Longshot Comics Book Three: The Inauspicious Adventures of Filson Gethers was, as I may have mentioned on a dozen occasions, a long time coming. But Filson has existed in the Longshot universe almost from the very beginning.

Passingly referenced in a largely speculative way in The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers, he appeared in his own story in 1995, right after the Slave Labor Graphics edition made its debut. It was a story you probably missed, but one that now functions as a coda to Book Three.

I hadn’t initially planned on making a string of short Longshot Comics stories, but during my first appearance at the San Diego Comic Con to promote the book, I was set upon by a representative of Tower Records. He loved Longshot, and wanted me to do an original story for the comics page of their in-store magazine, Pulse! The chance to reach a young, hip audience of pop-music fans was a golden opportunity I promptly rejected. Instead, I suggested doing a story for their other in-store magazine, Classical Pulse! because a chance to reach an old, out-of-touch audience of opera fans was more in keeping with my self-sabotaging business model of zero market penetration.

Nothing mixes better than classical-music enthusiasts and avant-garde experimental minimalist comics, I always say. With that pearl of wisdom in mind, I wrote a story about the final years of Roland’s mysterious grandfather, and his interaction with British composer Edward Elgar in the Powick Asylum, where Elgar worked during his early career. This quiet end for Filson suggested nothing of the rollicking life of daring adventure I had in mind for him, but provided the eventual third volume of Longshot an endpoint to aim at.

Reprinted in Money Talks #4 to help build anticipation for The Failed Promise of Bradley Gethers, that was the last anyone ever saw of Filson Gethers’s Music Lesson until now. The entire five-page story has been redone and reformatted, and is now the third Longshot story hosted on my Patreon page.