The artist who brought comic-book heroes to life
George Pérez 1954–2022
George Pérez breathed life into some of the biggest heroes in comic books. Over a career that spanned more than four decades, the Bronx-born artist earned legendary status among comics fans for his vivid, highly detailed drawings of superheroes that captured both their grandeur and their humanity. Among his signature achievements was reinventing Wonder Woman in the 1980s, injecting new life into an old franchise by returning the character to her origins in Greek mythology. At Marvel Comics in the mid-1970s, he drew acclaim for his nuanced renderings of The Avengers; in 1980 he cocreated The New Teen Titans, a series following a fledgling group of junior heroes that became one of the most successful franchises for DC Comics. He also created Marvel’s first Hispanic superhero, the White Tiger. Pérez “pushed the limit of what a comic could do,” said fellow comic-book writer Tom King, with a style that was “both overwhelmingly powerful and subtly graceful.”
Pérez was born in the South Bronx, to parents who were recent immigrants from Puerto Rico, said Polygon. Reading comic books helped him learn English and “offered a respite from the violence of his rough neighborhood,” and by age 5 he knew he wanted to be a comic-book artist. He got his start as an assistant to a Marvel artist, Rich Buckler, at 19, in 1973, and his first published work, a two-page Deathlok spread in Marvel’s Astonishing Tales No. 25, appeared the following year. A year later he was “illustrating titles such as Astonishing Tales and The Avengers,” said Rolling Stone. From the beginning, he was “applauded by fans for the complexity of his packed panels and the realistic style in which he drew the characters.”
Pérez notched one of his “crowning achievements” in 2003, said The New York Times: a “wildly successful” four-part crossover series that brought together the Justice League and the Avengers, two packs of “marquee heroes from DC and Marvel.” In the 2010s his output slowed due to health issues that led to his retirement in 2019; last December he announced on Facebook that he had terminal pancreatic cancer. The love of comic books that took root so early never left him, Pérez recalled in 2014. “Writing and drawing comics for the sheer joy of it,” he said. “That’s true bliss.”