Watch this site for more information on the new series Florida Man.
Now about the writer of it. There is this fellow Mike Baron, in comics who writes something different than the typical comic book works. I find his array of published works to be uniformly excellent, but without the sort of audience that his writing deserves. He is far too eloquent for most who read comics, but he doesn't feign write purely efforts in the "literary" vein.
This sounds like he is Jesus Christ come to writing, and no, I am not saying that. But I do sense in him a morality that is absent in many people in comics, and that shines through his work, even if the work doesn't spotlight moral considerations. When you encounter someone who has created work that is so different from everyone else's in the field, that work, if not the creator of it, deserves notice. And in this case, so does that creative talent.
It would be true to say, he doesn't always give great interviews, unless you pursue his simple opening answers with follow ups and deeper probes. Also he tries to replicate speech in the written words of email interviews, and that is great, but the info feed is occasionally lacking. That doesn't mean anything bad, just that, he is a writer who writes real life into these books of fantasy.
He did the adaptations of Michael Moorcock's character Corum for First Comics. He did them so well I preferred them over the source material. He even wrote them in such a way that I liked characters who I had previously been forced into abject boredom reading. Moorcock has his fine abilities, but he writes characters who evoke precious little sympathy or pathos in me. They just are literary excursions in fine writing, and little into excitement. But Baron changed that.
His works from the 1980s, my time of reading more comics than other times, were criminally uncollected despite the rage of capturing runs of quality in the form of the TPB. I cannot tell you why that is. His Punisher was gritty yet didn't lose sight of the darker, broken, hero in Frank Castle. His run on the Flash was completely new for comics, a hero who had to turn to capitalism to utilize his skills and keep a roof over his home. Badger captured a broken mind in the humor and fun of the time, but never mocked the mentally ill, and presented a world that I quite enjoyed. His Deadman series with Kelley Jones was fucking magnificent. I not only loved it, it was slightly spiritual. That is, he didn't convert me to any religion, but writer Baron and artist Jones created the near to life, but still quite dead layer near to this primal plane of existence that felt real. And Nexus is, was, and will always be a book that defies the casual comic book reader, but it rewards the deeper thinker vastly. The reason I say this, is, regardless of the story told in the front of the reader's mind, the story behind it is, what if you could kill all of the bullies of the universe, what would the cost to your soul become? Is violence redemptive? How can that be so?
I know a great many creative folks who adore the work of, but far more, the person of Mike Baron. He is, without people saying it, a sort of comic book writing guru. What is odd then, I think, that he hasn't been made a permanent fixture at any big comic book company. Of the many comic book writers I follow, he is extremely rare. He has never written a story I didn't enjoy. I write stories and poems that many people don't enjoy, and even I don't like all of my stories, (I like my poems). But here is a guy who has never ever failed to deliver.
And yet there aren't any great big collections of Mike Baron's Flash, or The Punisher by Mike Baron. That he has not been recognized for the quality is something that blows my mind. It is simply without my understanding.
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