It was announced this morning that Mike Richardson — founder and CEO of Dark Horse Comics — is no longer the latter. Mike sold the company in 2022 under a deal that involved him staying on as Head Honcho. Now, someone else will be running the place.
I’ve received a lot of questions, phoned and e-mailed, about what’s going to happen to Dark Horse and, by extension to Groo the Wanderer, a comic book in which I do something-or-other. Dark Horse — and by that, I mean Mike Richardson — has published Groo since 1998. I have an absolutely accurate answer to these questions: I don’t know.
I’ve written about this before here but I think the source of an awful lot of misinformation in this world is the result of people speculating without all — or sometimes, any — of the facts. Nature abhors a vacuum and some folks abhor not having an answer to some question to the extent that they’d rather have a probably wrong one than no answer at all. So they come up with an uninformed, fact-free answer and proceed as if it’s correct. It’s a great way to go down the wrong path.
I once took a criminology class taught by a former investigator. One of the best things I learned from it was to understand the difference between speculation (especially the totally baseless kind) and facts. Detectives are often sent in the wrong direction by witnesses who don’t understand they’re allowed to say “I don’t know.” One of the reasons there were and still are so many conspiracy theories about the J.F.K. Assassination is that everyone who was in Dealey Plaza that day or who ever came within three blocks of Lee Harvey Oswald was questioned eighty bazillion times by investigators, journalists, conspiracy theorists and so forth.
And a lot of those people wanted to be helpful. Some of them loved the attention. And some of them, the three hundredth time they were questioned, said things like, “Y’know, I think I may have seen a man in a green tie” or “Well, now that you mention it and so many people have asked me about it, maybe I did see Elvis Presley with a gun on the grassy knoll.” Suddenly, there was “evidence” out of thin air.
Someone asked me if I thought Mike Richardson will start a new company. I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Mike today. I don’t know how he feels. Maybe there was something voluntary about the change. I don’t know if his contract prohibits him competing and if so, for how long. I don’t know if he still has duties and some position with Dark Horse. I don’t know if he wants to do comics or movies or goat herding or something else and there’s a good chance Mike doesn’t yet know either. I could speculate for days but what’s the point of that? (By the way: Sergio and I were always pretty happy with Dark Horse under Mike. He’s one of the good guys.)
I gave that answer to someone today — “I don’t know” — and he kept asking, over and over, “Well, take a guess…what do you think?” Just to get out of it, I almost told the guy I saw Elvis with a gun on the grassy knoll. What part of “I don’t know” is so hard to understand?
I’ll only go as far as to say that (a) whatever’s going to change probably won’t change for a while and (b) whatever Mike does, I sure wouldn’t bet against him. But that’s as far as I’ll go.
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