“They hurt you at home and they hit you at school. They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool ’til you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.” From Working Class Hero, written by John Lennon.

I am not a fan of corporate bureaucracy. It is always counter-productive. It is the enemy of creativity and productivity. Sadly, it also is as predictable as a coal miner’s cough.

There are few folks operating in the comics racket more deserving of praise and acknowledgement than Mike Richardson, co-founder and publisher, until last week, of Dark Horse Comics. He was publisher for FORTY years, which might very well be the American record. Marvel/Timely/Atlas founder Martin Goodman held his gig for only a third of a century, and whereas Bill Gaines was the publisher at EC Comics and Mad Magazine for forty-five years. I’ll leave it to those with an attention span longer than mine to determine if that makes him the longest-lived comic book publisher or just a magazine publisher with a bottomless sense of humor and a terrific appreciation of line art.

A whole slew of us started making and distributing new comic books back in the early 1980s — a time when there was Marvel and DC and Archie and Paragon… and damn little else. Great old stalwarts such as Gold Key (Whitman), Harvey and Charlton already had gone blooie at least once or, if extant, were coughing up blood. But back then the comic book store had become a real thing and publishers, old and new, could sell their wares directly to those outlets without having to take returns on unsold copies. DC Comics’ honcho Paul Levitz once stated that you’d have to be a fool to screw that up.

Well, publishing is at best a high-wire act between two burning buildings.

So a whole bunch of us jumped into that pool — Pacific Comics, Eclipse, Mirage… and, oh yeah, First Comics, which I cofounded with Rick Obadiah in 1982. We were preceded by adventurous door openers such as Wendy and Richard Pini, Dave Sim, and the daddy of the so-called independents, Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach.

A comic book store owner on America’s northwest side was looking at all this action and, I gather, saw how it was affecting his bottom line. He took his business experience and combined it with his taste in and knowledge of the medium and he did what those of us who preceded him could not pull off — he made a go of it. Big time.

That man was Mike Richardson. In my book, he wins.

Mike didn’t stop with stapled entertainment. The Mask, Hellboy, Sin City, Timecop, Tarzan, Barb Wire, Virus, Mystery Men, 300, RIPD, Resident Alien, Umbrella Nation… those are but a few properties from Dark Horse that made their way to screens both big and small, all under the tutelage of producer Mike Richardson.

He sold Dark Horse to Sweden’s Embracer Group a few years ago but stayed on as CEO until he was redundantized last week. Neither his continued involvement nor his abrupt dismissal were the least bit unusual for the creatively-challenged corporate world. As of this writing, I do not know the circumstances or if such is even remotely my business. I came here to praise Mike, not bury him. Besides, he’s only about six weeks older than I am.

A couple paragraphs north of here I outed Paul Levitz for his comment about screwing up direct sales, so it’s only fair for me to note that in or about 1978 Paul said what the Americans comic book racket needs is about seven or eight stable, healthy publishers. That was right on the money, and it appears to be something we now enjoy. Yeah, the market had changed in many ways, but there appears to be at least that many publishers here today that likely will be around in, say, two years. There are one hell of a lot of good American comics being published today, to the widest range of readers in our history.

This is due to the efforts and the good works of Mike Richardson. No matter what he decides to do next with his life — I pray a well-deserved rest is part of that — I thank him for his efforts and his endurance.

Mike Richardson made it work.