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The Ultimate Team Player
A look at the career and art of
George Perez
By ROBERT GREENBERGER
Every team has its rookie of the year and its most valuable player but if you were to ask the Teens Titans, Avengers, Fantastic Four and Justice League of America who their ultimate teammate was, the answer would no doubt be George Perez.
Since he came onto the comics scene in 1973, Perez has become one of the most popular and influential artists working today. He has helped redefine the way team comics are handled and has brought back some of the energy and excitement missing from the comics since Jack Kirby left the mainstream several years back. Noted today for his two and a half years on DC's New Teen Titans, Perez has been handling almost unbelievable amounts of work including, in just the past year, numerous covers, 12 issues of the Titans, the Titans annual, the four-issue Titans mini-series, character designs, and two 48 page comics for Atari. We caught him inbetween jobs and he visited our offices on his way to drop off two Titans and one JLA cover at DC. He was relaxed and happy about his current life and brimming with enthusiasm for what's coming next.
As the conversation began, he easily went through the struggles to learn his craft without benefit of art courses and his entry into the comics field. But, he said a little later, ‘The Titans was the thing that resuscitated my career.” To
Perez, it was a lucky break coming after a very turbulent period in his life.
George Perez, when he visited the COMICS SCENE offices in August (1982)
photo: John Clayton
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LIFE IN THE BRONX
“Ah yes, the South Bronx,” Perez began about his early years. “I've been drawing since I was five years old. I was not really much for sports and I’ve always had a lot of imagination. I was reading when I was very young, before I went to school. Comics helped, my mother helped me read
through the Dick and Jane books. Reading comics was an outlet for me.”
Perez was immediately drawn to the sheer power of Superman. Curt Swan's style caught Perez's attention and became his first major influence and as Perez read comics, he kept drawing—his own creations and interpretations of the DC heroes. By his teens, Perez discovered the Marvel universe and was quickly drawn to Kirby's work.
Being in Cardinal Hayes Memorial High School, Perez was deprived of any real art training but continued to develop his work through imitation of already-established styles. “Starting from Swan, I went through a Kirby period and even Steve Ditko—for very briefly, I just loved the way Ditko did hands—then others that followed were Steranko, Neal Adams, Barry Smith, Gil Kane, Mort Drucker and many others. Norman Rockwell, Maxwell Parish, Alfonse Mouka as far as illustrators go. As far as someone whose style totally changed mine, Jim Starlin. I have developed an amalgam of styles,” Perez said.
It wasn’t until an active fan named Tom Sciacca convinced Perez to try comic conventions that the idea of working in the field occurred to him. He received his first professional criticism at a Star Trek convention. Also helping with criticism was Sal Quartuccio, now known for his line of posters and portfolios. “It was Quartuccio, Perez explained, “who gave Tom and me our first chance to do our first fanzine.”
In 1973, Perez joined Rich Buckler as an assistant but the relationship didn’t last long. First, the two styles didn’t mesh terribly well, nor did the personalities, especially with Perez trying to hold down a Bank Teller’s job. After six months the two stopped working together but by then the people at Marvel were familiar with Perez and he began to get some solo work. To this day, Perez refers to a Gulliver Jones story from Monsters Unleashed #8 as his poorest work. Originally, Buckler was to help him out but he didn't have time, so Perez, still pretty much a novice, went solo.
AND THEN CAME MAN-WOLF
“When Marvel got a hole in their schedule—they suddenly had no one to draw a feature that no one wanted to draw anyway—they gave it to me,” Perez said with a smile. Man-Wolf was running in Creatures on the Loose and selling only marginally, but when Perez began working with writer David Anthony Kraft, the title’s popularity grew to where it seconded only Tomb of Dracula in sales among the horror titles
Around that time Perez was also assigned Sons of the Tiger, another feature few had an interest in. Teaming with then-new writer Bill Mantlo, the feature became popular, eventually, more popular than Shang Chi himself in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu.
“It was my desire to please and my desire to learn,’’ Perez commented, “One thing I had going for me,” he added, “was a natural storytelling ability which seemed to transcend most of the flaws in drawing, of which there were many. I just improved very quickly.”
Marvel noticed the young talent’s improvements and found more for him to do which brought him around the offices often. “I was constantly keeping my ears open, and letting go of my ego which was my biggest stumbling block, listening to advice from John Romita and people who have been in the business a long time, and I’ve got to respect, and I finally started learning,” Perez said.
Buckler was the regular Fantastic Four artist at that time and he was unable to do an annual. So Marvel “asked me if I could do it, figuring if I've worked with Rich, I’ve got his style—strange reasoning there.” Perez did the annual and was then given the regular monthly to draw. At the same time he asked for The Avengers, thinking it wasn’t being done right. In just a short time he was doing four features and then a phone call came—The Inhumans was given its own title again and the first issue was needed last week and it was Perez’s assignment.
Something had to give. Perez gave up Man-Wolf which ended up being the last issue anyway. He had one two-part story left and put it aside, unfinished. Later, Marvel felt they had a use for it and Perez had to finish the story, two years later. “I had to be careful not to have too drastic a change in art style—constantly looked back at what I had done previously,” he explained.