Mike Manley (comic artist)

Mike Manley

Michael "Mike" Manley (* around 1961 in Detroit , Michigan ) is an American comic artist. As a draftsman (pencil and ink drawings) Manley has comic series like Batman , Quasar, Captain America, Marvel Universe and The Power of Shazam! supervised.

Life

Manley made a name for himself as a draftsman in 1991 when he created the cartoon character Darkhawk together with Danny Fingeroth and Tom DeFalco , whose series he accompanied as a draftsman for several years. Darkhawk achieved particular popularity not least because of Manley's powerful drawing style and his ability to increase the expressiveness of his own drawings with dynamic ink underlay.

The success of this project made Denny O'Neil , the head of the Batman editorial team at DC Verlag, aware of Manley, who offered him the successor to Jim Aparo as the regular illustrator of the traditional comic series Batman , which Manley started in 1993. The first Batman comic he designed was the anniversary number Batman # 500, which is one of the best-selling comic books with more than three million copies sold. As a result, Manley worked for a little over a year as a draftsman on the Batman series, which was written all the time by Doug Moench , until he left with issue # 515 as a draftsman in favor of the expressionist artist Kelley Jones .

In 1995 Manley founded Action Planet Inc. , a small publisher for the publication of private projects such as his creation Monster Man . In addition, Manley has worked as a storyboard artist and designer of television series such as Apy Groove , Spawn , One Saturday Morning , Clerks: The Animated Series , Superman: The Animated Series, and Batman Beyond . For the latter, he received (together with some colleagues) an Emmy Award . Manley, who lives in Philadelphia , currently works for the Disney Corporation .

In March 2010, Manley replaced the illustrator Eduardo Barreto for four weeks due to an ongoing illness . After Barreto's death in 2011, he took over his daily work on the comic strip Judge Parker . Manley worked with John Heebink, whom he had known since high school, during this time. At the end of May 2016 he took over the design of the daily stories of Phantom for the King Features Syndicate after the surprising death of the cartoonist Paul Ryan . While Terry Beatty continues to run the Sunday Stories, Manley began his daily work on the Phantom Strips on May 30, 2016.