Remembering Bernie Mireault: 1961-2024

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Zach Rabiroff | October 21, 2024

It is bittersweet that as quintessential an outsider in comics as Bernie Mireault should be so widely and sincerely mourned. Mireault’s work had always projected the passionate fascination of someone standing just outside the comics mainstream without ever totally entering it. The Jam, Mireault’s magnum opus and the work which occupied the better portion of his career, was like an outsider art interpretation of Jack Kirby – Marvel Comics by way of a prodigiously talented cargo cult. Mireault, to be sure, was never the sort of artist likely to make the front of a Previews catalog, but it is wholly possible to imagine the sort of alternate world where he might have been, and where anyone with verve, talent and tenacity for the art form might do the same.

That this future, and all of Mireault’s futures, are confined to the realm of the hypothetical is now a tragic fact. On Sept. 2, 2024, Bernie Mireault died at age 64. His death, announced in a Facebook post by his lifelong friend and fellow comics artist Howard Chackowicz, revealed the cause to be suicide. The flood of remembrances was immediate and heartfelt: from collaborators, publishers, and colleagues who knew him; from elder industry statesmen like Paul Levitz who didn't; from fans, stunned and saddened by the loss of an artist most of them — of us — had long taken for granted. It was, in a real and ironic sense, as close to the center of the comics field that Mireault and his work had ever been.

Mireault came early to his outsider status. Born on June 27, 1961, he was the child of two anglophone Canadian military officers stationed on the Belgian border of France. At the age of two, he moved with his parents back to Canada, bouncing frequently between the provinces of Quebec and Ontario as his parents were re-stationed, before winding up in the small town of Rawdon, north of Montreal. This was the early ’60’s, and French Canada was in the midst of a cultural transition, as Quebecois nationalism became an increasingly militant political force and the relative influence of the anglophone populace declined considerably in politics and culture. For Mireault, whose French remained only passable despite a lifetime spent in the francophone province, this made him something of a minority among a minority, a not-atypical brew for a budding comic book fan.

Comics were, by Mireault’s own accounting, his own private form of political uprising. In a Facebook post from 2021, looking back on his formative years, Mireault recalled: “My mom ran our house and she was puritanical in her views toward comic books. She would buy the occasional Harvey comic, maybe an issue of Archie or Mad, but certainly no superhero stuff! I had to find out about those myself, reading them at a friend’s house or finding discarded copies on the ground outdoors, which happened more often than you might think.”

Superheroes, when they hit him, hit him hard. Chiefly, this was the work of the early 1980s Marvel Comics artistic vanguard: John Byrne’s X-Men, Frank Miller’s Daredevil, Art Adams’s Longshot, and Mike Golden’s Micronauts—all of them importing into the increasingly stale conventions of the publishing mainstream a certain neo-Eisner vitality to which Mireault instinctively responded. A homemade Captain America comic, drawn by Mireault at age 21, was as close as he would ever come to entering the Big Two superhero worlds. Despite its legitimately primitive appearance — the work largely of an autodidact — it is instructive of things to come. The subject matter and dialogue, peppered with a healthy number of exclamation points, bespeaks a familiarity with Jack Kirby reprints, but there the Silver Age influence ends. The layout — opening with a page of stark text and alternating between panel-breaking, modernist splashes and small panels of repeated imagery — is all Jim Starlin, complete with a death’s-head skull motif. The figures are posed formally in symmetrically unbalanced frames, shades of Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan. Typeface frequently blends into panel frames and gutters, in the manner of John Workman and Walt Simonson. The overall effect is one concerned more with the general vibe of a Marvel comic book than the actual content or nature of one – the Spider-Man theme song as played by the Ramones. This look and tenor would be the nucleus of Mireault’s early style.

What followed was a self-imposed crash course in comics art and history, during which Mireault attempted to synthesize as wide a range as possible of styles and influences in as short a time as he could manage: artists of the Canadian New Wave like George Freeman and Dave Sim; newer, Montreal-based contemporaries like Chester Brown; the war comics of Harvey Kurtzman; Japanese artists like Yoshakai Kiwajiri; and the underground old guard of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. Within a year, Mireault was attempting his first major longform comics work.

Mackenzie Queen was Mireault’s self-styled homage to Steve Ditko’s Doctor Strange. Drawn in the same rough-hewn style with heavily spotted blacks as its homemade predecessor, it shares Ditko’s proclivity for trippy layouts and kaleidoscopic geometric backgrounds, as well as his general focus on mystical power-wielding characters, but there the similarities end. Mackenzie Queen centers on its eponymous hero, a Montreal busker whose musical talents attract sorcerers, demons, and mystical powers beyond his ken—though not beyond his power to rock and roll. At no point in the series’ five issues does Mireault take himself with anything near the seriousness of a po-faced Stan Lee script. Mackenzie’s increasingly frantic and macabre adventures are treated with all the absurdity and self-aware preposterousness of early Cerebus or Astérix.

And yet, throughout the rest of his work, it is clear that Mireault passionately, genuinely means it. Mackenzie Queen might be silly and its hero might be feckless, but there is never a moment when Mireault finds him worthy of scorn. The series concludes with its hero playing a song so overwhelmingly affecting that it moves even eldritch demons into a state of brotherly bliss. Such nods to sincerity are not the stuff of the indie scene — or aren’t supposed to be. But Mireault was, here as ever, a little too raw, a little too honest, a little too vulnerable for what comics might expect.

By then, Montreal had developed an underground comics scene of its own, and Mireault found himself embedded within it alongside Billy Mavreas, Geoff Isherwood, Max Douglas, Ian Carr, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt, to name a notable few. For a time, Mireault and Matt were roommates — a somewhat fraught relationship chronicled in less than glowing scenes in Matt’s Peepshow, which largely ended up burning bridges between the two at the time.

Howard Chackowicz was another artist who met Mireault during those days, which began a lifelong friendship.

“I met Bernie when I moved back to Montreal from Toronto, and he was one of the very first people I met,” Chackowicz said. “We hit it off right away. Bernie is pretty anglo in a lot of ways. His French [sounds] like an English person speaking. So he spoke well enough, and he was able to survive, of course, but I guess he just wrote in English and lived in English, mostly. But because he had these French roots, and because of his personality, and his warmth, and his talent, and his presence in the community, and enthusiasm — there are very, very few people who are more enthusiastic about art and comics and community than Bernie was.

“The past year is when life got harder, and he moved out of Montreal out of necessity because of being broke. I guess it hurt him, but Bernie was always the person you'd think of as the real shining light: enthusiastic, and putting people together, and working hard. He went out of his way to include other artists; I and I think everybody who knew him would speak about what a great guy he was in that way. And that's what he appreciated in people, too: kindness, and honesty, and being upfront and upright. He just didn't do anything that was kind of crooked or dishonest, or that kind of thing. He didn't have much of a stomach for it.”

Another anglophone cartoonist working out of Montreal at the time was Rick Trembles. Fellow anglophones in a French-speaking scene, they developed a bond immediately.

“We were all hungry to get published anywhere, and the easiest way to make that happen back then was through Montreal's first tabloid-sized entertainment alt-weeklies and alt-music zines,” Trembles said. “I contributed as much as I could, and even had a few serialized strips in some of them, so that probably caught Bernie's eye and helped put us into each other's orbits. The anglophone arts ‘community’ was mega-tiny and the comix nerds one even smaller, so I guess it was inevitable that we'd find each other. You tend to really appreciate it when you finally meet people who share the same eclectic tastes; it makes you feel less isolated. Since the actual making of comix is tedious and lonesome work, though, it's not like we were all glued to the hip 24/7. More like, counting the days until some nerdy event would take place where we'd all be in the same room. When local comix jams started up, that was the perfect icebreaker, because you weren't even expected to provide any [conversation] if you didn't feel like it; you could just scratch something down on paper and pass it along to the next person to draw the next panel, and bingo: nonverbal (but most excellent) communication! [Mireault] always insisted on projecting a playfulness to making comix, democratizing it by including pros and non-pros alike into the process.”

Somewhat of a later arrival to the scene, but sharing much the same impression of Mireault in those days, was Billy Mavreas. “Bernie is (was) an elder statesman before I ever showed up. The Montreal comics scene as I knew it was vibrant, eclectic, and bilingual. His art was solid. I can't describe it. I was a fan, but mostly a friend and neighbor," he said. "What I could say is that his pen could very slowly be dragged across a blank page and take these deliberate turns to eventually reveal a fully realized street scene replete with action and characters, and there was never a hint outside his brain that any of that stuff would show itself.”

At a comics convention in Ottawa in 1984, Mireault met Mark Shainblum and showed him the pages of Mackenzie Queen. Shainblum was immediately taken by it and soon agreed to publish the series through his own company, Matrix Graphic Series. It was the beginning of a publishing relationship that would last, in fits and spurts, to the end of Mireault’s life, and Shainblum was bullish about the book’s chances. John O’Neil, another of the period’s Canadian cartoonists who would come into Mireault’s orbit, recalled encountering the comic for the first time.

“I'll never forget the time Mark opened the trunk of his car and showed a small group of local fans Bernie's pages from the forthcoming issue #1 of Mackenzie Queen,” he said via email. “They were laughing so hard it drew a small crowd into the parking lot. Mark turned to me and said, ‘I think it's going to be a hit.’ Matrix Graphic published all five issues of Bernie's Mackenzie Queen by the end of 1985, and it was innovative, funny, and moving. What it wasn't was a hit. Bernie confided in me that Diamond Distributors had harshly criticized the cover of the first issue, a cartoon portrait of the main character. ‘They're trying to help,’ he told me when I pushed back on the criticism.”

Nevertheless, Mackenzie Queen marked the first step of Mireault’s move beyond the confines of Quebec comix. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, comics, taking advantage of a maturing direct market for retail, saw the birth of a slew of independent publishers with at least one foot planted in the tastes and audience of the mainstream: Eclipse (home of Detectives, Inc., Zot!, and Miracleman), Pacific (home of Groo the Wanderer and Captain Victory), First (home of American Flagg!, Grimjack, Nexus, and Jon Sable: Freelance), and Comico — home, among many other titles, to Matt Wagner’s breakout hit Grendel.

In the mid-1980s, Mireault decided to reach out to Wagner, who recalled the moment. “I first met Bernie Mireault via correspondence back in the mid-1980s when he wrote me a hate letter,” Wagner wrote. “Or perhaps it is better described as a ‘used to hate’ letter. … One day, a package showed up in the mail via my then-publisher, postmarked from Montreal, Quebec. That package included a letter from Bernie wherein he confessed to having an incredibly negative reaction to my work at first, and, as a result, to my newfound popularity. Apparently, he was all too willing to launch into rambling rants to his local comics-loving friends about what a shitty artist I was and how I didn’t deserve the acclaim that they (his pals) saw fit to grant for my efforts. When one of them finally called him on his single-minded hostility, it apparently caused Bernie to have a bit of an epiphany, and he realized that his objections to my work were largely grounded in professional envy.

“And so he wrote to me, expressing regret for his former opinions and how he eventually came to view my creations in a whole new light … based on the fact that he now recognized how much we had in common from an artistic and narrative standpoint. I was immediately struck with, and have never forgotten, the big-hearted and self-effacing personal strength it must have taken to write such a raw confession to someone he didn’t even know … and I remember thinking that, if we ever met, I felt pretty certain that I’d really like this guy. He had also included two examples of his own work in the package — the collected edition of his debut series, the magical adventures of Mackenzie Queen, and an anthology that included the first appearance of his comic-book alter-ego, The Jam.

“I sat right down and devoured both books and became a huge Bernie fan all in the space of one afternoon. And, yes, I also recognized the commonalities we shared as comic-book creators in that fertile era for both the industry and the art form. I immediately fired off a return letter to him and we struck up a correspondence via the old-fashioned snail-mail method of keeping in touch. It was in one of those letters that I first offered Bernie a three-issue gig as the artist on my newly launched Grendel monthly comic. I had set out to structure an all-new challenge for myself with this title by writing different story arcs for a deliberately rotating marquee of vastly different artists, something that was fairly radical at the time. Gratefully, Bernie said yes to my offer, and produced what I now see as one of the more seminal storylines in the vast legacy of Grendel — The Devil Inside storyline.”

Mireault’s work on The Devil Inside reads, visually, like an artist offered one chance to make his mark on comics and determined to seize the opportunity for all that it was worth. Pages are packed with as many images and post-impressionistic effects as Mireault can muster, arrayed against vast, open fields of spattered red and black ink. Figures are shaded with dark lines like early modern woodcuts; faces meld into swirling clouds like something out of a film noir van Gogh; stark arrangements designed for Wagner’s striking color holds abound.

For all its unrelenting intensity, it works astonishingly well, and reveals a Mireault, by the later 1980s, firmly in command of his talents. Diana Schutz, the book’s then-editor at Comico (and later at Dark Horse), said, “[W]hat a drastic, dramatic change from Portland’s Pander Brothers, whose twelve sleek and stylish Grendel issues preceded Bernie’s hand-stitched, humble run of three. The readers were furious, mostly. Those who weren’t ... had good taste.”

In the meantime, Mireault had been developing what was emerging, even then, as his most lasting personal creation. The Jam, which debuted as a backup feature in 1985’s New Triumph Featuring Northguard. It was Mireault’s personal, typically iconoclastic interpretation of the Marvel Comics superheroes of his youth. The eponymous figure, the significantly named Gordon Kirby, is an unremarkable specimen of Montreal manhood, transformed into a superhero by dint of his decision to put on a costume and do good deeds. He’s a frequently preposterous figure, but never a ridiculous one. Mireault is happy to get his hero in over his head, but he is never remotely willing to mock or condescend to him. Kirby’s goodwill and his sincerity of purpose are too fragile and too important for that. We’re here to laugh with him, not at him, because Kirby is us.

Or, more accurately, Kirby is Bernie Mireault. It’s no stretch to say that The Jam is fashioned as a fantastical autobiography, and with that in mind, it’s no surprise that Mireault clung so tenaciously to the character and the series, pursuing Kirby’s life story with such emotional dedication. Two years before Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s Zenith (and two decades before Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass), Mireault was an early pioneer in the genre of the everyman superhero, whose performance and motivation are inseparable from our own, even as they — like us — remain doggedly inspired by the stories and ideals of comics-addled youth.

It was Schutz and Comico who, in 1989, gave Mireault the chance to put his creation on a wider stage with The Jam: Super-Cool Color-Injected Turbo Adventure from Hell. She said that it “remains one of my all-time favorite comics, and believe me when I say I have edited a lot of comics.”

Visually, the one-shot and the ongoing The Jam: Urban Adventure, which launched the following year, display Mireault’s talents operating in full flower. Mireault’s line work retains the same ragged, distorted figure shapes reminiscent of the American underground, but his inking has evolved into a shifting range of depths and thicknesses—setting off his bizarre human forms against the starkly concrete urban scene in which they operate. His arrangements are as mannered as ever, but now it is the panels themselves that have an organic quality of motion, blending into one another and moving the action, and thus the reader’s eye, with the controlled speed of a jazz drummer. Perhaps most striking is Mireault's color work on the one-shot, which he applies in tones and thicknesses that resemble nothing so much as the colored marker work of an overgrown child. This is all to say that The Jam, however strange its story grows, remains even now unabashedly fun.

If only the public had noticed. That The Jam always struggled to find a mass audience is evidenced by its bewildering number of publishers over the course of its run: 19 total in a span of just under 40 years. Those were the boom-and-bust years of independent comics, in the wake of the massive breakout that was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the influx of titles meant a struggle for any book trying establish itself firmly in the marketplace.

Which is a shame. Because reading The Jam four decades later, we find ourselves in an alternate history of late-20th-century comics: one where the underground isn’t crushed or co-opted by the mainstream, but rather becomes its future. Where the bulging muscles of Rob Liefeld give way to the flabby torso of Gordie Kirby, and the personal hopes of artists and readers overtake the corporate directives for variant covers and film tie-ins, and – Bif! Pow! – comics really, sincerely, aren’t just for kids.

The Jam may not have been a force in the marketplace, but it did make Mireault a favorite of other comics artists and more discerning readers. He was the definition of an artist’s artist by the time the ’90s began, and frequently found himself in collaboration – as a colorist, inker, or backup artist – on the creator-owned books of artists who had fallen in love with his work. Mike Allred discovered Mireault via his appearance in Grendel.

“Matt Wagner's double whammy of Mage and Grendel lit me up. And so unique and exciting how he would use his Grendel creation to collaborate with other artists,” Allred recalls. “And while the first of those with the Pander Bros. was crazy cool, the next arc with Bernie Mireault just really sang to me for some indescribable reason. In my eyes he had what Jack Kirby had. A unique power and energy that gave you the impression the artist had to get the story on paper … or else! At times so ugly that it was inarguably beautiful! Gnarly faces and twisted figures contrasting with beautiful images and sincere storytelling that was intoxicating for me. And wow, was he innovative! The way he could break up pages and panels making them instantly pop without upsetting the flow of the story.”

Introduced by Schutz and her then-husband, Bob Schreck, Allred and Mireault soon became fast friends. “I got connected to Bernie, [with] some of the most enlightening phone calls of my life. He lived in Montreal. Those calls weren’t cheap,” Allred wrote. “Bernie was always philosophizing, and he was always open to giving advice, and he shared theories of storytelling and techniques. He wasn’t much older than me, but he quickly became my ‘second big brother’ in my eyes. From then on, I eagerly looked for ways for us to work/play together.

"I feel forever blessed with everything Bernie did for me, being willing to play in our comic-book playground together. The absolute best was when Dark Horse pushed our Madman/Jam team-up miniseries. It was Bernie’s brilliant idea to dive into our love of the wonky worlds of M.C. Escher, even making him the main character of the plot. I loved it!”

There were other collaborations as an inker and colorist, mostly with longtime colleagues like Allred and Wagner, but sometimes ranging far afield into the mainstream, for Marvel and for DC’s Cartoon Network tie-in books. “His color sense was as unique as his art and storytelling,” wrote Gabriel Morissette, a fellow Canadian artist who worked with Mireault on a Planet of the Apes book in the mid-2000s. “Very direct and punchy. My own sensibilities tend to go for the watercolor style of Franco-Belgian comics of the late ’60s and ’70s. Bernie would work with animation-type cels, and when he started to work digitally, his colors really exploded. I knew every time he colored some stuff of mine, I would [always be] surprised. I would think, ‘I would have never done that, but it really works well.’ It also made me realize how well his colors suited his style, how ‘organic’ it was.”

Schutz, always a champion of Mireault, pushed to find projects for him. At one point at Comico, Mireault tried out as inker on a series then in the works, with Carmine Infantino attached as penciler.

“This was a series that the great Carmine Infantino and veteran writer Nick Cuti were pitching to Comico in the late ’80s, and Carmine wanted the same slick ink line over his pencils that he’d gotten for decades at DC,” Schutz said. “But Nick Cuti’s proposal, as I recall, was a real-world-based story, grim, gritty — and for the hell of it, I asked Bernie to try out as inker, the idea being to deliver a more alt-style sensibility — which he did in droves! Carmine hated the look! Whereas we all loved it—madly! That crazy texture over Carmine’s otherwise glossy, fluid line was … well, an unusual combo, for sure, but it brought character and warmth and tangibility to Carmine’s typically cool surfaces! … Carmine had been a hero of Bernie’s youth, so at least he had some fun doing the work.”

Rarely, however, did full-fledged Mireault work-made-for-hire materialize. But when they did, they were memorable. At the tail end of 1988, Mireault came to the attention of a pre-Sandman Neil Gaiman, then just beginning to attract critical attention through his work at DC. Schutz recalls the circumstances: “In late 1988 or early ’89, editor Mark Waid hired Neil to write a Riddler story for that Secret Origins Special #1, and Neil — who might have been reading our Grendel series — wanted Bernie to draw it. At least, I think that’s how it went. It could have been that Neil asked Matt, and Matt suggested Bernie on pencils with Matt inking … So, Neil wrote “When Is a Door,” Bernie penciled and lettered the story, Matt inked it, and Joe Matt colored it. It’s a great, meta-comics story, commenting on the then-dark turn comics had taken, away from the lightness of the Silver Age, away from Batman’s Silver Age, in particular, which is a pretty wonky era of Batman comics.”

Schutz’s assessment is objectively correct. “When Is a Door” is revelatory: the sort of unexpected art on a mainline superhero title that makes the reader question the basic premises on which the franchise has been predicated. Mireault’s Riddler is a jangly mass of distended limbs and balding hairlines, dressed in flannel pajamas with visible hems. Working from Gaiman’s script, he places his figures against backgrounds of oversized typewriters and boulder-heft magic eight balls—Dick Sprang sets transformed into the preposterous toy chests of overgrown children. At one point, the Riddler even sits astride a gigantic phallic toy gun, like a costumed George C. Scott at the close of Dr. Strangelove. Mireault’s eight pages are both a sincere evocation of superhero nostalgia and a very 1980s grownup acknowledgement of the genre’s absurdities. They contain, in their visuals alone, a pathway down which the comic-book mainstream could have traveled in the 1990s, had its way not turned so forcefully in the opposite direction.

In part, Mireault’s isolation from the mainstream was a deliberate choice: a steadfast decision to maintain the creative control and artistic purity of his creations regardless of the financial cost. Mireault, who had always been as much a devotee of rock and roll as comics, was a true believer in the post-punk virtue of bohemian authenticity. Nothing could so compromise an artist, even a comic book artist, as to sell out. At times, even his sympathetic friends were taken aback by it.

“While I always admired Bernie’s very strong ethics and always striving to live a dignified life, leading with kindness, he could also be very stubborn,” Allred said. “Some folks who’ve talked to me about their own Bernie Mireault experiences would sometimes make him out to be ‘his own worst enemy.’ He would turn down gigs, maybe suspecting they were bad deals, worried he was being taken advantage of, or simply not feeling like he'd get anything out of it. [Kind of] ‘Ditko-esque.’”

At the same time, there was no doubt that an aspect of Mireault’s style just never gelled in the chrome-coated world of ’90s comics. Indie darlings like Eastman and Laird or even Wagner himself were blessed with a certain sensibility and familiarity of style that made them palatable to a mass readership. Mireault, by dint of some inner, brilliant weirdness, was not. It made him both unique and eternally on the fringe.

“You sell better if you draw like Jim Lee than if you draw like a cross between Jim Woodring and Crumb,” said Ty Templeton, another Canadian cartoonist who knew and worked with Mireault. “As much as people celebrate that Riddler story he did with Gaiman, he didn't spend a lot of time doing short stories for DC, even though he'd have been aces. Editors didn't see the return for what he did. Artists can get on a ‘list’ if an editor perceives them as not selling. This is a business.”

There was also, perhaps, something in Mireault’s character itself: a constitutional unwillingness to engage in the kind of entrepreneurial self-promotion that remains an unpleasant necessity for independent artists. Mireault is universally remembered by his friends as laid-back to the point of improbability, and the flip-side of his unflappable nature was a consistent refusal to act as his own salesman. Consequently, as his colleagues within the Canadian scene — Brown, Matt, Seth — began, one by one, to get discovered by the world at large, Mireault largely remained in stasis. For his friends who saw it, it was painful.

“It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease,” Howard Chackowicz said. “It’s not the good, solid wheel that doesn’t break down and that’s always reliable. And most artists are shameless self-promoters. Most artists are narcissists and hungry. That’s what this world does. … So the people that rose to the top were great at self-promotion, had big egos, were shameless, didn’t talk about other people, never mentioned the other people here in town. Even though we all drew together for 10 years, 15 years, over each other’s shoulders.”

This is not to say that Mireault didn’t try to publicize his art: he was a fixture at Canadian festivals and the convention circuit, and his periodic string of coloring and inking jobs for American publishers attests to his willingness to make connections with editors and other artists. But to bowdlerize or compromise his work was simply a bridge too far.

“Bernie was great with people. He did not like the corporate reality of art,” says Drawn & Quarterly founder Chris Oliveros, a longtime friend of Mireault’s who periodically attempted to champion his work with other publishers and potential media licensors. “I did get a shopping agreement for The Jam and took it around to some production companies, because to me, The Jam would be a delightful TV series. It’s perfectly made for it: it’s got humor, it’s got action, it’s got all of these things, and it would be the Ted Lasso of superheroes. And they didn’t know how to deal with it. They looked at me like I was trying to teach a dog to whistle. They didn’t understand. It was like, ‘Wait, so does he have real superpowers? So why does he dress up in a costume? What’s his dark origin?’”

Consequently, as the 2000s dawned, Mireault was increasingly working along his own lines. For seven years beginning in 2005, Miraeult created what was to become his first (and ultimately his only) full-length graphic novel, a step away from the fading format of periodical independent comics, into what had by then emerged as the dominant bookstore market of the indie scene. The result, when it finally emerged as 2012’s To Get Her, was as likely to perplex his readers and critics as to satisfy them.

To Get Her is, in a very broad sense, a sequel to The Jam, taking as its protagonist the same Gordon Kirby, now a decade older and substantially more chastened. But where The Jam had been fundamentally a superheroic adventure rooted in the mundanity of the real world, To Get Her is something like an inversion of that premise: an aggressively, perhaps alienatingly mundane story of a central character striving for some sense of heroic grandeur and optimism.

Mireault here took the autobiographical elements of the Kirby character — always present — and dialed them up to an unmistakable volume. It could be painful to read, and deliberately so. Long sequences occur in the book in which panels of static inaction are repeated at heartbreaking length, as when Kirby waits silently by his phone for a call from his estranged girlfriend — a call that never comes. As with all of Mireault’s work, it’s an intensely personal piece of art, but that makes it all the more difficult to bear, especially as its underlying hope becomes harder and harder to see underneath the book’s sense of longing and pain.

Mireault was aware that he was leaving many of his longtime followers nonplussed. To Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter, he said, “This has been an interesting experience in that as I’ve brought in more and more autobio detail, people have liked the protagonist less and less. Oh well. I guess I could’ve stuck with what it was people seemed to like about my work in the past, but that seemed lame. I think it’s better to be yourself and not have people like it than to fake something for approval.”

As divisive as the downbeat story were the changes to Mireault’s art, which had undergone a gradual but dramatic shift during the early 2000s. Out went the quivering ink pens and hand-cut Zip-a-Tone of his earlier work; in came Photoshop shading and thick, rounded digital pen lines more reminiscent of turn-of-the-millennium webcomics than the DIY sketchbooks of The Jam. This, again, was deliberate. Mireault had been fascinated by the possibilities of computer art for the better part of a decade. In an earlier self-interview for The Comics Reporter, he had written, “Eventually computers trickled down to consumer level, and I got one. Since then I've slowly come to depend on them as an unending source of the best paper, opaque ink, vivid colors and brushes I've ever had. Finally, a white-out that works! Finally, I don't have to go to the photocopy shop for paste-up stuff all the time. It puts a lot of power into your hands. And it's an incredibly efficient storage system. And an art delivery system! All in all, a wonderful democratic advance to a cartoonist. Now everyone has the same tools, and the playing field is more level."

Self-published, dependent on the author for publicity, jarringly unfamiliar in both art and subject matter next to his earlier work, To Get Her was not a commercial success. Yet, in public at least, Mireault seemed at peace with his place as an artist, content to follow the guidance of his own internal passion without regard for the judgments of the marketplace. “Wealth and respect never mattered to me beyond the basics,” he said in an interview with Comicmix. “That’s what I think of as external stuff, and I try to focus on the internal — on following my heart, as maudlin as that may sound. I think of comics art as a calling, like a religious person might feel to enter service. I guess what drew me into comics art specifically out of all the arts was that I liked the format so much, but not so much the content. I wanted to use the same tools and conventions, but to have the satisfaction of doing it in my own way, which is just a mishmash of all the stuff over the years that I’ve seen and liked and either consciously or subconsciously taken from, and to get to see if it ‘worked’. Opinions are mixed on that, but it’s never stopped entertaining me.”

That was 2011. Mireault kept a lower profile for much of the surrounding period. John O’Neill brought him on as one of the artists for Black Gate, a fantasy magazine started by O’Neill in 2000. Mireault’s work on the magazine is impressive: working in shades of flat but deliberate color, rather than the black-and-white of To Get Her, he used digital tools and imitation ink-washes, which were effective, especially when placed in the historical settings called for by his illustrations. But once again, the response was muted. “Not everyone got his artwork,” O’Neill said. “It was frequently cartoony and off-the-wall, and didn't always mesh with the high-fantasy aesthetic of the rest of the magazine. Bernie was the only artist on staff who generated hate mail. But I loved his work, and I loved what it did for the magazine. Bernie was one of the most talented visual storytellers I'd ever met, and many of his pieces — like his wonderful illustration for William Lengeman's short story ‘The Entrance of Bob Enters Valhalla,’ featuring a sword battle on a roller coaster — are among the finest I ever published.”

But new works by Mireault grew more sparse over the ensuing decade. Tragedies had begun to intervene, one by one. Around 2011 Mireault was diagnosed with leukemia — treatable and, in a nation with socialized healthcare, financially survivable, but a heavy load to bear nevertheless. Around the same time, Mireault left Montreal to move back in with his parents in exurban Rawdon, partly due to his own health and financial situation, and partly because his parents, too, were suffering from worsening health. Isolated more than ever from his friends and peers in the comics community, Mireault’s mood began to darken. Old friends and acquaintances started to lose touch.

“[I was in touch with Bernie] much less than I would have liked, to be honest,” Mark Shainblum said. “I hadn’t seen Bernie in person for a few years by the time I moved from Montreal to Ottawa in 2012. I don’t remember the exact timing, honestly. And then he eventually ended up moving from Montreal back to Rawdon to take care of his ailing parents, which (as far as I know) became a full-time job for years.”

Morrissette had a similar experience. “Bernie was always fairly discreet with his troubles,” he says. “I knew he had health troubles, but I did not know to what extent. I knew a bit more because of our [text conversations] where we would ‘commiserate’ sometimes, but those [conversations] were less and less frequent. My last birthday wishes remained unanswered, but I had no idea things were so dire.”

The weight only seemed to grow heavier. In July 2018, Mireault received his second cancer diagnosis, this time for bladder cancer. Three months later, his mother passed away, followed by his father in 2020. Mireault was still in Rawdon, now more fully isolated, and still fighting to maintain his health. Even so, outwardly on social media, he could project hope. In 2021, he was reunited with Shainblum, who was committed to returning The Jam to public prominence, first with a new sequel story written and drawn by Mireault in 2021, and then with a “remastered” trade paperback of the original series — its first collection after four decades. In a Facebook post in January 2022, Mireault declared that it would be “a great year.” Later that year, his work was featured on Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor’s Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube show. It seemed that Mireault was once again returning to, or perhaps entering for the first time, the attention of the mainstream comics readership.

In private, things were less rosy. Despite their longtime estrangement, he was shaken by the death of Joe Matt in 2023. His beloved cat Kirby also fell terminally ill later that year, his eventual death leaving Mireault completely isolated in Rawdon. In an email to Howard Chackowicz that August, he wrote:

“Not much energy to do anything besides wash dishes and sweep the floor. Lawn needs cutting and putting it off for as long as I can, bleh. One of my cats, Kirby, is obviously ill and has lost a lot of weight over the last few months, but I have resolved to let nature take its course because I can't afford the hundreds of dollars no doubt required to run her through a battery of tests and then have to buy the meds and try to administer them. … Sorry to be a downer, as always. It's the reason I'm out of touch with everyone. I hate the idea of just being a dark cloud to my friends and family. Feeling like this is new to me, but I imagine that I'm just going through the same thing many of us are in these relatively difficult times, and I do my best to not be a wuss.”

His politics, always peculiar, started to sink deeper into paranoid media. In another email he wrote, “So sorry to hear about how the government is hassling you for money! Our bloody governments are like public enemy #1, always a threat hanging over our lives as they preach one thing but practice another. One of my worries is getting harassed as you describe, randomly and unfairly. When the talk of CERB benefits [a monetary subsidy provided to Canadians during the height of the pandemic] began to show up on the news, I thought right away that I would not apply for it because they would ask for it back at some point. That's how little I trust them. I'm just amazed that I can still get health care and my meds are still subsidized. I expect that to end soon enough and to be ordered to pay back what I ‘owe.’ A death sentence.”

Elsewhere in the same letter, he wrote again about his mental health: “Aw, man! So sorry to be a wet blanket here, but it's these hard times we're in that have brought it on, I guess. We've been relatively spoiled for so long that I've got no gumption now that things have changed. I know that in a lot of places on Earth, life has always been way harder than this and that I'm like a crying baby over here … Not very lucky with the love/relationship thing, but that stuff has always been so tricky and I never put much store in it even early on. My most valuable relationships have always been Platonic. A positive relationship with a fellow human is as beautiful as psychic beauty gets and is the only ‘beauty’ worth a damn, imo.”

And in September it was all over. No suicide can ever be reduced to a single cause, or even a neatly contained set of them. The life and death of a human being is too intricate a thing to allow us the satisfaction of understanding. In his suicide note, Mireault talked about what might be expected. He mentioned his cancer and the effect his father’s decline had had on his own fears and expectations about the future of his health. He talked about his dwindling resources and the burden he felt he’d be imposing on others in the days ahead. He apologized to his friends and family, thanked his sister for her kindness, and called his decision a “practical solution.” "Life will go on without me to worry about. I've had a good life over all and 63 years ain't bad," he wrote.

And like all final testaments, it illuminates everything and nothing. The only undeniable fact is that Bernie Mireault is gone, and in his absence there is sorrow, grief, and an anger that things could not have been otherwise. “[T]he ‘comics world’ is really trying to be like the other art worlds,” Chackowicz wrote. “So Bernie was excluded, ignored, disrespected, and forgotten. Twenty years ago, he would not have been forgotten, but the comics world has changed. No one in particular to blame, it's a collective guilt amongst those who choose who gets the attention and who doesn't.

“Who's new, hot, timely, 'sexy,’ marketable. What trends are hot, who do they need to publish in order to get grants and funding … Somehow, they all forgot about Bernie, even though he had all the respect and history behind him. And now everyone is sad and confused. I doubt Bernie's death will change anything, but I hope it does. I don't know what makes people reflect and look at themselves and/or their worlds/communities—but this is the kind of thing that should cause some introspection.”

“We're none of us owed fame and fortune,” Templeton said. “It's pleasant to have it, or frustrating to not have enough, but that personal relationship to one's own sense of success or failure is never about external recognition. There are days when I'm quite pleased with being a Batman creator, other days where I feel it's just a silly job, a cog in a corporate fiction factory that means nothing in the grand scheme. Either belief is determined by my internal monologue, not by something someone else says about me. Same is true of everybody. There are ways you can internalize success or failure no matter where you find yourself in life.”

But above it all are the comics, still engagingly human and alive after all this time. “I loved everything Bernie did. When he showed me his Doctor Robot strips and hadn’t found a publisher, he allowed me to publish them as backups in my Madman Comics series,” Allred wrote. “I always hoped somehow, someday the planets would line up, and the world would finally see what I saw, and he would enjoy the enormous success he so richly deserved. Did he turn away too many opportunities? Or were they just never there?

“I’ll never stop thinking about what could have/should have been. He was certainly a celebrated artist’s artist. Many of my peers have always raved about his unique talents and perspective. But cult status doesn’t pay the bills or keep you healthy."

“Bernie was a landmark creator who just never quite found the broader audience he so richly deserved,” Wagner wrote. “Many readers over the years have hailed his talents and held him in a lofty position of artistic honor and respect, but the quirky aspects of his drawing and the unorthodox style of his storytelling that so delighted and inspired the rest of us just never connected with many comics readers. Sadder still, considering the diversity of talent and visual styles that flourish in the industry today. … I can’t help but think that if he’d only been born 25 years ago, he’d be a mega-star nowadays — widely read, highly regarded, and frequently imitated.”

A familiar motif in Mireault’s comics is a hero exhausted by the grinding mundanity of life, scaling upward — toward a rooftop, toward a rock song — and dreaming of something better. Mireault’s art was, certainly for his readers – and perhaps, for a time, Mireault himself – a consolation for the pain and banality of the world. If it was not, in the end, sufficient, the fault lies with the world, and not the art. There is something better we can reach. The final page of Mackenzie Queen shows the hero against a dark universe, guitar in hand, arms outstretched as he approaches infinity at last.

***

Memories of Mireault from colleagues and friends

Diana Schutz

In 1854 Bernie Mireault’s fellow iconoclast, philosopher Henry David Thoreau, wrote this in his classic text Walden, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” An artist’s artist, Bernie danced his way to a wildly different beat that led him, almost forty years ago, right into the open arms of our Grendel family. And man-oh-man, what a drastic, dramatic change from Portland’s Pander Brothers, whose twelve sleek and stylish Grendel issues preceded Bernie’s hand-stitched, humble run of three.

The readers were furious, mostly. Those who weren’t ... had good taste.

Bernie’s first very dark issue of Grendel: The Devil Inside was published in October 1987. Seven months later, in May 1988, we published Bernie’s signature lighthearted creation in what remains one of my all-time favorite comics, and believe me when I say I have edited a lot of fucking comics: The Jam: Super Cool Color-Injected Turbo Adventure from Hell #1. The color cover, painted in the style of an animation cel, was a gift from Bernie.

In 1990, I rode into Dark Horse on the generous coattails of my then-husband, the gregarious Bob Schreck. Three years later, I convinced the powers-that-were to publish The Jam — for only three issues, sadly. That year, speculators had made a mess of the marketplace, and The Jam would not survive the company’s rigorous spreadsheets.

After that, though, there was Madman/Jam, Bernie’s collaboration with Mike Allred, another sweet soul, and then the delightful Dr. Robot Special. In the early aughts, Bernie started playing around with digital art and emailed me an experimental nine-page romance story, just to read. Instead, I paid him and published “The Cat” in Dark Horse Maverick: Happy Endings, the first of a series of themed anthology books edited by yours truly, childless cat lady.

Though I seldom remember my dreams, I had one in 1994 about cutting my hair—pretty long in those days. I wrote the dream as a one-page comics story and asked Bernie to draw it. He did, then asked Rupert Bottenberg to ink. He did, and Bob Schreck paid them and published the page in Dark Horse Presents #126.

In between all those projects, there were more than a few that Bernie turned down out of . . . principle, I suppose, when I just wanted to help him make rent. I wish he’d taken the damn money! Instead, he died broke and by his own hand. Jack Kirby, inspiration for Gordon Kirby aka the Jammer, famously said that “comics will break your heart,” and I guess that’s what happened to Bernie in the end. A brutal, unnecessary, unhappy end that breaks my heart, too.

Matt Wagner

I first met Bernie Mireault via correspondence back in the mid-1980s when he wrote me a hate letter. Or perhaps it was better described as a “used to hate” letter. This was fairly early in my career when I was enjoying a wave of fledgling success in the industry with my creator-owned titles Mage and Grendel. One day, a package showed up in the mail via my then-publisher postmarked from Montreal, Quebec. That package included a letter from Bernie wherein he confessed to initially having an incredibly negative reaction to my work and, as a result, my newfound popularity. Apparently, he was all too willing to launch into rambling rants to his local comics-loving friends about what a shitty artist I was and how I didn’t deserve the acclaim that they (his pals) saw fit to grant for my efforts. When one of them finally called him on his single-minded hostility, it apparently caused Bernie to have a bit of an epiphany and he realized that his objections to my work were largely grounded in professional envy.

And so he wrote to me, expressing regret for his former opinions and how he eventually came to view my creations in a whole new light…based on the fact that now recognized how much we had in common from an artistic and narrative standpoint. I was immediately struck with and have never forgotten the big-hearted and self-effacing personal strength it must have taken to write such a raw confession to someone he didn’t even know…and I remember thinking that, if we ever met, I felt pretty certain that I’d really like this guy. He had also included two examples of his own work in the package—the collected edition of his debut series, the magical adventures of Mackenzie Queen and an anthology that included the first appearance of his comic-book alter-ego, The Jam.

I sat right down and devoured both books and became a huge Bernie fan all in the space of one afternoon. And, yes, I also recognized the commonalities we shared as comic-book creators of that fertile era for both the industry and the art form. I immediately fired off a return letter to him and we struck up a correspondence via the old-fashioned snail-mail method of keeping in touch. It was in one of those letters that I first offered Bernie a 3-issue gig as the artist on my newly-launched Grendel monthly comic. I had set out to structure an all-new challenge for myself with this title by writing different story arcs for a deliberately rotating marquee of vastly different artists, something that was fairly radical at the time. Gratefully, Bernie said yes to my offer and produced what I now see as one of the more seminal storylines in the vast legacy of Grendel: “The Devil Inside.”

Skip forward a year or so and I suddenly found myself actually living in Montreal as the result of a whirlwind love affair with the woman I would eventually marry. As I had expected, Bernie and I soon became fast friends and even shared a studio together for a while, located in the Old Montreal section of town…a cavernous space that had once been the ballroom for a now-decrepit hotel. My college pal, Joe Matt, eventually also made the move to Canada and the three of us became a posse…what I often thought of as the Three Comicteers! Bernie and Joe actually became roommates at one point and the three of us spent many hours together, eating, laughing, getting high and consuming, talking about and living comic books.

Sadly, Joe Matt passed away about a year ago and now comes the shocking news of Bernie’s tragic death as well.

I have to confess, Bernie and I hadn’t been close for many years at the time of his passing…one of those examples of diverging paths that litter our journeys as life moves forward across the decades. But I still always marveled at his brilliant talents as a creator of comics. He wove a truly unique and powerful vision as both an artist and a writer. His clever, innovative and, indeed, ground-breaking grasp of graphic story-telling marked him as a true genius in our beloved art form.

Sadly…Bernie was a landmark creator who just never quite found the broader audience he so richly deserved. He apparently died in poverty, devoid of much hope…a fact that only saddens me all the more, considering the fact that we’d grown so far apart. Many readers over the years have hailed his talents and held him in a lofty position of artistic honor and respect, but the quirky aspects of his drawing and the unorthodox style of his story-telling that so delighted and inspired the rest of us just never connected with many comics readers. Sadder still, considering the diversity of talent and visual styles that flourish in the industry today…I can’t help but think that if he’d only been born 25 years ago, he’d be a mega-star nowadays—widely read, highly regarded and frequently imitated. I can only hope that this sad event serves to spark a belated interest in Bernie’s work and exposes his narrative brilliance to an all-new generational audience. But for now, I’m just heart-broken that such a deserved renaissance could only occur too little and too late.

Mike Allred

My buddy, Charlie Custis, re-introduced me to comics through the indie boom of the late '80s. The death of Gwen Stacy had literally ended my childhood comic book collecting cold turkey.

But Charlie saw me storyboarding my first attempt at a screenplay, which at his urging, would become my first published work, the graphic novel Dead Air. Charlie also introduced me to my first comic pro, Steven T. Seagle, whose father had previously held my position at the Air Force Academy teaching cadets television production. Steve’s first book, Kafka, had just been published and his next, The Amazon (with the wonderful Tim Sale) was to be published by Comico.

Between Charlie and Steve I was being exposed to everything that was happening in the comic book biz. Charlie collected virtually everything, and Steve knew how to contact publishers and was super savvy and what was what. So in a very short period of time, and access to the new miracle of comic book stores, I spent every free moment re-purchasing childhood favorites of Kirby, Toth, Premiani, BWS, Ditko, Romita, Cardy, Steranko, etc. and the pulse of the new: Miller, Moore, Burns, Clowes, Wagner, Los Bros., Chester, and Bernie Mireault.

Matt Wagner's double whammy of Mage and Grendel lit me up. And so unique and exciting how he would use his Grendel creation to collaborate with other artists. And while the first of those with the Pander Bros. was crazy cool, the next arc with Bernie Mireault just really sang to me for some indescribable reason. In my eyes he had what Jack Kirby had. A unique power and energy that gave you the impression the artist had to get the story on paper...or else! At times so ugly that it was inarguably beautiful! Gnarly faces and twisted figures contrasting with beautiful images and sincere storytelling that was intoxicating for me. And WOW was he innovative! The way he could break up pages and panels making them instantly pop without upsetting the flow of the story.

After Grendel, Comico published Bernie’s masterwork, The Jam Urban Adventure Super Cool Color-injected Turbo Adventure From Hell #1 (teasing us that there would be more). It remains one of my all-time single favorite comics, and I will happily argue one of the greatest single comics ever produced!

Bernie printed the original line art on clear acetate and used cel vinyl paints to color the book like you would animation cels. This, and what at the time was the best paper being used to print comics, made it the best looking color comic I’d ever seen.

Now, thanks to Steve Seagle, by 1990 I had my first paying gig for our 12-issue series Jaguar Stories through Comico (if you’ve never heard of it it’s because Comico went Chapter 11 and used the property and my ridiculously generous page rate as “an asset”). Shelly Bond (then Roeberg) became my first editor there before she was at the start of DC's Vertigo imprint. Dead Air was being published by Slave Labor Graphics, and my wife Laura agreed to roll the dice with me and let me shift from broadcasting to an attempt at making comics for a living. We’d moved from Colorado Springs to Germany where I was a TV reporter for AFRTS, sent all over Europe covering mostly human interest stories. My last story was covering the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In the meantime, Grendel/Mage creator Matt Wagner had moved to San Jose where my Dead Air publisher Dan Vado lived and also had a comic shop which Matt frequented. And this is where my love of the people who make comics really bloomed and led me to my deep love and appreciation for the late great Bernie Mireault. Apologies for what must clearly read like “me me me”. But context is everything I’m striving for as I try to put together what happened to Bernie.

Matt got our Germany address from Dan and sent a very encouraging Mage postcard with his phone number, so of course I called him. Around the same time Comico editor Diana Shutz and Comico Marketing director Bob Schreck left for greener pastures at Oregon publisher Dark Horse. And we left Germany for my home state of Oregon. Then Matt Wagner moved his young family to Oregon. But before moving there, they visited Bob and Di and invited us to their house warming party. This bonding experience set the stage for what was to come for us.

We shared horror stories about Comico, the bankruptcy (my checks stopped coming after moving back to the states), Matt pulling Mage and Grendel to Dark Horse, and me just wanting to know anything and everything about BEM. I was obsessed with the work of Bernie Mireault and here I was among three people in the comic book biz who had worked with him very intimately. Bernie had earlier work published by Canadian publisher Matrix (now there’s cool name), and earlier The Jam black and white special and a nifty black and white graphic novel, Mackenzie Queen (Bernie’s riff on a Doctor Strange jag). I clearly remember Diana referring to Bernie as “the nicest guy in comics.”

Much longer story very short, I got connected to Bernie, including some of the most enlightening phone calls of my life (He lived in Montreal. These calls weren’t cheap.). He was always philosophizing and he was always open to giving advice and shared theories of storytelling and techniques. He wasn’t much older than me, but he quickly became my “second big brother” in my eyes. From here and ever since I eagerly looked for ways for us to work/play together.

In 1990 we attended our first Comic convention in Portland, Oregon with Bob Scheck showing us the ropes and introducing us to the shows guests, Dave Steven and the Pander Bros. Bob then introduced us to this thing called the San Diego Comic-Con where he introduced us to Frank Miller and my childhood hero Barry Windor-Smith. We met Harvey Kurtzman at that show, the last before moving into the massive convention center where it’s been since.

I told Bernie about our adventures and meeting Harvey Kurtzman, who was a huge hero of Bernie’s. He even named The Jam’s dog after him. We made plans to table together at the next year’s show.

This made sense because we began collaborating quite a bit. Bernie inked all my pencils on a one-shot called Creatures of the Id for Caliber Press. And what made the future especially bright for us was Marvel accepting our proposal for The Everyman, published by their creator-owned imprint, Epic. This was a high end squarebound one-shot where Bernie provided input on my script, inked my pencils, lettered it (always loved his lettering), and colored it all with his glorious “cel vinyl” animation cel process.

And we did table together at the very first San Diego Comic Con in the iconic convention center where we were placed by the bathrooms and a giant garage can providing us with plenty of traffic. I spent most of my time drinking in all the original art he brought, making trades and purchases, bringing home several Grendel and Jam originals including lots of cel vinyl colors. I couldn’t believe how lucky we were to score them!

I just found a picture I took of Laura and Bernie at our table in San Diego. Funny, cuz he’s wearing a Tundra t-shirt. We’d made our own shirts to sell there, but being a musician, I think he felt, “bands don’t wear their own merch”.

While I always admired Bernie’s very strong ethics and always striving to live a dignified life leading with kindness, he could also be very stubborn. Some folks who’ve talked to me about their own Bernie Mireault experiences would sometimes make him out to be “his own worst enemy.” He would turn down gigs, maybe suspecting they were bad deals, worried he was being taken advantage of, or simply not feeling like he'd get anything out of it. Kinda “Ditko-esque.”

I feel forever blessed with everything he did for me, being willing to play in our comic book playground together. The absolute best was when Dark Horse pushed our Madman/Jam team-up mini series. It was Bernie’s brilliant idea to dive into our love of the wonky worlds of M.C. Escher, even making him the main character for the plot. I loved it!

I loved everything Bernie did. When he showed me his Doctor Robot strips, and hadn’t found a publisher, he allowed me to publish them as back ups in my Madman Comics series. I always hoped some how someday the planets would line up and the world would finally see what I saw, and he would enjoy the enormous success he so richly deserved. Did he turn away too many opportunities? Or were they just never there?

I’ll never stop thinking about what could have/should have been. He was certainly a celebrated artist’s artist. Many of my peers have always raved about his unique talents and perspective. But cult status doesn’t pay the bills or keep you healthy.

The comic book biz is so dangerously fragile. It thrives on word of mouth and the sharing of passions. Please share your passions. And if you’re passionate about the work of Bernie Mireault, please share it and keep it alive. We all want to be remembered for what we did best.

Eli Schwab, publisher, Cosmic Lion Productions

It started with a simple commission request; I always aimed high. I wrote Bernie to see if he would draw a piece for my new comic book. He was beyond generous, and his pinup blew me away! At that point in my life I was studying marketing, during my second attempt at college, and in return I offered Bernie my help in navigating the savage, but necessary, wasteland of so- called “social media.” When he took me up on the offer, inviting me to be his guide to that wild world, I figured that comics fans would love a good shirt, so our first move was a print-on-demand T-shirt shop, with a Jam-logo tee for sale and a contest: “Who Wore It Best?” We sold a lot of shirts in just a few days! But the real winner, for me, was this amazing photo of Bernie — a snapshot of the creator becoming the creation — a full-circle moment that seemed to bring him great joy. In our last chat he said, “I hope your business is blessed with good fortune.” I’ll carry those kind wishes with me forever.