Voyage Comics was founded in 2018 by….me! I never expected to create a comic book company, nor do I have a large storehouse of comics in my basement. It all started when I began to discern God’s will for my life.
At the end of high school, I thought I was going to become a priest. I entered seminary at Saint John Vianney in St. Paul, Minnesota with every intention of being ordained eight years later.
God had other plans for me, as I discerned out after three years, completed my degree in Philosophy and Catholic Studies, and got married.
Around that time, I didn’t have a job, as Philosophy degrees can only get you so far. So I started working for a local parish as a secretary, as well as selling burial plots at a cemetery. That grew to director of faith formation (an obvious progression from working at a cemetery), but ended a few years later when the position was eliminated.
Jobless (again), I had to figure out a way to support my growing family (four children under four years old), so I started a blog (sounds like a good idea….I mean, blogs make money, don’t they?). Despite the difficulty of making money on the internet, an editor saw my writing and hired me to write for Aleteia.org.
This allowed me to support my family (at that point, five children under five), but eventually the desire to co-create (a term J.R.R. Tolkien liked to use), led me to write my first comic book script (remember, I’m a writer, I can’t even draw a stick figure correctly).
I knew a guy (Michael LaVoy), who was a very talented artist, but also never created a comic book in his life. It made sense (sort of) that we could create a comic book that would rival Marvel Comics!
What I didn’t know is that one of the readers of my blog knew a guy (Jim Fern), who worked for Marvel Comics since the 1980s. He worked initially as a fill-in artist on titles such as Amazing Spider-Man, X-Men Annual #13 (where he co-designed and drew Jubilee in her first story), Transformers and Wolverine.
Jim put us through the ringer, telling us that our initial comic idea was crap…which, it was. So we reworked the idea and artwork and created what became Finnian and the Seven Mountains #1.
What’s interesting is that by this point (2017), Voyage Comics was still not even an idea…that came later.
I’ll continue that story next week in Voices of Voyage #2!
Saints! Superheroes! Adventure!
Philip Kosloski
Philip Kosloski is the founder of Voyage Comics & Publishing and the writer and creator of nearly every comic that has been published by Voyage.