Tribune was supposed to be the Gladiator's sidekick in the Gladiator comic before George decided to do Crimson Plague instead of the Gladiator series. I hope this helps.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year!
Tom Smith "JLA/ACAL!"

TRIBUNE, art by George Pérez, thanks to Marcus Mebes

Hi folks... I've got a small challenge here. We've got a cool pencil piece to put in the art gallery section of the George Pérez Magazine "Pacesetter", but we've run into a wall finding info about it. The character is apparently called Tribune, and here's a picture of him. If you can help me identifying what series and company he came from, I'd surely appreciate it! Thanks!

GEORGE PEREZ NEWSLETTER #3
reviewed by Vu

(excerpt)

As usual, generous George Pérez lends his time to help create this issue. He supplies contacts, artwork (most have not been published), and, of course, his interview. Here is an excerpt on how the idea of Crimson Plague came about:

GPz: Believe it or not, it started out as a Batman story, way back when Julie Schwartz was still an editor for DC. I was tooling around with an idea for a limited series, an imaginary tale or Elseworlds story I believe, dealing with Nightwing (or another future incarnation of Dick Grayson) investigating the murder of a semi-retired Batman who is a John Doe in the police morgue. Grayson identifies the body of the many scars on the body and those scars spark memories that form the flashback framework which had something to do with all the partners and sidekicks who teamed with Batman throughout the years. One of them was supposed to be the killer. The story became more complicated the more I expanded on it. After a while, I thought that this story would probably not fly at DC at the time, so I never proposed the story and decided that it might work better with an original character. That's how GLADIATOR was born, with the title character replacing Batman, and Nightwing's role in the story split between a female character called Tribune, the latest in a long line of Tribunes, and a police detective modeled after a comic shop owner from Fayetteville, NC, named Bernie Mangiboyat. In creating a history for Gladiator, I wanted to feature a femme fatale character, similar to purpose to Catwoman - a deadly villainess with a romantic tie to the hero. She was called Plauge and she was modeled after a beautiful young fan I met at a Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC. In fact, she was Bernie Mangiboyat's fiancée at the time. Her name, of course, was DiNA: Simmons.

[ Read more August 2, 2002 | GPN #3 Review ]