IDW Publishing has announced it will be collecting the 31-issue series Jorney into multiple trades. The first volume collecting issues 1-16 will arrive in stores this August. The tale is set in the 19th century and follows the adventures of Joshua “Wolverine” McAlistaire.
Journey takes place as America recovers from the Revolution and braces for the upheaval of the War of 1812. The result is an absorbing account of life on the 19th century frontier—sometimes fantastic, such as when McAlistaire gets a free ride on a tornado, and sometimes harshly realistic (when he gets chased by a hungry black bear). McAlistaire endures every imaginable hazard, encountering Indians, German poets, Sasquatch, and even talking spirits of the long dead.
“I tried to give a funny, serious, realistic and surreal take on the era,†said Mr. Messner-Loebs in a prepared press release. “My feeling was life is all those things and as a comic reflects that the reader is drawn into it. A spy story needs to be tightly plotted; a frontier saga, or my frontier saga at any rate, should have as little conventional plot as possible. Since the land beyond civilization is freeform, the story you tell should reflect that. I had homesteaded along the Canadian border in Maine for a year and I tried to get the things I had experienced there into the story. I think I got a little serious and complicated towards the end. Of course I was drawing it in hospitals, waiting for both my mother and my wife to die.â€
