Bill Willingham Goes Back to the Drawing Board!

Bill Willingham has a lot of long-time fans in the comics community, many of whom have followed his work since the '80s when he was writing and drawing the groundbreaking Elementals series. My friends and I aren't just comics fans, however. In our younger years we were gamers, and we first took note of Mr. Willingham's art when he was doing illustrations for Dungeons & Dragons and writing and drawing Villains & Vigilantes adventure modules.

Check out "Death Duel With the Destroyers" and "The Island of Doctor Apocalypse" at the V&V Cover Gallery. When Bill was doing a signing at Paper Heroes in Killeen, Texas, these are the items I brought to get signed. His look of distaste when he saw them was priceless. "Whoever drew these should have his fingers broken" was his only comment. I still think they're classics.

Bill's brief Wikipedia entry has a decent overview of his career (though any mention of V&V is conspicuously absent), hitting the highlights as it skips over the details. I've followed most of the comics listed there, and even own some original art from the Ironwood series.

There's a scene in "Cursed" (the Wes Craven werewolf movie starring Christina Ricci) in which one of the characters is desperately researching lycanthropy. He has a pile of comics on his bedroom floor, and the one on top is an issue of Bill's Coventry. I recognized it immediately. You can see the cover at the top of the page at the virtual Bill Willingham COMICON "booth."

Bill lived in Las Vegas for awhile, the setting of his Proposition Player miniseries, which will always have a place in my heart, as it was partially inspired by one of my best friends. Today I discovered this Las Vegas Weekly interview with Bill and a handful of other comic creators who lived there, including another of my all-time favorites, Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber.

Although Elementals and Coventry are probably my favorite Willingham works, the comic that really put Bill on the comics industry map was the Vertigo series Fables. (Watch and/or listen to Bill discuss Fables at the 2005 ComicCon). And while Fables is indeed an excellent book, my favorites have something that it lacks: Bill Willingham artwork. For years, Bill has been exclusively writing comics, leaving the drawing and inking chores to other artists.

Which is why I was amazed when my friend (the aforementioned inspiration for Proposition Player) called to tell me that Bill was going to be writing and drawing a new series for DC Comics. The new series is Shadowpact, a spinoff of his Day of Vengeance "Infinite Crisis" miniseries. He discusses it at length at Newsarama. One of the characters is a talking alcoholic chimpanzee detective. I cannot wait. Bill's writing is good on its own, but the combination of his writing and art is always something special.