George Pérez was the master of the big comic-book moment
FEW artists can walk through life knowing they did exactly what they were put on this earth to do. George Pérez made this dance with destiny look easy.
It is almost impossible to find someone working in comics today who wasn’t in some way inspired by Pérez’s powerful portfolio. Industry giants such as Jim Lee, Brian Michael Bendis and Dan Jurgens paid their respects on social media at the news of his death Friday at the age of 67.
And on the page, the storytelling power of Pérez’s pencils was fueled by the undeniable joy that came through in every panel he ever illustrated. To flip through the pages of his decades of work with Marvel and DC Comics as well as independent projects was to know this man was born to draw superheroes.
As comics changed over the years, his art style remained classic — subtle and sophisticated. He never bowed to the pressure to draw oversexualized heroines in suggestive positions or heroes who looked as if they took superhero performance enhancers, which were the norms for many publishers in the very extreme 1990s. Now we live in a world in which comic books are woven into the fabric of Hollywood’s DNA. Heroes that Pérez drew for years in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s have been a part of some of the biggest box-office moments in recent memory. You can’t watch Thanos walking toward the Avengers wielding the power of the Infinity Gauntlet in the ‘Avengers’ movies and not see Pérez’s cover of 1991’s ‘Infinity Gauntlet’ No. 1. That comic has the look and feel of a big-budget movie with its bevy of Marvel superheroes surrounding an imposing villain.
Take a look at Pérez’s cover of ‘Wonder Woman’ No. 1 during the heroine’s mid-’80s revival at DC Comics, with her arms raised, and her indestructible bracelets clashing together, clanging with power — part of a storyline Pérez co-authored that melded Wonder Woman’s lore with Greek mythology. Now watch Patty Jenkins’s ‘Wonder Woman’ movie and take in how many of those comics Pérez penciled inspired one of the most important movies DC has ever made.
Pérez was the master of the big, pivotal superhero moment. His comics were movies before superhero movies were a consistent thing. Who cared if back then in the ‘80s and ‘90s comic books weren’t taken seriously by Hollywood? A Pérezdrawn tale was all you needed. One could argue that the Justice League/Avengers crossover in 2003 that he illustrated and coauthored with Kurt Busiek was just as monumental as the first ‘Spider-Man’ movie that came out a year earlier. One of the things that reeled me into comics forever was discovering that Dick Grayson, Robin the Boy Wonder, had grown up. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He was transitioning into a new superhero identity and escaping the shadow of Batman.
Pérez helped create that moment in an issue of ‘The New Teen Titans,’ a series he penciled alongside writer Marv Wolfman that catapulted them to rockstar status. Pérez always drew Robin with muscles the size of your standard adult comic-book superhero of that time — he never looked like a kid. And that was the point. Robin growing up was important to Wolfman and Pérez.
And they both knew it was time for him to move on to a new identity (one that would eventually become the superhero Nightwing). — The Washington Post