The Amazing Illustrated Legacy of George Perez
Once upon a time, in an era known as B.A. (Before Amazon), people went to drugstores and candy shops to purchase … hold on … magazines and newspapers. They carried local and national titles along with certain periodicals wrapped in brown paper. These supposedly featured people without clothes doing weird things to each other.
Wedged between the aisles of newsprint and glossy color pages was a circular, multi-tiered rack. Within its pockets were the crown jewels of children, teens, and a good deal of adults — comic books. The spinning display held the adventures of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and many more.
In 1983, during one of my visits to this type of rack, I found a copy of The New Teen Titans #30. Although I owned other DC titles like Justice League of America and Legion of Super-Heroes, I never read this one. However, the cover presented a “Hmm” moment.
The character designs and backgrounds were intricately life-like, and the inks were extremely bold. To my 14-year-old self, the image by artist George Perez and inker Romeo Tanghal intrigued me.
At this moment, I fell in love with Mr. Perez’s work. So did many other comic book readers since his artistic premiere in 1974. As of this writing, it has been a year since his death due to pancreatic cancer. Yet, his presence is still formidable.
No project was too daunting for George. Be it Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu, Fantastic Four, Avengers, or Justice League of America, he put all his efforts into his assignment. Then, when he reached 100%, he broke through the multiverse of mathematics to find a few points more.
In the 1980s, George joined writer Marv Wolfman to create two of the biggest-selling series for DC Comics. One was the aforementioned New Teen Titans. The other was Crisis on Infinite Earths, where Wolfman and Perez were asked to destroy 50 years of DC history and start from scratch.
The team did this extraordinarily well. So much so, it influenced the company’s future Crisis series (Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Dark Crisis, Real Housewives of the Crisis).
Plus, George went to town on the series. Known for his deep-dive team shots, he worked to squeeze as many heroes and villains into each panel and page. Even today, readers are amazed at how much he could do without mudding up the images.
Overall, George Perez was a risk-taker. He went from artist to co-plotter on New Teen Titans to writer in the post-Crisis Wonder Woman. He even returned to relaunch series like Avengers and Teen Titans in the 1990s.
We can learn much from George Perez besides how to draw and ink a single shot featuring 500 characters. Persistence is one example. Although he was amazingly talented, he always took his creativity to the next level. Add humility, passion, and powerful imagination, and you have a bold picture of who George Perez was.
