Byrne After Reading
Happy 2017! It's a new year, and we definitely started off with a bang! ...but more on that clue below... First, we'd like to welcome our friends from our Indiegogo campaigns! 78 awesome people generously opened their wallets to help make this movie a reality, and boy oh boy do we really suck at keeping them in the loop on our progress! So from now on, they'll be joining the fun in the monthly (mostly) Newsletter that's chock full of Charltony goodness!
Sometimes we at Charlton Comics: The Movie get a wee bit bogged down and fall behind in our work on the documentary, but not anymore! We have a new addition to the team! Remember Garry, the teenage Charlton superfan? No?!?!?! Read his story here! Garry e-mails us pretty regularly with neat stuff and errors he finds while reading old Charlton comics, so we asked him to join Jackie on Team Research! * If you also read the old Charlton comics and see something cool, funny, or otherwise worth mentioning, shoot us an e-mail (info@charltonmovie.com) with a picture of the page, comic title, and issue number and you too can earn a spot on Team Research!
In our ongoing pursuit of tracking down anyone who worked at Charlton, we finally found former Charlton editor Bill Pearson! Bill came on as assisting editor to George Wildman when Nick Cuti transitioned to writing full time, and was an eye witness when Charlton headed toward the dark path to closing its doors for good. We're very excited to compare notes with Bill and finally settle the most problematic part of the Charlton story line.
As most of you know, this project rests on the shoulders of just two people. We hatched the idea thinking we'd shoot a few interviews locally and sell it to CPTV as a Connecticut centered documentary - easy peasy right?
Wrong!
Our dearly departed 3rd producer Dennis Peters told us we were crazy! We were thinking too small! This project is something more!
Well, I guess the Charlton powers-that-be heard him because all of a sudden this project took off like a train and Keith and I were holding on tight. Help came to our rescue with friends pitching in to help with interviews, lending equipment, and contributing money to our crowdfunding campaigns.
But one friend just did the impossible for us!
Paul Kupperberg was the guy who all the other Charlton guys deferred to - "If Paul's in, I'll do it!" - they all told us. Paul said sure, but admitted to us later that he thought he'd never hear from us again after that day back in August of 2015.
Slowly, the comics creators of Charlton agreed to interviews, and as the list of names grew it became easier to convince them to talk to us. Except for one guy.
He had heard about us, and thought it was cool, but no interviews.
We waited. The grape vine told us no.
We waited still.... crickets...
We waited...
Then Keith got a call from Kupperberg. He'd seen Byrne and brought him up to date on the project. "They're still doing that?", John asked. Paul filled him in on all the other names that had been interviewed and the list of guys who were waiting for us to get to them.
Then it happened.
"Alright. I'll do it."
On Monday, John Byrne invited our crew of 5 to his home for an interview we were told "you'll never get."
To say it was awesome would be an understatement. John was a ton of fun!
You could say, "good things come to those who wait", or "persistence pays off", but the real power proverb that always helps us -
"Talk to Paul Kupperberg, he'll vouch for us."
