This is a thread for...talking about comics people that are dead. Writers, artists, editors, whatever. This is where we come to mourn and remember. BYOB.
...
Steve Dillon is dead. I've been going through my shelves and long boxes lately, to see what I actually have of his. A lot of collaborations with Garth Ennis.
Preacher stands out, and
Hellblazer, and some of the best runs on
The Punisher in modern memory.
Hitman...just, wow,
Hitman. There's a ton more I'll miss, that I'll run across tomorrow or a year from now.
I remember some of the criticisms that fans have leveled over the years. That Dillon's characters tend to have the same faces. There is a certain square-jawed aesthetic that creeps in on a lot of characters. You could usually count on an eyebrow arch at least once an issue. Women tend to be thin with triangular faces, rounded off at the chin. But the same? I don't remember them being the same. I remember thinking "Only Steve Dillon could draw Arseface." I think folks had a tendency to get caught up in the lantern jaws, they never looked at the eyes. Steve Dillon did some of the most expressive eyes in the business. He could nail a squint, or a wide-eyed gape of wonder. Register surprise and anger and the blink in between. I think he's the only person that ever really managed to put the Punisher's thousand-yard stare on paper, or the betrayal as a polar bear's world went wrong...
...or a seriously pissed rabbit.
Mostly, though, I'll remember the stories. Because there's a line when boys grow up - I seriously have no idea how it goes with women, but guys look for role models, consciously or unconsciously. The people we want to be like, the people we model our behavior after. And in the stories Dillon drew, the heroes tend to be bastards and the villains tend to be
bastards. Jerks with hearts of gold, in terrible worlds, but very human characters. Being human isn't always about being nice. You might see Superman allow himself a small smile of victory. But when John Constantine does it?
Someone else could have drawn that panel. But it wouldn't have been the same moment. None of it would have been the same. Michelangelo couldn't capture that grin.
I keep looking through the old comics, some of them a little softer than I remember at the edges from use. Trying to find THE MOMENT. The thing that says Dillon to me. I'm not really finding it. There's too much. Too many old memories with his ink-stained fingertips on them.
RIP, Steve Dillon.
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It's been said in other mediums but 2016 has been a really bad year for passings.
As well as the other stuff mentioned above I remember his Judge Dredd and his Rogue Trooper vividly. He was also the co-editor of the much-missed Deadline, a superb, subversive comic that ran for a bit in the UK.
And of course Darwyn Cooke died this year as well. 2016 sucks something awful.
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Just, fucking hell.
Bernie Wrightson is dead.
Bernie drew monsters. He drew a lot of other things, too, but let's get this straight: the man could draw a proper monster. A lot of comic monsters are half-assed things. No depth too them. Like shaved gorillas painted pink with a couple horns stuck in random places. I have yet to see another artist that could make moss looking fantastic.
He was...I don't want to say "old school." But I remember him from back when horror comics were still somewhere between hokey and edgy. Before the Comics Code Authority gave up the ghost, when the Addams Family and Munsters were the lazy fare, and Hammer Horror was the hardest of the hardcore. I don't want to say all comics art was crap back then, but comics were printed out on bad paper with garish colors that tended to spoil a lot of lines. You had to really be expressive with your characters...and Bernie Wrightson was.
And he gave us Frankenstein.
Bernie Wrightson put the "Art" in "comic book art." 'nuff said.
Sex & the Cthulhu Mythos
By all accounts he was a great guy and hope he's high fiving all the angels up there, rest in peace.
wonderful artist, kind guy. would give people free sketches all the damn time. loved to draw, and had an accessibility and Heart in his work that i love
A real loss, and way too soon.
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I loved Norm Breyfogle
Batman: Holy Terror was absolutely amazing
His Johnny Alpha is utterly definitive, though.
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https://2000ad.com/news/kevin-oneill-1953-2022/
There's a lot of "the artist of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" headlines out there, but for me it'll always be:
heck, I remember reading that specific issue at the time, even)
or
though, to be fair, he did a good job on Green Lantern that one time:
Kevin O'Neill was drawing a ton of stuff in 2000AD when I was reading it as a kid and it was utterly unique, strange and fascinating. His work on Nemesis is the standout, but he drew some very odd Dredd strips (one included the immortal line "Brown shoes don't make it. Penalty: death!") and the robot story Metalzoic, and was surely a huge influence on whomever was creating the look and feel of Warhammer 40K.
O'Neill is the only person banned from drawing by the comics code authority not because of what he drew but because of how he drew it. His every line threatened to corrupt and pervert innocent youth! I suspect most artists would kill for such an epitaph.
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I don't see him mentioned in this thread, but I posted about it in the DC thread on S&E when it happened: Alan Grant (co-creator of various Batman characters as well as writer on various 2000AD titles) died in July of this year. It's a hard year on 2000AD writers and artists.
Mostly known for a long, long run on Spider-Man and creating dozens of characters for it, but he has done so much more. Especially a lot of Romance comics before all the big Two turned almost Superhero exclusive.
Giffen has done a lot in his career as both artist and writer, both in comics and in other media like TV. In comics, he is mostly known for his run Justice League (and various spin-offs) with J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, a run on Legion of Superheroes including The Great Darkness Saga with Paul Levitz (and also as a solo writer/artist) and as the (co-)creator of Marvel's Rocket Raccoon and DC's Ambush Bug and Lobo. But this is just a small sample of a career spanning decades.
In his own words:
Ian Gibson, longtime stalwart of British comics (Halo Jones, Robo-Hunter, Dredd) has died at 77. Halo Jones is probably his crowning achievement, but his style was unmistakeable, influential and beautiful. Halo Jones (along with Ezquerra doing Strontium Dog, Cam Kennedy on Dredd, Glenn Fabry on Slaine and Belardinelli on ACE Trucking) was one of the strips in the first issue of 2000AD I bought over 35 years ago.
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Mark MDBright died at age 68. He was the artist on various titles (including Iron Man's Armour Wars) and a frequent colaborator of Christopher Priest. He was also one of the main artists on Milestone Media and the co-creator of Valiant's "Quantum and Woody"
https://nativeviewpoint.com/beloved-ndngeek-and-marvel-artist-jeffrey-veregge-dies-at-50/
I have a shirt with the Alien xenomorph done up in the Pacific Northwest style that I absolutely treasure.
Perlin was a mainstay at Marvel in the 70s and 80s, doing work on Defenders, Ghost Rider, Werewolf by Night and Transformers among others. He also worked as managing art director there. He left Marvel for Valliant and did work there on Solar and Bloodshot. For the last few decades he was retired and only did some specials occasionally.
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/p/perlin_don.htm
He also wrote a lot for First Comics, but I only read Grimjack and Sable Freelance, so I missed most of his work there.
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Bob Foster died yesterday, aged 93. He was cartoonist, writer, artist, editor and animator. He worked for Disney both on the comics as the animation side of things (as well as stints at Marvel, Dreamworks, Nickelodeon and Hanna-Barbara, but most of his life was at Disney) https://www.lambiek.net/artists/f/foster_bob.htm