On December 7, 2021, George Pérez – artist, writer, creator, and inspiration for two generations of comic fans and professionals – shared on facebook that he expects to have only a limited time left with us. Like so many others, the ComicsXF team has been touched by Pérez’s presence in ways both subtle and profound. We asked our team to share some of their favorite and most moving memories of their experiences with George Pérez, either in person or through his work.
We hope that in some small way, these recollections will help to remind George Pérez, and the world, how much he continues to mean to us.
Cori McCreery
I have lots of memories about George Pérez. The man is a legend in his time, and my all-time favorite artist. He’s drawn some of my favorite comics of all time, and set the standard for the big team comic. Crisis on Infinite Earths means an awful lot to me, as it’s where I first met Kara Zor-El, and Pérez’s version of Kara will always be my favorite. In 2014, I decided to get my first tattoo, and knowing that it would be something that I would want to mean a great deal to me, I found a George Pérez commission on the internet that would be perfect. So I went in and got my first tattoo on my calf, and what should have been a four hour tattoo became a six hour tattoo, because I was a terrible first time client who struggled with the pain. But in the end, I had a George Pérez Supergirl forever emblazoned on my leg, and I was pleased as punch.
I posted that tattoo to George’s Facebook page, and George Pérez liked the post. I wasn’t even a writer yet, just a fan who wanted to share my love of his art with him. Two months later, I went to Denver Comic Con. I’d been the previous year, and had gotten my copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 signed by him, but nothing else. This time I came prepared with several issues of New Teen Titans (including #2 and #44) and all of Crisis. I also came with $200 to get a single commission. All while I was in line, I debated whether to get a Supergirl or a Disco Collar Nightwing. When I got to the front of the line, George explained that he charged $40 for a head sketch, and suddenly I didn’t have to choose, I could get both and then some. I spent that $200 at his table, and got Supergirl, Nightwing, Starfire, Kid Flash, and Speedy. And when I showed him my tattoo, and asked if he could sign a blank sheet of paper for me to add his signature to it? He replied “OH! You’re the one with the LEG!”
In the time since, both the Nightwing and Starfire have been added to my arm as additional tattoos, as well as the signature to the piece on my leg. In 2020, when I moved internationally, several friends pitched in to buy me a house warming gift: the commission that was emblazoned on my leg. Everything came full circle, and forever I will have this connection to George Pérez. Let us celebrate the man while he is still with us. Thank you for all the memories, George.
Ritesh Babu
George Pérez to me will forever be, alongside Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, the face of the platonic ideal of the Western vision of the superhero. You close your eyes, and it is hard to not think of the man who drew the visuals that made phrases like “Worlds will live. Worlds will die. Nothing will be the same” actually mean something. Pérez was a master of the form, a titan whose visual splendor inspired legions. Wheras most shudder at the thought of drawing a sprawling spread of canvas, he seemed to revel in it, packing person after person wherever he could. He seemed to love people, more than anything. The more the better. It showed in his detailed, careful constructions and designs of the many, many characters he created.
But for my money? The moment where Pérez was defined for me? It was when I read the story of him coming into the DC offices and learning of their Post-Crisis plans. He was a heavyweight. He’d done Titans, he was the artist of Crisis, he could do anything. But when he learnt of the plans being floated around for Wonder Woman, and how the female staffers at DC were not pleased with them, he stepped in. As the story goes, he levied his cache, weight, and power and asked for stewardship of the character, to do something that might take more time, but might be something more enriching. And thus, the iconic George Pérez reboot of Diana Prince, edited by the legendary Karen Berger, came to life.
That story struck me then, and strikes me even now. George Pérez seemed to care, like, really care, and it shows in every person he illustrated, every fan and pro interaction you hear about him. Here was a guy who cared. And it’s hard not to love such a man, who also changed the face of comics, inspiring generations. His legacy is unassailable, his impact monumental and thunderous. The splendor that he brought to the superhero is forever eternal, but so is the rich impossible humanity. Thank you for everything you ever were, and still are, Mr. Pérez.
Dan Grote
Three years ago, my friend Rob and I attended a retirement dinner for George Pérez held as part of East Coast Comicon in New Jersey. Nothing fancy — a buffet-style setup in a ballroom of the hotel near the convention center. The dais included Pérez, Jim Starlin, Joe Rubinstein and Ron Lim. Tickets were available to 50 fans.
It was like a roast, except everyone there seemed to genuinely love each other. After the speeches, the creators all milled about and talked with the attendees, signing comics (I brought a copy of Tales of the Teen Titans #50, the Donna Troy-Terry Long wedding issue), prop Infinity Gauntlets, a child-size Batman statue and whatever else was around.
I thought I’d taken better notes of what was said that evening, but all I have written down is “Starlin wanted to do a post-9/11 Namor story w/ Nelson Mandela.” I have no further information on that. I do remember Pérez saying that while he was retiring from comics he was still working on his fetish art, a thing for which he is known apart from comics, so much so that he was to be the master of ceremonies for Fetish Con 2022 in Florida.
I didn’t grow up a Pérez fan. I was aware of him from his “Heroes Return”-era Avengers run and of course The Infinity Gauntlet, but coming into comics in the mid-1990s, you weren’t trained to get excited about Pérez the way you were, say, Lee or Liefeld. Eventually I knew enough to refer to Pérez as “the artist who can make 100 superheroes dance on the head of a pin.” I’m sure I thought that was clever.
But if you hang around comics long enough, you develop an appreciation for the man’s style and how he was able to go big even in the smallest spaces. A George Pérez splash page was a sight to behold. A Pérez double-page spread belongs in a goddamn museum. Interacting with him ever so briefly, I saw a warm, tall man who genuinely loved what he did, so much so that he spent the last few years of his life fighting his own body — through heart ailments, diabetes, declining vision and now cancer — to do what he loves and to share that love with his fans.
If that’s not a hero’s death, I don’t know what is.
Zach Rabiroff
I never knew George Pérez, but he knew me.
I must have been around 11 years old when I picked up New Teen Titans #38: just at the moment when the first post-Onslaught stirrings of disillusionment with my beloved Marvels were setting in. I was wandering somewhat desultorily through a grungy Portland comic shop, when I saw a cover that caught my eye: a noir-like image of a young man in a trench coat, cloaked in shadow, in the ruins of a burned-out building. Beside him, drawn in rough pencil like a police sketch, posters with the face of one woman three times over – a girl, a teenager, a woman with sad eyes looking straight at us. At me. I couldn’t look away. I was hooked.
The story inside was about the man in the trench coat (Robin, Dick Grayson – him I knew from cartoons) tracking down the origins of the young woman on the posters (his friend and teammate Donna Troy). Donna, it would turn out, was given up for adoption by a young and frightened mother, only to pass tragically from hand to hand before winding up in the care of her mentors the Amazons.
Now, back then, DC history was a labyrinthine mystery to me, and you couldn’t have paid me to tell you the difference between a Wonder Girl and a Lightning Lass. But the beautiful thing was, I didn’t need to. What mattered wasn’t the continuity or the timelines but the gorgeous, expressive storytelling on display: the tearful reconciliation of a long-parted family. The POV shots, depicted in an extraordinary density of panels, of a young child being pulled from her cradle. The stark, dark, wordless pages of a young man transcribing his notes of a case concluded. The story was in the pictures, drawn in lines as rich and textured a hung portrait. That was George in a nutshell. That was what he did every time.
But there was more than that, too. It wasn’t just the storytelling or the beauty of the drawings, but an overwhelming sense of humanity that seeped into every page. It would be entirely wrong to say I had a deprived childhood. I was the product of an American middle class, at a time when the American middle class was a phrase that had some meaning behind it. But it’s fair to say I was a lonely kid, grappling with an
isolation and sense of otherness that may not have been unique but was nonetheless undeniable. And I somehow felt, for reasons it would not have been possible to explain but would have been equally impossible to ignore, that George Pérez knew that. Every emotive face, every quiet story beat, every physical gesture on the page had behind it a warmth and humanity that said: you, the reader, are not alone.
Much later, I would learn who George Pérez was: how his kindness toward colleagues and fans was legendary throughout the industry. How his influence stretched to virtually every comic artist now working in the superhero genre. How his preternatural humbleness was such that he used to ask his editor on Avengers, repeatedly, if he could be paid less for drawing covers that he felt did not take up enough of his time. But I knew then, already, the thing that mattered most. I knew that somehow, George Pérez saw me in every line he drew.
I never knew George Pérez, but I can meet him any time I need to.
Adam Reck
I was 10 years old, and always had comic books on me. As my Dad drove us around to our grandparents houses or wherever in his ridiculously large conversion van, I wore out my Transformers back issues and whatever random floppies I had bought at the Waldenbooks spinner rack.
I had read a chunk of Silver Surfer from the last year as Jim Starlin and Ron Lim reintroduced the Mad Titan, Thanos and his cosmic supporting cast. And then the Infinity Gauntlet came out. I was used to the X-Men crossing over, I had read a little of the Secret Wars silliness, but this felt all-caps IMPORTANT. And not just because the cover featured characters from across the Marvel Universe in a story that promised to be epic, but because George Pérez was drawing it.
Pérez is known for his amazing ability to draw huge casts of characters from whatever universe he’s played in. With Infinity Gauntlet, he was able to bring a level of gravitas to a story essentially about a big purple man who has the hots for death. He introduces characters in bold ways that incorporate their iconic symbols: Cap’s shield, Strange’s window, and allows Starlin’s script to slowly build the tension of what is on the horizon. When Thanos does the snap, it’s more horrific than on film as terrified pedestrians and Avengers alike witness a commercial flight nosedive into a crowded city. The stakes feel real. Pérez brings the story to life and nails the essence of every character, be it Nick Fury or the wily Mephisto.
The irony of course being that Ron Lim finished drawing Infinity Gauntlet, but Pérez’s reasons for the baton pass – one of which being that when the story moved to space there weren’t enough characters to draw prove his status as an incredible workhorse able to do the kind of epic storytelling very few could. As I and so many others are now looking back on his career, it’s clear there are no other artists who could quite do what Pérez did. The acting of his characters, the majesty of the action, and the sheer bombast of what he was capable of on the page will live forever. For my part, I will always remember that van, that comic, that snap. And for that, I am thankful this master of the artform graced us with his talents.
Austin Gorton
I first got into comics just before the Image Exodus circa 1992, with the X-Men as my entry point into the world of superhero comics. In 1992, artists like Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, and Todd McFarlane (and the artists Marvel desperately tabbed to take over for them after the exodus) were the ones everyone was talking about. Between that, and the fact that he never really did much work with the X-Men, it took me a few years of reading to first encounter George Pérez’s art (especially in those days of no digital comics and scant few reprint collections). It wasn’t until I had branched out from the X-Men to the Harras/Epting Avengers, and from there, into the Avengers back catalog, that I came across Pérez’s art for the first time, as he livened up some pretty tepid Jim Shooter and David Micheline scripts with his detailed pencils and masterful depiction of action. By then, though, my initial tastes were well-established, and while I liked Pérez’s work in those Avengers issues, especially compared to many of his peers at that time, I never considered him a “favorite” artist, alongside guys like, say, Jim Lee or John Romita, Jr.
But then, a funny thing happened. Over the years, as my explorations into comics went further and further, George Pérez kept popping up. He drew an old X-Men annual I found as a back issue, as well as some old Fantastic Four issues. I picked up Infinity War, which led me back to Infinity Gauntlet, and there he was again, drawing nearly every character in the Marvel Universe in a cosmos-spanning epic. As I branched out into the DC Universe, I found him doing another, even bigger, cosmic epic, one of the architects of DC’s universe-upending Crisis on Infinite Earths. Plus, he’d stuck around to reseed the new DC Comics in History of the DC Universe and Wonder Woman. Before long, New Teen Titans‘ reputation as “DC’s X-Men” led me to check it out, and I found Pérez again. After Grant Morrison’s JLA made me a Justice League fan (and reprints started to become easier to find), I discovered the issues of Justice League of America Pérez drew, in some cases, contemporaneously to his work on Avengers. I even learned he’d designed the power suit sported by Lex Luthor’s Super Powers action figure, one of my earliest encounters with superheroes and villains, years before I got into comics.
And it wasn’t just back issues: before long, Pérez returned to Avengers, turning in my favorite series of the “Heroes Return” books, launched in the wake of Marvel’s problematic reconciliation with at least two of those Image founders who had burned them just after I’d started reading. When the ill-fated CrossGen publishing company launched at the turn of the millennium, and I was ensnared by the promise of an entirely new interconnected universe of characters spanning multiple genres, Pérez was there, too. Not long after, I was buzzing for the launch of the long-delayed JLA/Avengers crossover series, in which Pérez outdid even himself as he drew dozens upon dozens of characters from two different universes across four giant-sized issues, turning in some of the most geekily fist-pumping and smile-spreading comic book moments of all time.
All of which is to say, while George Pérez has only ever been tangentially connected to the X-Men, the characters I’ve spent the most time exploring, his work is so engaging and memorable, his career so expansive, that he essentially drew my history of comics, showing up everywhere I turned as I stepped out of the world of the X-Men and dove deeper and deeper into the larger universes of superhero comics. Whether I was rifling through long boxes filled with back issues or grabbing books off the shelves at my LCS, there he was, his familiar style comforting and exciting me. He may not have been the first artist to capture my attention, but George Pérez, in terms of both quality and quantity, came to stand above the rest.
Thank you for being my guide on this journey.
Zach Rabiroff edits articles at Comicsxf.com.
