On Michael Poe

I’d like to talk about Michael Poe for a second.

Poe, as I’ve known him, is the writer and artist behind the comics Errant Story and Exploitation Now! and Does Not Play Well With Others.  He was admitted to the hospital with acute renal failure a few days ago; he’s home now, and on track to recover, which is awesome.

I know this through the internet.  I’ve never met Poe in person, and I haven’t traded emails or chatted with him in about a decade.  I’ve never spoken with his wife.  But Poe’s been a model of mine for almost half as long as I’ve been alive, and when I learned about this I felt like I needed to say something.

It all goes back to the Fantasy Powers League, that strange corner of the internet where I started to mature as a writer.  The FPL’s a website where players create superpowered characters and match them against one another in gladiatorial combat.  A core group of creators started to rope all these characters, from undead barons to semi-rational penguins to anime schoolgirl defenders of the universe to intergalactic businessmen, into a single weird almost-continuity, a stir fry of genres and tropes.  Fertile ground for a young and growing writer.

And Poe was there.  He was one of a few artists in a room full of writers.  He had the power to make ideas visible.  The best creators at the FPL had Poe draw pictures of their characters.  After I’d been writing there for a year, he drew a character pic for me, and looking at that picture for the first time made me as proud and psyched as the day that character won the FPL’s main event.

Poe wasn’t just an artist, either—he was making it.  Around the time I joined the FPL, he started up the studio that became Caffeine Angel Productions.  Soon after, he launched his first webcomic. I watched with joy and respect as Poe took that same creative energy we all poured into fanfiction, and turned it into a career.  Over ten years, his art matured, and he moved from gag-a-day antics to deeper storylines and back again.  As I wrote book after book, knocked on doors and sent out query letters, I kept tabs on him, and reminded myself that yeah, this is possible.

So now he has kidney trouble, after two years of intense trial for his family.  Poe and his wife are explicitly not asking for donations, though they do have books and original art for sale. Poe’s worked faithfully for a decade.  He’s a good person, with a pleasantly twisted mind.  I don’t know if one blog post will be much help getting the word out, but this is the internet, and all things are possible.  Drop by his site.  See his work.  Buy books and tee shirts and prints.  Help out.  And if you don’t know his work already, read and enjoy.