An Ink-Stained Wretch

Allyn with the monument of Philip Pendleton Barbour, September 2017“I’ve never seen a comma I didn’t like, and everything I needed to know about the proper use of the em-dash I learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby.”

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors‘ monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the comics industry, Allyn has interviewed comics luminaries including DC Comics Co-Publisher Jim Lee and From Hell artist Eddie Campbell as well as cartoonists such as Bloom County‘s Berkeley Breathed and writers and celebrities such as William Shatner and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story “Make-Believe” and the Doctor Who short story “The Spindle of Necessity.”

Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004, and, as a near-lifelong fan of J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, developed the Shire Reckoning plugin for the platform. Among his interests (and fodder for blogging) are baseball, history, politics, mythology, Star Trek and Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, building ebooks from scratch, the Beatles and jazz, and genealogy. Allyn is almost certainly the first graduate of Philippi, West Virginia’s Philip Barbour High School to visit the grave of the school’s namesake, 19th-century Speaker of the House and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Philip Pendleton Barbour at Washington’s Congressional Cemetery.

In short, Allyn is a modern-day “ink-stained wretch,” and this is his journey.

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