UPDATE, Monday, June 26: Thank you to ADOBE SYSTEMS, our first respondents, for offering Bill a copy of Adobe's Creative Suite!

GETTING BILL WIRED

Hi. As some of you might know, alternative comics legend William Messner-Loebs and his wife Nadine have had some catastrophically bad luck in recent years. The Detroit News summed it up best. The original article is now offline, but it's reposted on the John Ostrander messageboard here. Other links to info about Bill and Nadine can be found here.

I was out in Michigan recently and had the pleasure of seeing Bill and Nadine and catching up on their ongoing struggles with medical bills, housing and debt (and more cheerful topics like comics, of course). Thanks to some generous souls in the comics industry -- especially Neal Adams -- a few of Bill and Nadine's most pressing needs have been addressed, but they still have a long way to go to reach daylight.

Recently, Bill's taken an interest in working digitally, but he's saddled with some very old equipment and limited software. Computer skills and a decent home set-up can be a key to getting paying graphics work in their area, so there's a practical side to it, but the cost of a good set-up (as we all know) can be prohibitive.

What Bill and I agreed would help includes:

A new Mac Laptop with xtra memory
A high-end Wacom tablet (A Cintiq would be fantastic, but a traditional tablet would certainly help)
Adobe's Creative Suite
Microsoft Office for OS X

But here's the catch. What I don't want to do is drain energy from the ongoing efforts in the community to raise cash for Bill and Nadine. Any money that comes their way will be used for urgent needs like medicine and trying to get a roof over their heads again, not buying computer equipment.

So instead, I'd like to put out the call to any of you who work for, or have contacts at Apple, Adobe, Wacom or Microsoft. What are the chances of simply getting a donation of the hardware/software listed above directly to Bill? I can guarantee that such an act of kindness would be deeply appreciated and well-reported on by myself and a lot of others in the community with bigger soapboxes than me.

In short, if you work for Apple, Adobe, Wacom or Microsoft (or perhaps a retailer trading in such items) and you think you can offer such a donation, please write me at scott@scottmccloud.com first to make sure no one else has made a similar offer, then we'll give you Bill and Nadine's address in Michigan -- and our deepest thanks!

Meanwhile, if you don't know anyone able to donate such equipment, you can still help Bill and Nadine, Capra-style, by simply sending some much-needed dollars via PayPal directly to bloebs@yahoo.com.

Bill was the very first pro I ever met at a convention who seemed genuinely interested in the art of comics. It's been 22 years since then and a lot has changed, but I still see that curiosity and optimism in him when we talk about the medium. I'm hoping we can give Bill and Nadine at least one more small reason to be optimistic about life in general.

Thanks for reading and for considering this request,

--Scott