Veteran Comics Writer Todd Dezago Likely Retiring From Comics After Tellos

There's just about a week left to order The Mike Wieringo Tellos Tribute, a two-volume, hardcover [...]

By Russ Burlingame

There's just about a week left to order The Mike Wieringo Tellos Tribute, a two-volume, hardcover graphic novel that brings dozens of comic book artists together with writer Todd Dezago to pay tribute to Dezago's frequent collaborator and good friend Mike Wieringo, who died in 2007 at age 44.

tellos
(Photo: Mike Wieringo/Image Comics)

The series centered on a young protagonist named Jarek, his genie, and his anthropomorphic tiger companion Koj. The heroes strive to unravel the mystery behind Jarek's origin and escape the attentions of a mad boy-wizard named Malesur who is seemingly bent on Jarek's destruction. Along the way, they hook up with the likes of a pirate named Serra, a fox thief named Rikk (many of the characters were anthropomorphic, not just Koj), a dragon named Brad, and many more colorful characters.

Besides the original 10-issue run by Dezago and Wieringo, the world of Tellos existed in a three-issue miniseries and a number of one-shots, with art by Wieringo and a number of other artists. Not long before he passed away, Wieringo had talked about working on new Tellos, and the final entry on his sketch blog was in fact an image of Jarek.

Will the upcoming, two-volume set mark the true end of Tellos? Dezago is hesitant to make such a claim, but he does say it might very well be his last hurrah as a comic book writer.

"I always hate to put 'The end' on something," Dezago said. "With that, you'd think I would have learned my lesson on The Perhapanauts, which has a couple of dangling plotlines that Craig and I are desperate to get back around to, but just can't seem to do it. With Tellos, this is a complete story. It's completely closed, there's no hanging plot threads or anything for a series or anything. I honestly don't know that I want to continue in comics and doing comic things. I'm going to do some short stories and maybe a novel. I feel that maybe that's calling me now; I've been doing a lot of plays, radio plays, and things like that on the side that kind of are showing me a new direction for my storytelling. As far as Tellos goes, this is a big, wild, rambling saga that reunites the characters who aren't died, brings the characters back together, and has them fighting the next level of evil. When you see this, you'll realize that the original saga was just kind of setting the stage in a lot of ways for what's happening here. We do bring in a lot of new characters both on the good side and the bad guys and expand the parameters of Tellos, which his something that Mike and I always wanted to do. A lot of the things that I have said about this is that this is a continuation of some of the ideas that Mike and I had for Tellos if we ever had the chance to revisit it financially."

Dezago hasn't been working on monthly comics in a while; in 2015, he and co-creator Craig Rousseau funded a Perhapanauts graphic novel via Kickstarter, but other than that, he describes himself as keeping his head down. Dezago told ComicBook.com that even if he retires from comics, he may still occasionally try to work with Rousseau on The Perhapanauts, although it's economically difficult to make a book with a small print run and a small fan base feasible.

That's part of why he was so thrilled to bring together the creators who made The Mike Wieringo Tellos Tribute a reality, and why he's so touched by their efforts to pay tribute to his longtime friend.

"Every person who contributed to this, these are my heroes," Dezago said."They made my dream come true. This was my dream, to be able to do this for Mike, and I got the ball rolling, but man, they all gave so much."

The Mike Wieringo Tellos Tribute is on sale for one more week, exclusively through a website set up by Dezago, Wieringo's brother Matt Wieringo, and Matt's wife Suzanne.

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