Michael Netzer
Michael Netzer (born October 9, 1955 in Detroit ), actually Michael Nasser, is an American comic artist .
Life and work
Michael Netzer was born in Detroit in 1955 under the name Michael Nasser, the son of immigrants of Lebanese origin. Due to severe polio , which he contracted at the age of eight months, he spent the ages of three to eleven in his father's Lebanese hometown, Dairquobil. Although the disease left his left hip and leg partially paralyzed, Nasser was largely able to cure it. After returning to the United States, he first attended school before he began training in illustration and graphic arts at Wayne State University in Michigan.
In the 1970s, Nasser began working as a full-time comic artist , partly through the mediation of Neal Adams , whom he met at a comic convention in Michigan. In the 1970s Netzer designed for the publishers DC Comics and Marvel Comics about well-known characters such as Batman , Wonder Woman , Kobra, Superboy & Legion of Super Heroes, Green Arrow & Black Canary , Supergirl , Martian Manhunter and Black Lightning (DC) or Spider Man (Marvel) and his and Neal Adam's own creation Ms. Mystic.
In 1977 Nasser made a drastic change in his life when, after discovering a personal form of spirituality, he left his partner Cindy Burrell and their daughter in New York to live in San Francisco. Netzer presented his newly discovered philosophy - a complex, partly esoteric, amalgam of socio-political postulates, reflections on the solar system and the call to active participation in the realization of the ideal of lasting world peace - for the first time in the history of “The Old, New and Final Testaments ”Which was published in Star * Reach magazine # 12.
Nasser spent the following years traveling through the United States and, parallel to his drawings, propagating the strange idea of establishing a "new political hierarchy" through the medium of comics: Numerous artists and editors who worked with Nasser during this time highlighted this Context his messianic behavior and demeanor bordering on loss of reality and madness.
During a trip to Lebanon in 1981/1982, which he undertook to deepen his personal faith, Nasser got caught in the Israeli Lebanon offensive in June 1982. He finally escaped the war in August 1983 by a daring taxi ride through the military belt to the israeli border. After studying the Hebrew language in several kibbutzim, Nasser settled in the West Bank in the settlement of Ofra. In Ofra, Nasser met his second wife Elana Joseph, with whom he has five children, and he changed his last name to Netzer.
In 1987, together with Jonathan Duitch and Yossi Halpern, Netzer finally created the first Israeli superhero comic, Uri-On, which marked the beginning of the “rediscovery” of the comic medium in Israel in the 1980s.
In 1991 Netzer returned to New York to work for Neal Adam's Atelier Continuity Studios until the two fell out over the rights to the character of Ms. Mystic , a dispute that resulted in a 1993 lawsuit in New York federal court that closed in 1995 has been.
In the early 1990s, Netzer again oversaw numerous projects for DC Comics: for example, he drew several editions of the Detective Comics series written by Chuck Dixon , designed the one shot Armageddon: Agenda, Denny O'Neil's comic novel Batman / Green Arrow: The Poison Tomorrow and the miniseries The Huntress (1994)
After collaborating with Neil Gaiman on the comic book Lady Justice for Tekno Comics, Netzer returned to Israel in 1994, where he still lives today. Although he has not presented any significant work as a draftsman since the mid-1990s, Netzer is still a prominent figure in the US comics scene, which is mainly due to his zealous Internet activities: he maintains a large number of websites on which he expresses his personal views on philosophy, religion, the social relevance of the comic medium and the need to exert political influence on artistically active people.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Netzer, Michael |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Nasser, Michael |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American comic artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 9, 1955 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Detroit |