History of KZ Comics
For anyone who cares, here is the history of KZ Comics, a company that came and went with the black and white implosion. But unlike many other companies of that era, it was conceived years before. It was just a matter of luck that it came out during that time.
KZ Comics stands for Karolczyk and Zjaba. It was started back in grade school by myself, Tom Zjaba and a friend of mine, Dave Karolczyk. This was back in the 1970's. Later, my cousin Dave and myself formed the company as Dave Karolczyk lost interest in creating comic books. My cousin and I would write and draw stories and give them to each other to critique. It was done more for fun than anything else.
After I was out of high school, I found a comic book called Swords of Cerebus. I bought a few of them at a comic book show and loved the stories. They were collected versions of the Cerebus the Aardvark series and it inspired me to create a similar character. I had toyed around with the idea of doing a western comic book, as I was tiring of doing strictly super heroes. So I went to work on creating a western hero who was not human. At first, I thought about having him be a cow. But it just seemed silly. I even toyed with a human cactus among other ideas. Then I went to my handy collection of animal cards for inspiration. They were a collection of animal cards that I ordered from a magazine and they sent more every month. As I looked through there, I came across an armadillo. It was a western animal, it had the hard shell and it made for a good animal. I had the animal, now all I needed was a name. I started thinking about what would be a good name. For some reason, the Colt 45 gun came to mind and I liked it. Colt the Armadillo was born!
I then went to work on a story of Colt. It was nearly identical to what later became issue #1. For some reason, when I finished it, I really liked the story and thought it had potential. I showed it to my cousin Dave and he also really liked it. From there, we decided that we should create a comic book and publish it. He created his own story that went with it called Zero. He also drew a one page spoof with a character named DDOJ. DDOJ was a strange character that he created in grade school and was the butt of our jokes.
After we decided on the stories for the book, we called it KZ Comics Presents. It would be an anthology title with Colt as the main story for issue #1. I soon went looking for an artist. Having a comic store, you come across artists with great regularity. Two artists stuck out and I contacted them about doing the comic book. The first was Dan Berger, a very good artist, especially in the cartoon design. He did some sketches of the character for me and I was sold. Then I contacted Ryan Brown, a local artist who did a cartoon strip called Rockola. I asked him to do the cover, which I wanted to be a painted cover. Just something about western comics and painted covers seemed right.
With the artists in place, I turned my attention to finding a printer. I wanted someone local, so I could make any corrections quickly and have a better control of the final product. After calling all the local printers and being quoted outrageous amounts or told that they could not handle the project, I finally was told about a printer about an hour south. It was called Carrolton Graphics and they could do everything we wanted and more. Their price was much better than anything local. So we were all set.
So in June 1985, KZ Comics was born. It would survive until December of 1986, a very short time. During that time, we published a total of six comic book issues. Colt the Armadillo went four issues and we did one issue each of Crossed Swords and Unicorn Kings. We became a victim of the black and white implosion as two of our largest distributors - Glenwood and Sunrise, both went bankrupt and took a very large sum of our money with them.
Now in 2006, I decided to do a site as a tribute to KZ Comics and tell the story of a small publisher and the many trials and tribulations we experienced. I also wanted to break out the old stories that I wrote but were never published. This way I could finally finish the Colt story, tell what happened in Crossed Swords and tell stories that I never had a chance to do. So enjoy this site and hope you find it enjoyable. Also look throughout the site for stories on each individual issue as I tell some funny and some serious stories about the making of each issue. It was a wild ride.
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