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.
3 Comments:
First I thought, "What? No link for the Ironwood series?" So I did a search, and couldn't really find a decent link myself. I did find a page of original art (click on it to enlarge it) here. I also found this page, about a role-playing game with a worldbook for playing the RPG in an Ironwood setting.
I once paid something like $12 for Elementals #1 when it was barely more than a month old, just because I was so careless as to miss the first issue during the week it came out. Bill Willingham's Elementals series was HOT LIKE FIRE when it first came out. All the die-hard Fantastic Four fans loved it, because it was so much better than any of the regular FF stuff that was coming out at the time.
Thanks for this, which is the best independent writeup on Willingham I've seen, even after my exhaustive (hah) web search.
Karl Black, Ironwood Necromancer
Thanks for stopping by, Karl! I really appreciate the input and the links. You're right about the lack of Ironwood coverage on the net... makes me think I should at least dig out my collection and scan the covers. Even the Elementals gets surprisingly little attention online.
It's funny you mention the Fantastic Four; I can remember watching a bootleg copy of the Roger Corman FF movie with Bill in the early '90s. At one point he asked, "Did Reed Richards' mother just name the team?" and then promptly fell asleep on the couch. I think he was the lucky one of the group.
I'm glad you liked the post. Hopefully I'll get around to writing more on Mr. Willingham in the future. (And someone needs to flesh out his Wikipedia entry).
IMHO, 'Fables' is one of Will's best works so far. As addictive as any Vertigo series
Post a Comment
<< Home