Heroes never die...
The "H"iatus is over. After three and a half years Hero By Night is returning to your small screens. Why now? There's going to be a lot of questions about rights and people wanting to know details of the business aspect, some of which I've answered on the ABOUT/F.A.Q. page , but really all of that is not important. What is important is that if you loved Hero By Night and wanted to see it back... it's back for the foreseeable future. Merry Christmas. "H"appy "H"olidays.
The truth is, this has actually been three and a half years in the making. When we went on the terrible hiatus before, it broke my heart a little, and a lot of fans. The energy back then was pretty tense and angry and was no good for anybody. Understand, I can't and won't talk about my business dealings in the future, but I can say that this agreement was something that's been on the table since that time and it was just waiting to cross the right desk. I knew I had made some mistakes the first go around and I never wanted to repeat those if HBN ever came back. For this to really work for all parties involved, I had to be in control of my own destiny. Just like the forging of a true Vitalogy ring, the conditions had to be absolutely right, or else.
I want to say a big THANK YOU to all of the die hard Hero By Night fans. Every week over all of these years I still receive fan mail asking if it will ever return. It brings me a lot of joy to announce this to all of the fans who never gave up hope. YOU are the ones who really kept Hero By Night alive in my heart. THANK YOU.
So how's this all going to work?
HERO BY NIGHT is now hosted on Keenspot. I'm running it indepentely on my own. When you buy things like digital copies directly from us, the money goes directly to us. We're trying to cut out as many middle men as possible. (see about page for more) - Essentially it's just Jason Embury and myself (D.J. Coffman) running this show.
Jason and I have decided that since it's been so long, that rerunning the first three issues of our "ongoing series" before it went on hiatus would not only be great for gaining new fans but also rekindle excitement and refresh the memory of our old fans. We have a full issue #4 in the works already, and I'm starting production on the new issues after that and will be sharing behind the scenes things on our facebook page (which you can also see on our main page here on Keenspot)
In the spirit of Hero By Night, I also want to do things a bit different, like no other comic has done before. When a new "issue" begins to run on a page a day update schedule, the full digital edition will be on sale in the shop directly from us. This means if you don't want to come back and read every day at the site with the "slow burn", you can jump ahead and buy the digital copy and have the Hero By Night universe at your fingertips. That will be pretty handy to have nearby when we fire up our trivia contests.
Help us get the word out. We're literally just a two man crew here. If you're a fan of Hero By Night, please share it with your friends, scan our archives and use our cool Facebook commenting feature! I also included some simple "share this" tags for posting to twitter, G+, etc. The real success of Hero By Night's future is depending on YOU. If you're not here to read it or tell your friends about it, it could very well die again. You don't want that, I don't want that... so share early and often!
If you're an old fan and think you've read EVERYTHING, you might want to look through the archives a little longer and look for the new secrets we will be hiding throughout the Hero By Night Universe. If you see something ODD or out of place, I encourage you to take note of it, because it may not be there for long and may be important to future games we're going to play here. Are you ready to help save the world? Let's go!
_____________________________________________________________________________
A note from Jason Embury
It's funny how fast time passes us all by. It's been 12 years since I first started working with DJ Coffman in 1999. In that time we have watched each other work on countless different properties for a plethora of comic book companies and creators. We've both had success in many different areas of our creative lives, but more importantly I think, we've both failed almost as much as we have succeeded (if not more) We have worked on projects that were terrible, we've worked on projects together that haven't lasted for one reason or another. We have also become very close friends. I think this friendship, above all else, was one of the keys to how successful Hero By Night has been in the past.
Since Hero By Night went on hiatus 3 1/2 years ago, DJ and I have watched our kids grow older and start to become young adults, we've had fantastic new opportunities arise for ourselves and our LOVELY wives, we've both struggled with deadlines, we've continued to add to our artistic arsenals on a daily basis, and we've found ways to finally bring BALANCE to our family and creative lives. In that same time frame, neither one of us has worked on Hero By Night in any real capacity. We have talked a LOT about it and for a while searched for ways to bring it back. But it wasn't until we actually started focusing on all of the GOOD things that we gained from working on this project together that anything changed. We were on the phone just a week or two ago, and I told him that I think I can remember the exact moment that we decided to change our perspective on everything. It was a pretty long phone call we had WAY back in January of 2010. Almost 2 full years ago. And since that time, the wheels of change have been working tirelessly in ways that we probably still don't fully understand.
Which brings us to where we are now. 2 days before Christmas in 2011. With so much for both us to be thankful for in our lives, we are both truly blessed. With that being the case, it is nearly impossible for me to put into words how TRULY happy and excited that we are to finally be in a position to tell new stories, to create new art, to add to the legend of Hero By Night. We all have so many journeys left in our lives that await us as we get older. We would love for you to join us on this next leg of our journey, and see just what lies ahead.
Jason Embury - Co-Plotter/Colorist of Hero By Night - December 23, 2011
___________________________________________________________________________
A note from D.J.
For the past three and half years I've been doing other things. Looking back now I guess I was doing a lot of soul searching even though I didn't realize it at the time. At the height of all the good things going bad I could have crashed pretty hard, but I met some real life super heroes in the form of the band THE FLOBOTS who helped to cushion my fall. My heart was pretty uplifted to go from working in a corporate capacity to a grassroots one. The lead emcees, Jonny5 and Brer Rabbit were comic book nerds at heart and were stoked to have me onboard helping out their team, as they not only produced socially conscious hip hop from their secret headquarters in Denver, but they also were putting their money where their mics were by forming a non-profit to bring forth real and sustainable social change to urban communities. I was lucky to be a long for the ride with such great people. Big thanks to Andrew Guerrero (another comic nerd!), Stephen Brackett (Brer Rabbit), and Jonny5 for everything they taught me. It's really odd how the music industry has so many contrasts with the comic and film industries, so I think we were able to really see eye to eye on a lot of things we didn't agree with. I've worked mainly in the shadows, but together we've accomplished some really amazing things. (they have a new album coming in 2012...)
During that whole period, I also started studying the "Law of Attraction." All of which actually sprang out of doing research for the Hero By Night universe. You see, the IRON TALON's "I" symbol (which is actually sort of the "H" turned sideways, was an ancient alchemists thing, the arrows pointing up and down meaning that men are both heaven and earth in one. The phrase, "As above, so below" was plucked from some esoteric scripts I found online that sounded cool for a group of shady secret society people to say while having meetings to save the world. I began researching it's origins more and more as I got deeper into those characters. At times it was as if the characters themselves were pointing me in the right direction. One day while I was working I decided as a complete goof to put on the audio book of the "The Secret" to see what all that hype was about. The first lines of the audio book were.... "As above, so below" and it made me take immediate notice. It was as if I were discovering the one TRUE super power we all have within us. I was pretty excited and began to experiment with these ways of thinking and sharing with my wife and friends who all believed I was completely insane until they themselves tried the simple methods and began seeing results. I was pretty passionate about this topic in my private life and afraid to tell the world for fear everyone would think I just went off the deep end, ha! I ended up devouring every book I could find on this topic, going not only all the way back 100 years, but to my surprise, thousands of years ago into the Holy Bible and many other religious texts. This really was something that many people knew and wrote about but didn't understand exactly how it worked.... it just worked.
Don't get me wrong. I am not a very spirtirual man. I grew up, as many kids, being forced into believing there was a magic guy in the sky. I read the bible, the stories there are pretty epic. As I grew older and wiser I believed that wasn't true, especially when I saw what certain people did in the name of religions over the course of history. But I always respected everyone's beliefs. I always loved when friends who thought I didn't believe in God or that I was an atheist would suddenly hear me drop some knowledge from the Bible or the Koran. My stance has always been that I feel like there's something more, but we humans aren't mighty enough to have figured it all out. Wasn't too long ago we thought the world was flat. Playing with the "Law of Attraction" has been really fun, and has lead me to believe in manythings more and more. Primarily the human spirit and the power of positive thought. I never really believed in any life after death either, but with the passing of some good friends over the years and my older brother this year, it sounds odd, but I can feel them with me, egging me on to be and do better. If all of this is just my imagination, so be it. Welcome to it.
This past summer I was pretty relieved to see that another big name in comics, Grant Morrison, actually talks a lot about the law of attraction too, although he calls it chaos magic or something or other. His "Talking With Gods" documentary is worth the watch. Admission: I never read a Grant Morrison book before (on purpose at least) but now I'd like to. I guess the point is, it doesn't matter what you call it, or who you believe is in control... the point is that you must believe and have faith.
I won't preach to you about this, but I have written a new graphic novel from SmarterComics all about this topic (available in print in January) and I encourage you to look into it a bit more and set aside any doubts and explore this way of thinking and see the results in your own life. Life will feel pretty magical and you'll feel like you have some amazing super power of your own! You can see more about that project at http://smartercomics.com/TheLawOfAttraction
It's great how the whole HERO BY NIGHT experience has brought all of these things into my life and I am extremely grateful. There were some dark days when a fan e-mail FROM YOU changed my mood and set me on a more positive track. Without that, surely Hero By Night would have remained sleeping. Remember... everything around you is happening for a reason. Thanks for being here.
D.J. Coffman - Creator of Hero By Night - December 23, 2011
