Jeff Boman
Jeffrey Allan Boman founded the Comicopia APA in 1990 when he'd just finished University while still sharing an apartment with his University roommate. He created it along with interest from Ivan Raketik at a local comic-book store called Komico. Mike Aragona was also a founding member, and in the late 1990s Jeff passed the distribution manager torch to him, and Comicopia thrived. Jeffrey left Comicopia in June 2007 to create a new zine, The Original Universe.
Biography
Jeff was born in May 1967 in Montreal, Quebec. He discovered comics when he was 14. He ultimately ended up graduating from Concordia University in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Animation, having specifically focused on the screenwriting aspect.
That September, he co-founded Comicopia, and was a contributing member, with his newsletter The Old Detective's Watering Hole published in 100 issues.
The founding of Comicopia was approximately 6 months after Jeff became a founding member of Mordred, an RPG APA in Montreal. Said APA lasted only 18 issues. He was also a founding member of APAcalypse, the APA that grew out of Mordred.
When it began, Jeff contributed to 4 APAs the same week! The three named above, plus Rogues Gallery, a Texas-based HERO Games APA then run by author Aaron Allston. A year later Jeff left that one.
His life underwent a change in 1996 when he became a 'lucky recipient' of Multiple Sclerosis. It impacted his abilities to sing and dance, and around 1998 he stepped down as the figurehead distribution manager for Comicopia, relinquishing the title to Mike Aragona, who had been fulfilling the duties of the position for years. Jeff's passion for writing endured and still does to this day.
In 2007, Jeff left Comicopia. He's producing his own comic book fanzine now, The Original Universe.
Publications
His first major publication was in the role-playing game field. In 1995, he published the adventure/sourcebook Crashpoint for DreamPod 9 (then called Ianus Games).
Starting in 1996 he began to write reviews and columns for fps: The Magazine of Animation (fps stands for frames per second, an animation term) and did until the death from leukemia of his good friend and editor/publisher Emru Townsend on November 10, 2008. He also has written for the now-defunct publication RPG Gazette and the also long-defunct Web site RPG Action.
In 2005, he was involved in three charity benefit e-books (two for the tsunami of 2004, one for the Hurricane Katrina disaster}, has written Hunters Inc., a sourcebook e-book for Cracked Mirror Publications (a second edition is slated to come out in 2010 at Plain Label Games), and since 2002 he has been a victorious 1-month novelist with NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writers Month, held each November) four times. He also regularly submits short stories to various science fiction anthologies and magazines--so far unpublished--and he is involved in a few other zines.
His fanzine The Original Universe is nominated for an Aurora Award in 2009, to be decided in August. Update: It won. It was also nominated in 2010.
Bibliography
Reviews
Articles
RPG Stuff
- Hunters Inc. for Cracked Mirror Productions (note: first edition no longer available)
Zines
- Comicopia The International Comics Apa
- The Knarley Knews (UPDATED)
- The Old Detective's Watering Hole
- The Original Universe
