Thinking about George Perez after today’s sad news about his health. These were the three comics th
Thinking about George Perez after today’s sad news about his health. These were the three comics that came to mind for me, for him, first.The Teen Titans drug specials: I was never a Teen Titans guy, especially, but I have a fond memory of seeing those Nancy Reagan don’t do drugs comics as a kid. Even knowing then the comics were a little full of shit (e.g. this little kid complaining about pot, what a loser), that was my introduction to all those characters. I remember them delivering the goods in showing those characters off. People sure love those characters– there’s a lot of pretty girls dressing up like Raven or Starfire on Tik Tok or wherever that happens, all the time– it’s hard to imagine a description of George Perez winning that’s more apt than that. All those characters that Perez co-created or redesigned that’ll probably outlast me and my limited lifespan, too– it’s something! I liked the Teen Titans most when they lectured me about how I shouldn’t snort heroin. And you know what? I never did snort heroin. Even though I’ve had people tell me it’s a very pleasant time. I listened to Cyborg instead. And then, the bit of Crisis of Infinite Earths I like the most– universes just getting blown to shit in the first issue. If you weren’t there when it was published, and I wasn’t, I think Crisis is a tough comic to come to later– it’s certainly dense. But I do think you have to see the intensity of his approach and sense of scale if you really want to understand the comics that came after. I think Perez really hit for fans about 5-15 years older than me, he was a big deal for them, and I think he was very influential with them in terms of how they thought about comic book universes, what they saw when they closed their eyes. All the rubble– all the detail on Perez rubble. “Put us there; make it feel real while also making it feel HUGE and violent and high stakes”– I think that fan desire (setting aside what I might feel about it) really gets realized in a big way with Perez, I don’t know if it’s for the first time– I couldn’t say, but certainly in a big way. (There’s Byrne, but Byrne never did anything at Crisis’s scale– you could argue Days of Future Past, but that’s just a couple X-Men issues, not twelve comics starring an entire publishing line). Even if some fans thought Wolfman-Perez were dismantling some important part of DC, so much of what they did created the template for DC ever since– the DC reboot, the Ultimate Battle for Everything, that would replace whatever that fandom wanted before, it’s been the tradition for the last twenty-thirty years. They keep trying to make sequels, and they keep blowing it! And I think a lot of that impact is not just because of its place in history, but because of Perez’s contributions, specifically. DC certainly tried a million times to capture Perez drawing every superhero ever standing around on that satellite– that sort of became an archetypal scene for big mega-crossovers. I think you saw how that bit imprinted on modern creators when they were young in things like Civil War or whatever, decades later. He feels very much like an author / co-author of a lot of things about modern comics that maybe people take for granted. He may not be the artist I see in my head when I close my eyes, but I think he is for a lot of people who ended up writing those books during my adult life.And then the third comic that came to mind was those Marvel Fanfare’s that printed some Black Widow comics he did– I think they were inventory issues. I don’t 100% know what the deal with those were, but knowing the cache Marvel Fanfare has had with creators over the years, and how big Perez was for them, I’ve just always wondered/figured that maybe those hit people a certain way more than gets mentioned. Black Widow’s suddenly a character bigger outside of comics than ”she” ever was in them– sure, maybe some of that’s Devin Grayson, or whoever else, but. But a lot of people read those Marvel Fanfare issues…Plus, you can see on that page I think one of the things that make Perez’s pages enjoyable, more for me than his detailwork (I’m not really a detailwork guy?)– how he likes slowing down and fracturing moments as a way of underlining the drama of certain beats. The death of the Flash in Crisis is probably the better example (I prefer the bottom part of this stretch), but. I like that kind of cartography. He really seemed like he went at his pages with every single thing he could muster– every layout idea, every bit of horniness, every character he could remember, every little tiny rock he could detail out, it seemed like he tried to get it all on his pages. I don’t know that those comics mean as much for me as they do for other people? But it makes sense why they mean something to the people for whom they mean a lot… -- source link