers  looking for an engaging, relevant and well-told science fiction story are in for a treat: Scout: Marauder is coming!                       

An Interview with Tim Truman – Part I

JOESEPH SIMON

Your son Benjamin has already established himself as a comics writer and game designer. I find this fascinating. I don’t have any children, but I always imagined it would be awesome to have a child follow in my footsteps. How cool is it that your son is not only an established writer, but he’s also collaborating with you on various projects like A Man Named Hawken and your current project, Scout: Marauder?

TIM TRUMAN

“What can I say? It’s quite cool indeed. I’m really proud of our children and the way that they’ve been able to stake out their own individual careers as creative people. Emily, Ben’s sister, is an editor, photographer, model, exhibited collage artist and CD cover illustrator. Ben wrote and was story lead for the hit game Black Mesa at Steam, wrote a comic project for Google and was one of the main contributors to the bestselling indie zombie anthology, FUBAR. He recently collected most of his best stories into a book called Trumanthology which is available at his website. They ain’t kids anymore, you know?

Both of them are now older than I was when I was doing Scout: War Shaman. But both of them served as models when I needed reference shots for Scout’s boys, Victorio and Tahzey. Em was Victorio and Ben was Tahzey! I’m trying to find some of those old reference shots to post in one of the Kickstarter updates, then show folks what they look like now that they’re adults. Should be fun.

Ben and I have a great time working together. We’re a good team. We have really different methods of approaching a story. He’s more methodical and analytical, and I just sort of go from the gut. In the end, it makes for a nice blend. By the way, we just found out that story we did for the comics anthology Vampire Tales, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s famous short story “Horror from the Mound,” just won the 2018 Rankin Artistic Achievement Award from the Robert E. Howard Foundation!”

JOESEPH SIMON

You wrote Scout and Scout: War Shaman in the 1980s and 1990s. The comic industry is a lot different now. The great leaders in independent comics like Eclipse (who published Scout) and First (who published Grimjack) are sadly no longer around. Sales, demographics, comic stores, public perception of comics have changed, not to mention downloadable comics and more. What do you find interesting as well as troubling about the comic industry now as opposed to the days when the original Scout comics were released?  

TIM TRUMAN

“I think the biggest thing that affected the industry was the dissolution of distributors. God bless Diamond Distribution, but all told, things were better for the industry when we had 15 or more seperate comic book distributors to deal with – especially for indie comic publishers.

When I was publishing the 4Winds graphic novels, for instance, one distributor might order only 6 books but another would order 300. In between, other distributors would pick up the slack. To illustrate the point, my two Wilderness graphic novels sold far more copies than a lot of current books by big name creators by Dark Horse, IDW or whoever.

We actually did 2 separate printings and 2 hardcover editions at 4Winds plus two separate editions collecting both books in one volume through Eclipse and another publisher. They sold thousands in both the comics market and the historical book market. Would we get those numbers today? In the historical book market, perhaps yes. In the comics market, maybe not. So, though I think that there are many – if not more – people out there who read and enjoy comics now as there were then, less order sources make for less sales.

It has affected everything.The interesting thing that has happened is that the internet has certainly opened up the playing field. With things like Kickstarter, we can offer true collectible editions to our fans directly and even interact with them directly rather than splitting the profits with a publisher who in most cases isn’t even going to do marketing for the book. It’s far more work, of course – especially the work it takes to gather all your numbers and set things up at the site – but in the end it allows you more freedom to control the contents, format and things like that.

So in that way, it’s immersive – a total creative experience.  You’re constructing something heartfelt from the ground up in an almost “fine arts” way. As one of the earliest proponents for both creator ownership and self-publishing, I’ve wanted to move back into it for years, and so it feels great to be doing so.”

JOESEPH SIMON

Scout began publication in 1985. Emanuel Santana (AKA Scout) is a Native American of Apache heritage living in a dystopian United States that has basically become a third world country. The story starts in the then-future year of 1999. The story revealed that due to a series of ecological disasters and economic excesses, other nations were forced to levy vast sanctions against the US for exploiting world resources. In 2017, I’m curious about a few things. First, how has the time passed since the Eclipse Scout comic’s 1999 in the time period of the world you and Ben will depict in Scout: Marauder? 

TIM TRUMAN

“Well, the original miniseries ran for two years, so it covered the ‘future’ of 1999-2001 or thereabouts. Scout: War Shaman was set 12-15 years later, so let’s say that miniseries covered ‘2016-2018,’ when Victorio and Tahzey were kids. Scout: Marauder is set about 15 years after War Shaman, so ‘2033’ in ‘Scout years.’ So yay! It’s the future again!”

JOESEPH SIMON

Do you feel that perhaps with how things are turning out in the present day that our future could still turn out like Scout’s 1999?

TIM TRUMAN

“In many ways we’re already there.”

JOESEPH SIMON

You name-dropped the titles Scout: Marauder as well as Scout: Blue Leader years prior to the Kickstarter for Marauder. Is this the same Scout: Marauder as planned previously?

TIM TRUMAN

“Absolutely. The general idea was planned and plotted out since the time of Scout: War Shaman #1. When I re-read the first half of War Shaman a few years ago, I was amazed at how much groundwork I’d actually laid. In the first two issues, even though Vic and Tahzey are clearly seen as young children in the stories themselves, the text in the captions are a young adult Victorio as a captive being interviewed in a detention facility.

Seeds of this current series were sewn throughout War Shaman. People new to Scout need not worry much about continuity, though. We’re consciously writing this as a stand-alone tale, with key info about the boys’ background sewn throughout. For those that want to dive deeper, though, we’re offering PDFs of the complete Eclipse run of Scout and Scout: War Shaman as part of our rewards. In coming months, I’ll have downloads available for sale at my website as well.”

(End Part I of this interview)