While today more persons are bothered by the passing of reactionary conservative commentator and pill-head Rush Limbaugh, I was more struck by the rather abrupt passing of British writer of comics and television, Si Spencer. Instead of the proverbial one-trick money such as Rush, Si tried a lot of different things, from genres to mediums, and unlike some people never publicly called for the deaths of anybody. Even when he was able to do creator-owned stories he looked for collaborators to share any rewards with, as opposed to other writers of both comics and television who must settle out of court with former dance partners for undisclosed amounts years after the fact. Si seemed like the rascal in far more creative ways.
And just earlier this month, the noosphere of funny books also lost the great S Clay Wilson, seemingly from long-term effects of brain damage caused by alcohol abuse. Clay was self-publishing his cartoons before I was even born, staying faithful about his passions for decades longer than most creative industry careers even last. There were times when the sorts of anthologies he contributed to were the only comix that could succeed in never insulting me. Maybe in the Twilight Zone I’m editing one this year with work by him, and folks like Al Columbia, Ian Carney, Aidan Potts and Glenn Wong, and Valentino granting me permission to reprint his old Belladonna confession. I can be so against the arts these years now, but sometimes reminders of tragically beautiful grotesquerie hit me like maybe forcing dream into the real world more substantially than any religion can find better execution than appeasing whichever ego, coming or going, after all. Fantasy is seductive, but forever less fulfilling than a mouthful of air.
Aways back I wrote a thing about miserable ends of certain comic book professionals, and of the too many thousands of articles I’d written in my time it remains one of the very few relative to creative industries which I hold in high regard, or any regard. There are obviously endless ways for any of us to meet our own, and although comic books are a niche within a microcosm, within the trade are further diminished cliques, sects and subdivisions. And this year has already had these big losses in two of them. That article I wrote back when clearly missed some names, but of the stories presented some were well known and others were not. Reading now of Si and Clay passing away, even though I’ve never had any personal interactions with these people myself in spite of hundreds of others I knew too well…I think I’d like to here observe a few more irons for the fire.
Nick Manabat was a rockstar at the start of Image Comics, back before Homage studio rebranded itself into Wildstorm. All of his published work encompassed maybe 4 comic book issues, done inside of a year. I think I heard somewhere that studio-mate Richard Johnson ghosted background inks on some of his later pages, as Hodgkins Lymphoma went through him disgustingly fast. Most of his work appeared in a title called The Cybernary, initially a “flip-book” to another called Deathblow. He wasn’t billed as a co-creator, but I’d bet the farm that the IP was developed with his art style in mind all along. It was dark and brutal, not merely cybernetic but necro, a dark fantasy spin on cyberpunk aesthetics where every page, every image was distinctly original. Unlike his fellow artists at Homage, he wasted little on pinups, did not look to be fighting for covers or cards or any other easy gig, but instead took on this sequential monstrosity as scripted by veteran writer and editor Steve Gerber, who just a few years later managed to steal back his Howard the Duck character from Marvel some years before reaching his own end. If a rookie artist were to be paired with an established writer, I can’t imagine many other names who fit as a glove; and the same could be said for artists deserving of Gerber’s own imagination. Nick would so easily have been one of his generation’s absolute best. Realistically, measuring character for who one would like to be or what one would like to have accomplished, would make saints out of everyone, while providing no rationale for the infinitely more lapses in saintliness which abound.
Gemma Portacio was another who passed away at a young age, and also in connection to the Homage studio of the early 1990s. The world never got the chance to see if she was a writer or artist herself, although she was an office assistant to the studio, ably so in a very hectic day and time where it and the greater Image publishing label were getting loads of attentions warranted and unwarranted. She was brought into that fold by her brother Whilce. Whilce was so devastated by her death, he eventually passed his own title Wetworks onto others, and for the next few years predominately did fill-in jobs on the creator-owned books of other creators altogether, as though he simply could not focus on his own thing anymore. Which was a shame, understandably, because I always took his work to be the most visually inventive of the Image Comics founders, in that he never recycled panels or layouts, never went out of his way to avoid drawing something over lack of ability. Which sounds cruel toward his compatriots, who in fairness were no strangers to provoking strong impressions. Honestly I bet I could talk with Jim Valentino for hours and hours about a great many things, and I believe the prolonged evolution of Erik Larsen’s style has proven an ongoing exegesis, that while he’s best known now for an admittedly great sense of humor and his characters dabbling in softcore porn, he frankly rendered some genuinely beautiful imagery along the way. Whilce’s artwork really spoke to me way back when though, in terms of appealing style if rarely the subject matter itself, and I personally identified with losing a sister. He got his head sorted eventually, however a bit strangely homaged his sister as a deceased sibling to one of his Wetworks characters, living and dying entirely off-panel.
And finally, was Will Jungkuntz. Al Milgrom’s editorial from Marvel Fanfare #26 says it all, although I should add that while I believe Will also did some short story work for the smaller brand Eclipse Comics in his brief window of documented creative output, his debut from the monopolies being a racially-aware Captain America story, in the mid-80s, was kicking in a door somewhere. Far more ingenuity to his storytelling and presentation than half of the company’s writers and artists published in the time since, no contest. A big ship sailing without him or the nuances he’d have had to share on the journey. In that same era, long before scoring monthly work anywhere, a young Norm Breyfogle was seeing his own short stories printed by Milgrom in this title. Like Will, Norm had also done previous work at smaller publishers, and was moving fast, so I wonder if Will had lived long enough to refine his passions, might his career have echoed that led by Norm. Making money for the big publishers rewarded with being made to feel spurned by the big publishers. Norm sadly passed away himself in recent years, the final weeks of his declining health wasting away on legal drugs rather than out camping under fine stars somewhere, as was his thing. Norm I did trade words with, but in all honesty nothing worth remembering. Achieving the dreams of others, succeeding with a long career and pursuing fantasy to the extent of leaving no measurable legacy, while these matters irrevocably produce feelings of incompleteness, what one is left with speaks louder than any illustration. Art does not actually save lives. It is a distraction from all of life’s possibility.
People are dying each and every moment of this sorely misbegotten world. As testament to their creator or Intelligent Design either one, so few of them have anything to say. Most are evidently forgettable. But we remember who we can, while we can, because if we are not reciprocating then we are masturbating.