George Perez

George Pérez (center) with fans disguised as Wonder Girl (left) and Terra (right)

George Pérez (born June 9, 1954 in New York City ) is an American comic artist and writer .

Life and work

Beginnings and early works

Pérez, who came from a Puerto Rican immigrant family who came to the United States in the 1940s, was born in New York City in 1954, where he grew up in an immigrant part of the Bronx.

In the 1970s, Pérez, who is known for his clean and dynamic, realistic drawing style, which he had learned from Jack Kirby in his early days , began working as a full-time comic artist. He presented his first work for the series Sons of the Tiger , which the Marvel Comics publisher published in the comic magazine Deadly Hands of Kung Fu . The established writer Bill Mantlo acted as the author of the stories to be visualized by Pérez. Together with Mantlo, Pérez also created the fictional character of the adventurer White Tiger.

Pérez first received greater attention in the later 1970s as a draftsman of the successful superhero series The Avengers, which also appeared in the Marvel Comics program, and which he illustrated for several years, starting with issue # 141.

Another work for Marvel in the 1970s was Pérez's work on the Fantastic Four series, which marked his first collaboration with his longstanding main artistic partner, Marv Wolfman. At the end of the decade, Pérez moved to Marvel's rival publisher DC Comics , for whom he initially worked as an illustrator on the Justice League of America series, for which he mainly put stories written by Gerry Conway into the picture, before he started the new series The New with Wolfman Teen Titans took over.

Pérez 'work in the 1980s

New Teen Titans, DC's "counter-project" to the then extremely successful X-Men series by Marvel, was directed by Wolfman, who acted as the lead author of the series, and Pérez, who co-wrote for the first time in addition to the drawings, within a short time to the most popular and by far the best-selling series in the DC publishing program. In addition to Wolfman's original stories, Pérez's drawings, which ideally suited the taste of the mass audience of the time, contributed to the Titans' success. Romeo Tanghal mostly appeared as the tusker of Pérez's pencil drawings .

Pérez, who, along with John Byrne, is widely regarded as the most popular and successful American comic artist of the 1980s, was commissioned on the wave of success of the Teen Titans in 1984 with the graphic design of the twelve-part maxiseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, which DC-Verlag is responsible for celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. This maxiserie, which Pérez co-wrote with Wolfman, was finally published in 1985/1986 and proved to be a great financial and artistic success. Jerry Ordway and Dick Giordano acted as Inker, who were entrusted with the ink-wise revision of Pérez's drawings .

From 1987 to 1992 Pérez supervised the relaunched series about the superhero Wonder Woman , which he wrote and drew in personal union. His reinterpretation of the pugnacious Amazon met with a very positive response from fans and critics and is still considered one of the highlights in the character's over sixty-year history. Parallel to his work on Wonder Woman, Pérez worked intermittently on the series New Teen Titans and Action Comics (# 643-652), in which he told stories about the original superhero, Superman . Once again he not only acted as a draftsman, but also as a co-author of Marv Wolfman and Roger Stern . Due to his long list of assignments, Pérez was often unable to complete this work on his own, but had to be supported by draftsmen like Tom Grummett , who did the additional pencil drawings, or Brett Breeding , Kerry Gammill and Bob McLeod , who took care of the ink rework.

Pérez 'work in the 1990s

After Pérez had quarreled with DC in 1992 about the artistic direction of the Wonder Woman series and the in his opinion insufficient marketing promotion of his work on it, as well as the in his opinion insufficient appreciation of the fifty-year "birthday" of the character, DC he DC for several years to work for other publishers like Marvel or Malibu Comics . With Marvel, complications arose at the same time in connection with Pérez's work on the Infinity Gauntlet miniseries - which Pérez broke off after four out of six editions and which was then completed by Ron Lim .

For Malibu Comics Pérez drew Break-Thru and Ultraforce while he worked on I-Bots for Tekno Comix and on Soul for CrossGen . This was followed by more work for DC - for which he did the ink work for a third, written and drawn by Dan Jurgens , reprint of the Teen Titans title (1996-1997), and for Marvel, for which he wrote the series Sachs and written by Peter David Violens and Hulk: Future Imperfect designed. This was followed by a multi-year, second run on Marvel's superhero classic The Avengers , for which Pérez illustrated stories written by Kurt Busiek . This run finally culminated in 2003 in the cross-publisher crossover JLA / Avengers , which had been planned since the 1980s - and for which Pérez had already drawn over twenty pages before it was due to differences between the owners of the two superhero groups involved, DC and Marvel had been stopped and was not realized until nearly twenty years late.

In contrast, Pérez's attempt to self-publish works as an independent artist failed: he had to abandon the publication of his Crimson Plague project under considerable debt.

Recent work

In the recent past, Pérez has mainly worked as a draftsman for various DC projects such as the miniseries Infinite Crisis and the anthology series The Brave and the Bold .

Works

Working for DC

• Action Comics # 600, 643-652; Annual # 2
• Adventures of Superman # 457-459 (plots), # 461 (ink)
• The Brave and the Bold (Vol. 2) # 1-Present
• Crisis on Infinite Earths # 1-12
• History of the DC Universe # 1-2
• Infinite Crisis # 1-7 alternate covers and partial interior
• JLA / Avengers # 1-4
• Justice League of America # 184-186, 192-197, 200
• The New Teen Titans (Vol. 1), # 1-4, 6-40; Annual # 1-2
• The New Teen Titans (Vol. 2), # 1-5, The New Titans # 50-61
• Teen Titans (Vol. 2) (inker, issues # 1-15)
• Superman # 423 (Indian ink)
• Superman: The Wedding Album
• Wonder Woman vol. 2, # 1-62; Annual # 1-2

Working for Marvel

• Uncanny X-Men vol. 1, Annual # 3
• The Avengers vol 1, # 141-162, 167-172, 194-196, 198-202; Annual # 6, 8
• The Avengers vol 3, # 1-15, 18-25, 27-34; Annual 1998
• Crimson Plague # 1–2 ()
• Fantastic Four vol 1, # 164-167, 170-172, 176-178, 184-188, 191-192
• Hulk: Future Imperfect # 1-2
• Infinity Gauntlet # 1-4
• Sachs and Violens # 1-4
• Silver Surfer vol 3, # 111- # 123 (Author)
• Youngblood Battlezone vol 1, # 2