He was so technically flawless as to seem somewhat soulless. ![]() He had his flaws-in particular, the tendency to draw everyone with the same face, as Crisis #5 shows. In these two books, the elements that made Pérez such a fan favorite became clearest to the eye: His was a vivid world, with detailed costume work, glittering metal, elaborate technology, and dynamic musculature-but with the rough edges of his idol Kirby polished into ultra-clean lines, fresh and colorful surroundings, and a penchant for group shots. An industry star at 26, he accepted an offer from DC to work with Marv Wolfman on The New Teen Titans, and from there, they paired for the first big “event” comic, Crisis On Infinite Earths. ![]() After a wobbly start (his early work bore a too-obvious debt to Jack Kirby), he fully came into his own when he became the regular artist for Marvel’s The Avengers. George Pérez The 1980s ushered in a new Golden Age of superhero comics, and no one did more to define their look and style than George Pérez. In recent decades, the elusive artist has largely been dormant, although he’s returned to comics several times, most recently in 2008.ģ. (No wonder the acidheads who tripped to 2001 took him, apparently incorrectly, for a fellow stoner.) The famously press-averse Ditko, who might be the comics world’s right-wing answer to Chris Marker, has never detailed his reasons for splitting with Marvel-a dispute over the profits from his creations is a plausible surmise-but the books that followed were heavily influenced by his conversion to Randian Objectivism, whose two-tone morality spawned the speechifying vigilante The Question, the explicit inspiration for Watchmen’s Rorschach. Strange, introducing the character of Eternity, a cosmic personification of the universe whose body was an outline filled with galaxies. He also worked the fantastic end of the spectrum on Dr. In addition to designing the famous red-and-blue Spidey suit that debuted in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy #15, Ditko created a world around Spider-Man that wasn’t the mythical Metropolis or Gotham, but a recognizable version of New York, a city whose towering skyscrapers loomed as implacably over Peter Parker as they did over any other mild-mannered teen. ![]() Steve Ditko Stan Lee may have introduced adolescent angst to the superhero genre (he certainly claims he did), but it took Steve Ditko to create a hero whose civilian life was as compelling as his crime fighting. The modern comics industry simply wouldn’t be the same without him.Ģ. Whether they embraced his style or deliberately forsook it, every comic artist for decades was defined by the lessons they learned from the man called “The King Of Comics.” Constantly pushing himself further (among other pioneering developments, he was one of the first comics artists to incorporate collage and photographic backgrounds into his work), Kirby’s value to the medium is incalculable. Though Kirby is rightly remembered for the miracles he worked in superhero comics, with his exciting fight-staging, efficient storytelling, cosmic scope, and love of crackling energy and unthinkable technology, he also drew everything from sports comics to romance tales to Westerns. It’s easy to forget that by the time he and Stan Lee transformed Marvel Comics into a culture-shifting powerhouse, he’d already been in the business for more than 25 years. The former Jacob Kurtzberg was a restless self-improver, a workaholic, and a veteran idea man who created an art style that was highly distinctive and a massive influence on the rest of the industry. Jack Kirby Simply put, no artist had more of an influence on American comics this century than Jack Kirby.
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