Gone But Not Forgotten, 2022 Edition

37+ Comic People Who Said Goodbye in 2022

1. Neal Adams (b. 1941)
If someone with a lot of money and a big mountain in their backyard decided to create a Mount Rushmore for comic artists, that person would have a hard time narrowing the line-up down to just four faces. Kirby, naturally. Eisner, Barks, Ditko, Kurtzman, Wood, Kubert, Crumb, Pérez… there’s a long list of other great artists who could make the cut. But one thing’s for sure: any stone monument to the great comic artists of our time would be sorely lacking without Neal Adams’ smiling face.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, Adams changed the look of the comic industry forever. Great artists came before him and great artists came after him, but you could make a convincing argument that the history of the American comic book can be divided into two eras: before Adams and after Adams. By applying photo-realistic techniques and production philosophies he picked up in the commercial art world, Adams inspired a whole generation of artists that followed in his footsteps and ushered in a radical shift in style in American mainstream comics that dominates to this day.

After graduating from Manhattan’s School of Industrial Art in 1959, Adams freelanced for Archie Comics and began landing regular work at the Johnstone and Cushing advertising agency before breaking into comics with artwork on the Ben Casey newspaper strip. During this time, he continued to do storyboards and other commercial work, and he said in 1976 that after leaving Ben Casey he brought his portfolio to ad agencies and men’s magazines. “My material was a little too realistic and not exactly right for most,” he said. “I left my portfolio in an advertising agency promising they were going to hold on to it. In the meantime, I needed to make some money… and I thought, ‘Why don’t I do some comics?'”

 

“Do some comics” is exactly what he did, ghosting for other artists on comic strips and eventually making his way to DC Comics, where he started out as a penciler and inker for stories in the company’s war titles. Soon enough, he moved into the publisher’s superhero titles; his work on the supernatural sleuth Deadman became a fan sensation, earning the young artist the 1967 Alley Award for Best Comic Cover and a special award for “the new perspective and dynamic vibrance he has brought to the field of comic art.” Critically acclaimed stories starring the Spectre, Teen Titans, and the X-Men soon followed.

Then came Batman. Carmine Infantino introduced the “new look” Batman in 1964 to help bring him back to his crime-fighting roots, but the massive popularity of the campy Batman TV show in the 1960s created another identity crisis for the hero, and Adams (in partnership with writer Denny O’Neil) was brought in to revitalize the character with stories that re-established Batman’s dark, brooding nature and reinforced just how dangerous his rogues’ gallery could be (while also adding a few noteworthy additions to the line-up, like the tragic Man-Bat and the eco-terrorist Ra’s al Ghul). During this time, Adams and O’Neil also teamed up Green Lantern and Green Arrow for a series of then-controversial “relevance” stories that tackled real-life issues like racism and drug addiction, earning DC and the writer/artist team much positive press as the rest of the world started to see comics in a different light.

Not content to rest on his laurels, Adams quit drawing for DC and Marvel at his creative height in the mid-1970s to launch Continuity Studios, an artists’ studio that produced comics, commercial art, and storyboards, among other services (its comics division showcased indie characters Bucky O’Hare and Adams’ own Ms. Mystic). It was around this time that Adams also started getting heavily involved in creators’ rights, recognizing the value that comic creators brought to the table and demanding compensation for himself and others when their characters were licensed and adapted into other media. One of his bigger successes was a campaign on behalf of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, that eventually led to greater recognition for the pair and a creator tag in the comics and in other media that continues to this day.

His biggest legacy, though, might be the legions of artists who were influenced and inspired by him — not just by his art style and his approach to the profession but also by his indefatigable fight for better working conditions for comic artists, a fight that began long before the rest of the world would come to appreciate those artists’ contributions to our pop culture. “It wasn’t until I sat at tables at conventions next to the same people I would watch treat my father with such reverence that I understood he was their father, too,” his son, Josh Adams, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Neal Adams’ most undeniable quality was the one I had known about him my entire life: he was a father. Not just my father, but a father to all that would get to know him.” Died April 28

2. George Pérez (b. 1954)
When DC decided to salute George Pérez’s passing with a tribute in its August 2022 comic line-up, they no doubt knew the challenge in front of them; namely, how does any one image sum up a career like the one Pérez enjoyed at DC? In the end, there was only one way to do it; to properly salute the man, they had to follow his lead and go big.

The double-page spread (a size befitting his status as one of the company’s premier artists) is the same type of crowd shot that came to be one of Pérez’s signature moves. Whether it was books starring the Avengers, the Teen Titans, the Justice League, or just about everyone who ever existed in the DC or Marvel universe (see also: Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Infinity Gauntlet), Pérez seemed to take delight in how many recognizable faces he could squeeze into any one cover or page. His personal record is probably a wraparound cover that he and artist Alex Ross prepared for a 1998 collection of the literally earth-shattering mini-series Crisis on Infinite Earths, with no less than 562(!) characters penciled by Pérez and painted by Ross.

Born in the South Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, Pérez broke into the comics business as an assistant to artist Rich Buckler before making his professional debut in August 1974 with Marvel’s Astonishing Tales #25. He quickly became a Marvel regular, penciling a run of “Sons of the Tiger” — a strip he co-authored with Bill Mantlo that ran in Marvel’s Deadly Hands of Kung Fu magazine and featured the White Tiger, comics’ first Puerto Rican superhero) — while also contributing to The Avengers, Creatures on the Loose, The Inhumans, and Fantastic Four, the latter title offering him the chance to work with writer Marv Wolfman for the first time.

Together, Wolfman and Pérez would go on to create The New Teen Titans for DC, a reboot of the company’s Teen Titans that owed a debt to Marvel’s then-recently revitalized (and hugely popular) X-Men. While Pérez was lured to DC by the chance to work on its flagship team title Justice League of America, it was his facility with faces and dynamic layouts on The New Teen Titans that made the book a bestseller and catapulted him to the front of the fan-favorite line. It also made him the natural choice for penciling DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, a project that gave Pérez the opportunity to draw nearly every single character in DC’s stable.

By the late 1980s, Pérez was rebooting Wonder Woman, coming in as both the plotter and penciler for the series and tying her more closely to the Greek gods than she had been in decades, before returning to the Titans (though they had grown up enough by then to be called the New Titans). His industry-defining work across more than four decades also included DC’s War of the Gods, History of the DC Universe, Action Comics, Adventures of Superman, Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet, Batman, a 2003 JLA/Avengers crossover, and so much more.

Pérez announced his retirement in 2019; he revealed he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2021. Telling his fans that the cancer was inoperable and doctors had given him six months to a year to live, he chose not to undergo treatment. “I have been given the option of chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy,” he wrote, “but after weighing all the variables and assessing just how much of my remaining days would be eaten up by doctor visits, treatments, hospital stays and dealing with the often stressful and frustrating bureaucracy of the medical system, I’ve opted to just let nature take its course, and I will enjoy whatever time I have left as fully as possible with my family, friends, and fans.” “We lost another of the absolute greats this weekend,” Jim Lee, chief creative officer and publisher of DC Comics, wrote following his death. “His career is truly a testament to what one can achieve in life when singularly focused on what one loves to do.”  Died May 6

3. Lily Renée (b. 1921)
Born Lily Renée Willheim, Renée grew up in Vienna, Austria, during the 1930s. Her family was Jewish, and so when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 she was part of the Kindertransport, an organized effort to move more than 10,000 Jewish children from continental Europe to the United Kingdom in the months leading up to the Second World War. She worked in England as a nursing assistant (where her duties included carrying infants to bomb shelters when air raid sirens went off) until her parents were able to emigrate to the United States and bring her there in 1940.

As a young woman in a new land, she felt a duty to help her struggling family pay the bills; one of her jobs involved modeling for a fashion illustrator (a plaster cast of her head was used to make mannequins for retailer Peck & Peck). In 1942, her mother spotted a want ad that said Fiction House was looking for cartoonists and so she encouraged her artistic daughter to apply. The publisher agreed to give her a two-week trial after seeing her samples, and the job stuck.

It wasn’t an easy place for a woman to work; as she told comic historian Jim Amash in an interview for a 2009 issue of Alter Ego, her early days on the job mainly consisted of “erasing other people’s pages, drawing the backgrounds, and being totally miserable because the men thought of nothing but sex, and they were always making innuendos, and they just stared at me, which made me very uncomfortable.”

But she stayed with it, and soon she was given work on a series about a female pilot named Jane Martin, a feature that no one else wanted and so she took it upon herself to give it a makeover. Soon enough, she was drawing “Señorita Rio,” a feature that had first been drawn by Nick Viscardi but was turned over to her and became her best-known work. She signed much of her work “L. Renée,” which led to fans assuming she was a man; soldiers would write in to “Mr. Renée” requesting pinup drawings of Señorita Rio.

“Ms. Renée added an elegance, charm and anatomical fluidity that eluded many of those workmanlike house artists,” Amash told the New York Times. “As her pictorial approach to human anatomy improved with experience, so did a glamorous sheen that helped refine the ‘good girl’ style of the time period with more natural, feminine women.”

Renée left Fiction House by the end of the 1940s and began drawing with her first husband, artist Eric Peters, working on comics starring Abbott and Costello, romance books, and even a comic starring Borden’s corporate mascot Elsie the Cow. She eventually moved on to other professions, working in textile design and writing and illustrating children’s books. Her comics career was nearly forgotten until her granddaughter reached out to artist and comic historian Trina Robbins in 2006 to let her know that her grandmother was alive and happy to talk about her time making comics. Robbins interviewed Renée for The Comics Journal in 2006 and in 2007, when Renée visited Comic-Con International for the first time, she was nominated by Friends of Lulu to its Hall of Fame — an honor she would live to receive before dying at age 101. Died August 24

4. Aline Kominsky-Crumb (b. 1948)
Born Aline Goldsmith in 1948, Kominsky-Crumb grew up on Long Island and studied art at the Cooper Union in New York City. She married Carl Kominsky in 1968 and moved with him to Tucson, Ariz., where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona in 1971. It was also in Arizona where she met underground comics artists Spain Rodriguez and Kim Dietch, and she began drawing her own comics.

Her marriage was short-lived and, keeping her ex-husband’s name, she decided to move to San Francisco, arriving in 1971 just as Trina Robbins and others were forming the Wimmen’s Comix collective. Her first comics story, “Goldie: A Neurotic Woman,” was included in Wimmen’s Comix #1. It was around this time she met Diane Noomin (see entry below). The two eventually broke with the Wimmen’s Comix collective and created their own title, Twisted Sisters, published by Last Gasp in 1976. In 1991, they put together an anthology of comics by women titled Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art; in 1994, Kitchen Sink Press published a four-issue Twisted Sisters miniseries that was collected the following year as Twisted Sisters, Vol. 2: Drawing the Line.

Kominsky-Crumb met underground cartoonist Robert Crumb in 1972, and the two married in 1978. They began collaborating on comics in 1973, publishing them as Dirty Laundry. Her solo work includes The Bunch’s Power Pak Comics, published by Kitchen Sink from 1979 to 1981, and Need More Love, a graphic memoir published by MQ Publications in 2007.

Named by the website Comics Alliance in 2016 as one of 12 female cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition, Kominsky-Crumb’s drawing style deliberately emphasized the grotesque and awkward, squeezing humor from what might be described today as “deep cringe” moments. “Aline’s work really stood out when I first saw her in early issues of Wimmen’s Comix,” said cartoonist Roberta Gregory, a Wimmins’ Comix alumna who became the first woman to self-publish her own work and created the long-running Bitchy Bitch series. “It was exuberant, ‘primitive’ (in the good sense) and breaking every art and storytelling rule in the world. It was so inspiring: If you had a story to tell, go ahead and tell it with all ya got!” Died November 29

5. Tim Sale (b. 1956)
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a lot of American comic artists responded to market demands for bigger action, bigger explosions, bigger everything, Tim Sale stood out by going a different way. “Tim was much more interested in capturing the small moments,” said Jeph Loeb, Sale’s longtime writing partner. “When people traditionally think about comics, it is the biff-bam-boom. He could draw the biff-bam-boom, but it was the quiet moments that made it extraordinary.”

A graduate of New York City’s School of Visual Arts (where he studied under veteran comic artist John Buscema), Sale began his career as an artist in the early 1980s, illustrating the independent comic MythAdventures. Other independent work of his from this time includes the series Thieves’ World, Billi 9, Jonny Quest, and Matt Wagner’s Grendel.

Many of Sale’s most notable works were collaborations with Loeb, a partnership that began in 1991 just as both men were getting their foot in the door at DC. In 1996, they released the widely acclaimed The Long Halloween, a murder mystery set during the early days of Batman’s career when mobsters and gang wars were arguably a greater threat to the city than its more colorful denizens. Loeb and Sale followed that up with Superman for All Seasons, a 1998 mini-series that explored Clark Kent’s evolution from farmboy to superhero. Clearly enjoying the chance to explore the backgrounds of our iconic heroes, the duo would go on to create a string of well-regarded limited series for Marvel (Daredevil: Yellow, Spider-Man: Blue, Hulk: Gray, Captain America: White) that focused on early or pivotal years in the careers of some of their most famous heroes.

Loeb and Sale’s partnership even extended beyond the printed page; when Loeb was an executive producer of Heroes, the 2006 NBC television series about ordinary people discovering their super powers, Sale’s art frequently appeared on the series posing as the work of a man whose paintings could depict visions of the future.

“Tim Sale was an amazing artist, draftsman and storyteller,” said fellow artist and DC publisher Jim Lee in one of the many tributes that appeared after Sale’s death. “Beyond the taut chiaroscuro style which became his trademark, Tim clearly put a premium on storytelling, clarity and pacing — cherishing emotion above all. His stories were beautifully visceral, nuanced and evinced deep humanity. Tim simply had no use for surface banality.” Died June 16

6. Sid Jacobson (b. 1929)
Good artists find their niche; great artists flourish wherever they land. After graduating with a journalism degree from New York University, Jacobson’s first jobs out of school were writing copy for the New York City tabloid The Compass and the horse racing paper The Morning Telegraph. His career went in a different direction in 1952 when, after his sister started dating a chap at Harvey Comics, Jacobson wrangled himself a job there — and ended up running the editorial department for 30 years.

In the early 1950s, this meant he was writing and editing books from a wide variety of genres: horror, crime, romance, and many examples of Harvey’s comic-strip adaptations (including comic-book versions of Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon). As time went on and Harvey started to focus on its popular line-up of kiddie humor stars (Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Dot, and Hot Stuff, among others), Jacobson adroitly switched gears and worked with a stable of artists and writers to keep those stories coming. “It was called Harvey Comics, but he pretty much ran the company,” said Angelo DeCesare, a writer and artist who got his start at the company in 1978. “Everything flowed through him.”

After Harvey Comics folded and Jacobson completed a stint at Marvel as an executive editor (where he helped create the short-lived children’s imprint Star Comics, as well as write comic adaptations for movies like Labyrinth and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), Jacobson returned to Harvey Comics in the early 1990s, where among other tasks he created a line of Hanna-Barbera comics with original stories based on the studio’s cartoon characters. But the next chapter in his life would take him places about as far from the Saturday morning cartoons as you can get.

In 2006, Jacobson and his old Harvey colleague Ernie Colón teamed up to create The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, a graphic novel version of the 9/11 Commission Report. They followed that up in 2008 with After 9/11: America’s War on Terror, a look at the American response to those attacks, and 2017’s The Torture Report: A Graphic Adaptation, which presented the findings of a Senate investigation into the torture of terrorist suspects. Other collaborations saw Jacobson and Colón publish biographies of Che Guevara, Anne Frank, and Vlad the Impaler. Not exactly dollar sign-shaped swimming pool territory, to be sure, but Jacobson believed in the power of comics to help people understand their world. “We thought it was incredibly important to make this available in a more understandable package,” he said in 2006 while discussing The 9/11 Report. “Just the fact that so little has been done yet—to me, to both of us, it shows that not enough people have understood what was said.” Died July 23

7. Justin Green (b. 1945)
Justin Green’s career answers the age-old question: can a man find success by sharing with the world his thoughts about the “pecker rays” that emanate from his phallus fingers and mark him as one of Satan’s agents when they intersect with a church? The answer, it seems, is yes.

Born in Boston and raised in Chicago to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Green attended Catholic school in his youth but in 1958 he rejected the faith in which he was raised. He was studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1960s when he he discovered the work of Robert Crumb and turned to cartooning, attracted to what he called Crumb’s “harsh drawing stuffed into crookedly drawn panels.” By 1968, he felt a “call to arms” to move to San Francisco, where the underground comix scene was blossoming amid the city’s counterculture movement; his short comics pieces appeared in various titles and anthologies including Art Spiegelman’s and Bill Griffith’s anthologies Arcade and Young Lust.

In 1972, Green published Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, a solo comic book that was a searingly graphic study of his personal torment being raised as a Catholic. Through his alter ego, Green explored the traumas of his youth rooted in his repressive schooling by “fascistic” nuns and behaviors that would later be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Never before had anyone expressed such candid sacrilegious and psychosexual thoughts in comics, and many comic creators credit Green for inspiring their own confessional comics. “Justin Green, in many ways, is the quintessential ‘invisible cartoonist,'” Joe Matt (Peepshow, The Poor Bastard) told The Comics Journal. “His influence is vast and all-pervasive, especially when it comes to confessional, no-holds-barred autobiographical comics.”

Aside from Binky Brown, Green was a master sign artist, combining his passions for comics and sign art in 1986’s “Justin Green’s Sign Game,” a strip he drew for two decades for the monthly industry magazine Signs of the Times. He followed that up in 1992 with “Musical Legends” for the Tower Records chain’s Pulse! magazine (tackling, among other subjects over the decade or so he drew the strip, the day that Nat King Cole was attacked at a concert and composer Philip Glass’s time as a taxi driver); both would be collected in volumes published by Last Gasp, the same outfit that published Binky Brown.

“Yes, Robert Crumb also crafted brutally honest autobiographical stories in the early ’70s in which he drew himself as a character, but despite his honesty Crumb’s comics were essentially comical parodies on his personal obsessions,” writes M. Steven Fox at comixjoint.com. “Crumb himself admits that Green was ‘the FIRST, absolutely the FIRST EVER cartoonist to draw highly personal autobiographical comics.’ Because Binky Brown was so obviously founded on the complex life of a real person, it opened the comic floodgates to realistic protagonists who were deeply flawed or morally conflicted, yet still likable to the reader. Binky Brown single-handedly launched an unprecedented comic-book movement that took root immediately, spread quickly, and evolved into a major category of modern comic art.” Died April 23

8. Paul Coker Jr. (b. 1929)
It’s been a tough decade for MAD fans who have had to say goodbye to many members of the magazine’s “usual gang of idiots.” This past year saw Paul Coker join Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, and so many others in that place where MAD writers and artists go after their time in this reality has passed (possibly entering that other place to the sound of a patented Don Martin sound effect).

Born and raised in Kansas, Coker started his career designing greeting cards for Hallmark. His work first appeared in MAD in 1961 and he was one of the magazine’s mainstays right up until 2018. Coker was easily recognizable by his loose, scratchy drawing style, and his art graced several regular features in the magazine such as “Horrifying Clichés” (which mocked overused phrases by illustrating them with monsters) and “Only a Republican/Democrat Could Possibly Believe…”, as well as several of the magazine’s film and TV parodies including Casper, Twister, Star Trek V, Frasier, and Sabrina: The Teenage Witch. When he wasn’t working on MAD assignments, his freelance work appeared in other publications including Esquire, Look, Good Housekeeping, and Playboy.

And then there was Rankin/Bass. Coker’s work with the animation studio began in 1967 with an uncredited involvement in the animated theatrical film The Wacky World of Mother Goose. He would go on to contribute as either a character designer or production designer for many of the studio’s productions, especially its holiday-themed TV specials: 1969’s Frosty the Snowman, 1974’s The Year Without a Santa Claus, 1977’s The Easter Bunny is Coming to Town, and many others. Among the many beloved characters developed under Coker’s supervision are Kris Kringle (voiced by Mickey Rooney), Keenan Wynn’s Winter Warlock, Paul Frees’ Burgermeister Meisterburger, and the spatting seasonal siblings known as Snow Miser (Dick Shawn) and Heat Miser (George S. Irving). His final onscreen work was done for the pilot of the 2002 Cartoon Network series Whatever Happened to… Robot Jones?

In 2015, Coker received the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cartoonists Society. “Paul was capable of whimsical but beautiful artwork that always had a bit of subversion to it,” John Ficarra, a former Mad editor, told the New York Times. “He did phenomenal pen-and-ink work, and as he grew older he learned to simplify his work without losing its sparkle and charm.” Died July 23

9. Kevin O’Neill (b. 1953)
When DC Comics began scouting for British artists in the early 1980s, it’s no surprise that London’s Kevin O’Neill was among those who would become part of “the British Invasion” of American comics at that time. What was surprising was the reception he received. When the censorious Comics Code Authority reviewed the pages for a 12-page Tales of the Green Lantern Corps story drawn by O’Neill, officials at the CCA rejected it outright. Though the aliens he depicted were contorted and grotesque, there wasn’t any one particular image in the story they objected to; reportedly, it was O’Neill’s entire style they found offensive. DC would later print the story in another book without the CCA’s stamp of approval, but the experience left an impression on O’Neill. “I’d heard all these stories about it’s just little old ladies in a room reviewing pages and stamping the back,” he told the website Comic Book Resources in 2014. “It’s a really regressive way of producing comics.”

It seems fitting that O’Neill would be the one putting noses out of joint among the gatekeepers; as his longtime colleague Alan Moore (who scripted that Green Lantern Corps story) put it in a touching eulogy, “Nobody drew like Kevin O’Neill… When I was putting together my formative ideas for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the lead-out groove of the last century, I quickly realised that nobody save Kevin was qualified to present such a dizzying range of characters, periods, situations and styles with the vitality and ingenuity that the narrative — a ridiculous mash-up of all human fiction since classical antiquity — seemed to demand. Thus began what I think was perhaps the longest, happiest and most productive partnership of either of our careers.”

Along with co-creating The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Moore, O’Neill also partnered with writer Pat Mills to create Ro-Busters, A.B.C. Warriors, Nemesis the Warlock, Metalzoic and Marshal Law. Wrote the editors at 2000 AD: “Words like ‘unique’ and ‘genius’ are not uncommon in the pantheon of 2000 AD creators, but no-one deserves them more than O’Neill, whose innovative, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, inventive, visionary, and provocative work still has the ability to shock and dazzle, even decades after its first publication.”

Born into a working-class family in southeast London, O’Neill entered the British comic industry in 1969 when he was hired as an office assistant for Buster, a humor publication for children. He moved on to coloring comic reprints and creating his own fanzine, but his career really took off when he began working as an artist and editor on the then-new comics anthology 2000 AD, which premiered in 1977. “As part of the editorial team behind launching 2000 AD,” writes Popverse’s Graeme McMillan, “O’Neill managed to sneak creator credits into each of the stories — a first for British comics, which had previously kept the identity of its writers and artists as secret as possible, to the point of painting out signatures on pages if they were caught before the pages went to press. O’Neill’s move… meant that fans would finally know who was responsible for their favorite characters and stories, allowing creators to build their own audiences and fanbases.” Died November 3

10. Kazuo Takahashi (b. 1961)
Tokyo’s Kazuo Takahashi had his first brush with fame in 1981, when his one-shot manga Ing! Love Ball, submitted under the pen name Hajime Miyabi, won the Shogakukan New Comic Award and was published in Weekly Shōnen Sunday later that year. In a 2002 interview, he would call much of his early manga work (including titles like Fighting Hawk and Tennenshoku Danji Buray) a “total flop,” but the same could not be said for the series that would literally set world records.

In 1996, Takahashi launched Yu-Gi-Oh! under the pen name “Kazuki Takahashi” in Weekly Shōnen Jump, where it was serialized until 2004. The story of a spiky-haired teenager named Yugi who receives an ancient puzzle that awakens in him the alter ego of an Egyptian pharaoh, Yu-Gi-Oh! sold more than 40 million copies in Japan and spawned a massive media franchise encompassing several long-running anime series, films, novels, video games, toys, and a trading card game developed by Konami that sold more than 25 billion cards between 1999 and 2011 — earning it the Guinness World Record for the best-selling trading card game in history. The latest Yu-Gi-Oh! game, Master Duel, was released earlier this year on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation, and at one point it was pulling in over 200,000 concurrent players just on Steam alone.

Following the end of the Yu-Gi-Oh! saga in the comics, Takahashi continued to oversee the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise while launching new manga series (like Drump and The Comiq) in Weekly Shōnen Jump; he received an Inkpot Award from Comic-Con International in 2015 for his contributions to comics and his impact on millions of childhoods around the world.

On July 6, Takahashi was found dead in the water 300 meters off the shore of Okinawa by Japanese Coast Guard officers responding to a civilian report from a passing boat. He was found wearing snorkeling gear, and his cause of death was determined to be drowning. The American military newspaper Stars and Stripes later reported that Takahashi died on the afternoon of July 4 while assisting in the rescue of three people, including an 11-year-old girl and her mother, who were caught in a rip current. A U.S. Army officer hailed him as a hero who “died trying to save someone else.” Died July 4

11. Tom Palmer (b. 1941)
As Palmer once recounted, his wasn’t the most auspicious entry into the world of comics. “I walk in the door and pencil an issue of Doctor Strange — first job I ever penciled. At the time, I thought I did a good job, but really it was a stinker. It wasn’t up to par. I went back two weeks later to get the next issue, and they said, ‘No, we’re getting someone else to pencil it; would you like to ink it?’ I said ‘Sure!’ I’d never inked anything before! But to this day, if someone asks, ‘Can you handle this new assignment?’ I’ll say ‘Sure!’ I may not know how to tackle that specific assignment today, but by tomorrow or next week I will.”

That first assignment took place in 1968, and it’s fair to say he eventually got the hang of it. Working with iconic artists like the Gene Colan and Neal Adams on a variety of Marvel titles, Palmer is perhaps best known for his long inking stints on such titles as X-Men, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, Moon Knight, Tomb of Dracula, and The Avengers, the latter a title he inked for an almost uninterrupted run from issue #255 (1985) to the book’s final issue (#402) in 1996.

Palmer studied art under painter Frank Reilly in the mid-1960s while also working freelance in an advertising studio. He was a fan of photo-realistic painters like Norman Rockwell and James Bama, but he was also a big fan of comics. By coincidence, former EC artist Jack Kamen worked in the same studio and took Palmer under his wing but initially discouraged him from pursuing a career in comics. When Reilly died in 1967, Kamen agreed to help Palmer break into comics by introducing him to Wallace Wood, who passed his name on to others he knew in the business… and the rest is history.

Palmer continued as a freelance inker until he died, with a notable stint as the inker for John Romita Jr. on Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl titles, a gig that led to Palmer seeing his name on the big screen during animated sequences in the Kick-Ass films. While that might not have netted him an Oscar, among the hardware he collected over the course of his career was an Alley Award, a Comic Fan Art Award, and an Inkwell Award, as well as 2014’s Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame Award. “Yet another comic legend has left us,” wrote Marvel editor-in-chief C. B. Cebulski in one of many tributes to Palmer. “Aside from being an incredible inker and painter, Tom was a true gentleman. He was like Obi-Wan to so many young editors, freely sharing his experiences and wisdom with us all. Rest in peace, Tom.” Died August 18

12. Tony Tallarico (b. 1933)
A Brooklyn boy, Tallarico attended New York City’s School of Industrial Art, the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and the School of Visual Arts before getting his start in comics in 1953, working as a penciler and inker for companies like Charlton (Hot Rods and Racing Cars, Black Fury, Space Adventures), Fawcett (Tex Ritter Western), Trojan (Crime Smashers, Attack!) and the David C. Cook Publishing Company (Sunday Pix). But it was arguably during the following decade when he made his mark in the business.

After starting the 1960s with a handful of books for Gilberton’s Classics Illustrated (H.G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods) and World Around Us (Vikings, Undersea Adventures) titles, Tallarico settled in to become a prolific freelancer at both Charlton and Dell, where he was a reliable presence in their licensed comics (Bozo the Clown, The Beverly Hillbillies, Sinbad Jr. and F-Troop, among others) and Dell’s short-lived line-up of monsters-turned-superhero books (Dracula, Frankenstein, Werewolf). It was also around this time he did the art for 1966’s The Great Society Comic Book, a satirical comic that cast Lyndon Johnson and other 1960s political figures as superheroes, and its follow-up Bob-Man and Teddy, starring Bobby and Ted Kennedy (with both books written by D. J. Arneson).

Then there was Lobo. Created by Arneson, penciler Bill Fraccio and Tallarico on inks, Lobo was one of the many Western heroes who rode the range and helped the helpless while being falsely accused of a crime himself — but with one crucial difference separating him from the other lone rangers of the world. Debuting in Dell’s Lobo #1 (cover date December 1965), his title only lasted two issues, but that was enough for him to make history as the first Black character to headline his own comic book. For his part in creating Lobo, Tallarico received the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention’s Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006.

Later, Tallarico teamed up again with Fraccio to contribute to Warren’s horror magazines (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella) before leaving comics altogether in 1973. From then on, he focused on illustrating children’s books for a variety of publishers, educational books about drawing, and puzzle and game books.

Tallarico was also a member of the Berndt Toast Gang (a.k.a. the Long Island chapter of the National Cartoonists Society), which had this to say upon news of his death: “The wonderful Tony Tallarico passed away late last night. Tony had a long and prolific career working in comics and children’s books. A consummate professional, Tony was always in demand and worked up until recently. He was very proud to have illustrated the first comic book with an African-American hero Lobo. Such a kind and generous soul, the Berndt Toast Gang is privileged to have had Tony as an esteemed member.” Died January 6

13. Alan Grant (b. 1949)
“I became a writer by default because I couldn’t draw,” said Alan Grant when asked to describe himself in 2008. “Rather than being a successful writer, I’m a failed artist.” If that’s the case, then we should all hope for the chance to that kind of a failure.

Born in Bristol, England, and raised in Scotland, Grant entered the comics industry in 1967 as an editor for the UK’s D.C. Thomson, where he met comic writers John Wagner and Pat Mills. He moved to London in 1970 to work for rival publisher IPC as a writer and editor on their romance magazines, and after he was invited to write a strip for the short-lived Starlord editor Kelvin Gosnell offered him an editorial position on 2000 AD. Grant quit his position in 1980 and his robotic alter ego, AALN-1, was given a heroic death; when another job fell through, Wagner — who lived with Grant in London at the time — asked him if he could help with his growing workload.

The rest, as they say, is history… but what a history. Grant spent much of the ’80s working on on other people’s stories, changing and adding dialogue where needed, while also working with Wagner under the pseudonym T.B. Grover on strips like Robo-Hunter and Strontium Dog. But their main focus was Judge Dredd, the strip that would become the most popular feature in 2000 AD (if not all of British comics), and when American publishers looked across the pond for new talent it was almost a given that Wagner and Grant would be a part of that decade’s British invasion. Starting with the 12-issue mini-series The Outcasts for DC, the pair moved on to Detective Comics, where they teamed up with artist Norm Breyfogle to create such memorable characters as the Ventriloquist, the Ratcatcher, and Anarky, the latter an outgrowth of Grant’s evolving political beliefs. (And of course there was 1991’s Judgement on Gotham, the perhaps inevitable Batman/Judge Dredd crossover.)

Grant started the ’90s with a bang, taking a nearly-forgotten Omega Men supporting character named Lobo and (with co-plotter Keith Giffen and artist Simon Bisley, another Brit) transforming him into one the biggest stars in the DC stable at the time. Other stints saw him working on L.E.G.I.O.N. (a spinoff of Legion of Super-Heroes), a revival of Jack Kirby’s Demon character, and the first issues of a new monthly Batman series titled Shadow of the Bat. By the end of the decade, Grant had written for virtually every American publisher of comic books, with other highlights including The Bogie Man, two spinoff Anarky series, many more Judge Dredd stories, and Wasted, a comics anthology featuring drug-themed humor and anarchic cartoon action stories written mostly by Grant and illustrated by artists from the UK mainstream and underground art scene. His last work for 2000 AD was a Judge Anderson story in 2018 and a war story in the Battle Special in 2020.

“For the generations who grew up reading Alan’s work for 2000 AD, who were touched by the pathos and compassion of his characters, who felt the joy of their victories and the sting of their deaths, Alan’s passing is a painful gut punch,” wrote the editors of 2000 AD in tribute. “His impact on comics and standing in the industry simply cannot be understated. But he was more than just a giant in his field – he was a fascinating man whose sharp wit and boundless warmth touched all those who met him. One cannot separate 2000 AD from Alan Grant, his humour, humanity, and intelligence made it what it is, and his talent was integral to its success.” Died July 20

14. Danny Bulanadi (b. 1946)
The cold and rocky North Atlantic outpost known as Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s easternmost province, is about as far as you can get from the warmer islands of the Philippines where Danny Bulanadi was born and raised. But the Manila-born artist had already made the massive trek from his home country to the United States; what was a few more miles (or, once he crossed the U.S./Canadian border, kilometres)?

In 1979, Bulanadi collaborated with the father-and-son team of Geoff and Scott Stirling to create a new kind of superhero for the Newfoundland Herald, a weekly news and entertainment magazine owned by the elder Stirling. “The result,” writes Canadian comics historian Brian Campbell, “was as much time-travelling psychedelic cosmic-guru as it was superhero: Captain Newfoundland (who also used the aliases Captain Atlantis, Odin and Samadhi throughout the series).” Before he finished the assignment, Bulanadi would create a few more original characters for the strip including Captain Canada, Golden Dove and the villainous Black Star. Heavily infused with the Stirlings’ New Age beliefs, the strip brought a hefty dose of both superheroes and consciousness-raising mysticism to a part of the world that was light on both — but it wouldn’t be the last time Bulanadi made his mark on this wide of the world.

Like many other Filipino kids, Bulanadi grew up with American comic books. After studying art at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, he was hired by fellow comic artist Tony DeZuñiga as his assistant, and it was through his guidance and the attention of DC Comics editor Joe Orlando (who was scouting Filipino talent at the time) that Bulanadi joined other artists from his country in travelling to America for work. Bulanadi landed at DC in the late 1970s providing pencils and inks for the company’s war and horror titles; by 1980, he moved over to Marvel as the inker for Micronauts alongside artists Pat Broderick, Gil Kane, and Jackson Guice.

He moved on to become the regular inker on Daredevil from issues #198-213, a run that included the first Marvel work of artist David Mazzucchelli. Later, Bulanadi found success on Marvel’s licensed books when he inked Steve Ditko on The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones, in addition to his work on G.I. Joe: Special Missions and Transformers (Bulanadi would have the rare distinction of having worked on both the Transformers comic and the original Transformers animated series, for which he drew storyboards in Season 3). By 1987, Bulanadi teamed up with writer Mark Gruenwald and artist Paul Ryan on D.P.7., one of Marvel’s original New Universe titles. The creative team stayed together for 1989’s Quasar while Bulanadi worked with Gruenwald and an assortment of other artists on Captain America between 1990-95. That was just a warm-up, though, for Bulanadi’s multi-year run with Paul Ryan on Fantastic Four, missing only a single issue between 1991’s #356 and 1996’s #411.

In his later years, Bulanadi illustrated a comic book adaptation of the Bible for Kingstone Comics and No Greater Joy Ministries while also making appearances at conventions and exploring his other artistic passion: performing Filipino love songs under the stage name Danny Harana. Died November 3

15. Carlos Pacheco (b. 1961)
In April 2022, Pacheco announced he was taking a break from comics to focus on his health. He said on social media at the time, “As some of you probably know, I suffered a paralysis of my right leg this past September. Since then, I’ve been visiting neurologists trying to know what the heck was happening. After receiving the worst diagnosis possible, they finally have discovered that the root of that is a compression of the nerves that go from the L5 to the legs and a little and hard to see fracture in that vertebra, so I will go to a hard dorsal spine surgery next sunday morning. The doctors say that I will need to suffer a rehab that will last between 8 and 12 months….+…That was the reason why I couldn’t finish my commitment with Fantastic Four and now I’ll be out of order during all this year after the surgery. DON’T FORGET ME, PLEASE!!!! I’LL BE BACK!! (Hope so).”

In September, the Spanish artist updated his fans by saying he had been diagnosed with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. “It is what it is, and it is what needs to be dealt with,” he said. “It’s true that this is an unexpected turn of events in my life, but this doesn’t make me feel less fortunate to have lived the life I have lived, for the experiences I’ve had, the achievements I’ve made, and the people I’ve been fortunate to cross paths with.”

Pacheco’s career in comics began in Spanish-language editions of Marvel books published under the Cómics Forum imprint at Planeta De Agostini; he illustrated Dark Guard in 1993, the first Marvel series in which he was sole penciler. He would go on to work on The Flash over at DC, eventually leading to interior art and cover gigs on Avengers Forever, Inhumans, Excalibur, Fantastic Four, JLA/JSA: Virtue and Vice and Superman/Batman. He also lent his pencils to crossover events at both Marvel and DC, including 2009’s Final Crisis and 2013’s Age of Ultron. On Sept. 28, Pacheco tweeted what he called “My LAST piece”: a cover for Marvel’s Damage Control #2 showing a shrunken Ant-Man and Wasp running across a burrito away from the hungry mouth of another character. Died November 9

16. Kim Jung Gi (b. 1975)
Over the course of his career, Kim created such comics as Tiger the Long Tail (with writer Seung-Jin Park) and Spy Games (with Jean-David Morvan), drew covers for various American comic titles (Civil War II, Wonder Woman, The Flash, The Walking Dead), and contributed artwork to the video game League of Legends. But what connected fans with Kim most deeply were his live sessions in which he would quickly create large and fascinatingly intricate drawings in front of crowds at conventions and art shows. To the astonishment of his audiences, Kim drew from his imagination without any reference material, typically creating a drawing with some components in mind but improvising large parts. Kim talked to his audiences as he worked, joking as well as illuminating what he was working on and how he did it.

“I’ve always drawn from memory,” he said in a 2018 interview, “whether it was something I heard from people around me, or the animals I’ve seen from TV, or the scenes I saw from a movie. My drawings were always based on the things I saw or the things I heard, and it was only later that I found out that my method was different from other artists. Looking back, all the things I did for fun was actually a great training for me.”

Born in Goyang, a city near Seoul, Kim studied fine arts for three years and spent two years in the South Korean army as part of that country’s compulsory military service (he credited the latter experience for helping him memorize an array of military weapons and vehicles). His first work, “Funny Funny,” was published in Japan’s Weekly Young Jump, and he went on to teach comics at Korean universities and private schools (and through his YouTube channel) while developing a fan following for his sketchbook art, much of which was collected in several volumes from 2007 to 2022.

Kim was in Paris on his way to the New York Comic Con when he experienced chest pains on the way to the airport; he died at hospital after suffering a heart attack at age 47. The organizers of the New York convention were among the many who paid tribute to Kim online after his death: “We’re so sad to hear of Kim Jung Gi’s passing. He was a pioneering visual artist. You couldn’t watch him draw without being in complete wonderment. More inspiring was his appreciation & kindness towards his fans & his peers. Our hearts are with his friends & family.” Died October 3

17. Victor “Vic” Carrabotta (b. 1929)
“I am one of the old-timers,” wrote Vic Carrabotta, then 91, for the Hero Initiative. “My work in the comic industry goes back to the days of Atlas and the early days of Marvel. I had a long, satisfying, and successful career in the comic world, penciling and inking. My reputation is signified in my nickname among my fellow comic artists—Quick Vic… In addition to being quick, my work expressed the emotion of the characters and shows inventive designs of futuristic cars, buildings, and designs. My hand is still steady and my imagination fertile—I am working on a graphic novel based on the book The Last Eleven Days of Earl Durand by Jerred Metz.” True to his word, he finished that project and saw it published shortly before his death at age 93.

Born in the Bronx, Carrabotta attended the High School of Music and Art in Brooklyn and Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. He served in the United States Marine Corps from 1948 to 1951, and then worked in construction before he got his first art jobs through Famous Studios and Will Eisner. Attempting to break into comics, Carrabotta found himself turned away by editors at several publishing houses, including Stan Lee, who was then editor-in-chief of Atlas Comics. In a 2006 interview, Carrabotta credited Jack Kirby for his big break, describing how Kirby turned him down for studio work but then, upon seeing Carrabotta’s pregnant wife in the lobby as he was seeing Carrobotta out, gave the struggling artist a break.

“Connie stands up,” Carrabotta said, “and Jack does a double-take up and down because she’s pregnant…. He said, ‘Sit here a minute, I need to go back to my office.’ He writes a note and seals it, and tells me to go back to Stan with the note. … [Upon doing so,] Stan said, ‘Jack says you’re a good artist.’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Would you like to see my samples?’ He says, ‘No, that’s OK. Jack says you’re a good artist. I’ll tell you what,’ and he throws this script across the desk. He says, ‘I want this back in a week.'”

That five-page story, “The House on the Hill” in 1952’s Astonishing #13, led to a stream of regular work for Carrabotta, first in Atlas horror anthologies like Adventures into Terror, Journey into Mystery, and Strange Tales, and then — after the introduction of the Comics Code in 1954 — science-fiction/fantasy and suspense stories for books like Journey into Unknown Worlds, Marvel Tales, Mystic, and Uncanny Tales. While also freelancing for Fiction House and Lev Gleason, he would soon branch out to Atlas’s war titles (Battle, Battle Action, Battlefront, and just plain War Comics), Westerns (Apache Kid, Kid Colt: Outlaw, The Outlaw Kid), the jungle queen title Jann of the Jungle, and the adventure anthology Rugged Action.

Along with a number of other artists, Carrabotta left the comics business in 1958 when Atlas laid off most of its staff (though he did return to pencil a single story issue during Marvel’s Silver Age that appeared in 1967’s The Two-Gun Kid #86). Moving into advertising for the next four decades of his career, he became an art director at the Atlanta office of the Manhattan advertising agency BBDO, and later freelanced as a storyboard and conceptual artist for several ad agencies, working on accounts for Advil, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Jell-O, and Kenner Toys. During his retirement years, he was a regular fixture at comic book conventions throught the American South — while also returning to the comics that he loved. Died November 22

18. Oliver Frey (b. 1948)
A curtain opens. We hear the sound of a running projector. And after the words “June 1938” flicker across the screen, we see a hand opening an issue of Action Comics as a child’s voice reads the text: “In the decade of the 1930s, even the great city of Metropolis was not spared the ravages of the worldwide depression…”

Then, as John Williams warms up his orchestra, we zoom in on a comic image of the Daily Planet building, which slowly fades into a real-life version of the same building before the camera looks up, up in the sky… “My rough for the cover was accepted on the spot and used as it was in the pre-title sequence, along with the finished version of the strip,” recalled Frey, the artist commissioned to create that comic as a prop for the opening sequence of the 1978 film Superman. “It was thrilling to go to the Empire [Leicester Square] the day after the premiere in 1978 and see my work flash up on that vast, luminous screen. Just for about 15 seconds—and that was that.”

Born in Zurich, Frey enrolled in the American Famous Artists School correspondence course during his high school years and studied at the London Film School. During this time, he supported himself with freelance work, including illustrating War Picture Library comic books. When he found it difficult to break into the British film industry, he continued to freelance for British comic publishers, establishing himself as an illustrator on strips for IPC Comics’ Look & Learn and its spin-off Speed & Power while also doing covers for Souvenir Press novels, video inlay jackets, and illustrations for children’s book publishers. Throughout the late 1970s and ’80s, Fey continued to work in comics by drawing the Dan Dare strip while also working under the pen name Zack as a prolific creator and publisher of gay erotic art in magazines like HIM and Man-to-Man (Russell T. Davies, writer of the British TV series Queer as Folk, praised Frey’s serial “The Street” as an important influence on his groundbreaking drama).

Frey (together with his brother and his partner) was also one of the founders of the computer magazine CRASH in 1983, which quickly seized the imaginations of UK gamers, thanks in no small part to his stunning cover illustrations. He went on to illustrate for CRASH’s sister magazines Zzap!64, Amtix, and The Games Machine, with his comic strip “Terminal Man” (written by Kelvin Gosnell), which was serialized in both CRASH and Zzap!64 in 1984, published as a complete story in 1988.

“Since first hearing the news of his passing, I’ve been trying to think of a comparable talent – someone else who produced so much in a single field, so consistently, so influentially,” wrote Eurogamer’s Dan Whitehead. “Marvel Comics legend Jack Kirby is one comparison… Drew Struzan is another, the famous movie poster artist whose painstakingly photoreal depictions of Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones and others was the default aesthetic of the 1980s Hollywood blockbuster. Both had signature styles, instantly recognisable, that defined their genres. It’s a testament to Frey’s commitment and talent that such comparisons even make sense. But he wasn’t some distant media titan, he was one of our own, someone who saw not only the business potential in British gaming from the very start, but was endlessly, exuberantly inspired by the community and medium, and poured that passion into his work.” Died August 21

19. Diane Noomin (b. 1947)
Diane Noomin did not set out to start a career as a cartoonist when she arrived in San Francisco from New York in the early 1970s. She had just come out of a short and unhappy marriage — “Noomin” was a spelling variation on her married name — and she was making sculptures and drawings when she met Aline Kominsky at a party. After sharing her notebook with Kominsky, she found herself dragged to a meeting of female artists who were putting together the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix, a place that women could call their own in the deeply male underground genre.

Wimmen’s Comix would go on to be the longest-running female underground comic, publishing 17 issues from 1972 to 1992; Noomin’s first story, “Home Agin,” appeared in Wimmen’s Comix #2 (1973), and her work appeared in several subsequent issues. Soon, though, internal conflict within the collective led to Noomin and Aline Kominsky leaving Wimmen’s Comix in 1975. (Noomin would return to Wimmen’s Comix in 1984 and contributed several stories, as well as the cover for 1987’s issue #11, the fashion issue, before the collective folded.) The pair put together a one-shot issue of Twisted Sisters in 1976, which featured their own humorous and self-deprecating stories.

One of those Twisted Sisters stories starred Noomin’s DiDi Glitz, a hard-drinking, leopard-print-loving character who both satirized 20th-century notions of femininity and channeled Noomin’s own experiences. (In the image above, taken in 1980, Noomin is seen dressed up as DiDi for Halloween, one of many Halloweens she cosplayed as her most famous creation.) An early story saw DiDi rob a bank and get away with it; later outings had her go to a women’s camp for the inorgasmic, become a private eye, and marry a gay hypochondriac. “At first glance, DiDi Glitz’s life is nothing short of fabulous: a high percentage of ‘fascinating devastating love affairs,’ ‘lavish interior design schemes,’ and ‘utterly gorgeous outfits,’” wrote Nicole Rudick in The Comics Journal in 2012. “But DiDi wouldn’t be half as exciting if that were all there was to her. Formed in the crucible of the underground comix and women’s movements, she is equal parts sex, anxiety, domesticity, and rebellion — by turns a garish, boozy mess and a modern, self-affirming woman.”

Noomin’s editing career began with 1978’s Lemme Outta Here! Growing Up Inside the American Dream (The Print Mint, 1978), a collection of comics about suburban life by Noomin, Kominsky, R. Crumb (Kominsky’s husband), Bill Griffith (Noomin’s husband of 40 years), and others. She later revived the Twisted Sisters name for a 1991 anthology of 15 female cartoonists that included the work of Carol Tyler, Mary Fleener and Phoebe Gloeckner, among others. She also edited the Eisner Award-winning Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival in 2019, a book inspired by the #MeToo movement and dedicated to Anita Hill. At the time of her death, she was working on a graphic memoir about her parents who — unbeknownst to her when she was a child — were active members of the Communist Party. An initial look at that period ran as the strip “I Was a Red Diaper Baby”, which appeared in the Winter 2003 Comics Journal Special Edition. Died September 1

20. Pierre Fournier (b. 1949)
The 1960s and ’70s was a turbulent time in the Canadian province of Quebec. The “Quiet Revolution,” as it came to be called, was a period of rapid economic and social development in the province, coupled with a swelling of nationalism and linguistic pride among the French-speaking majority. While more radical public figures explored the possibility of achieving political and economic independence from the rest of Canada, others seized the moment to develop the province’s cultural sector, including its nascent comics industry.

A fan of science fiction and comics, Fournier joined the influential group Hydrocéphale in 1971. This group, and their periodical L’Hydrocéphale Illustré, included many of Quebec’s leading comic creators at the time. In 1973, he created his satirical superhero comic book Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec, starring what would become one of French Canada’s most famous comic characters. The following year, he and other creators organized Québecomics, the first exhibition of its kind, and toured New York, Eastern Canada, and Europe. In 1975-76, Fournier produced and hosted a popular television series, Les Amis du Capitaine Kébec, that was entirely devoted to comics.

From there, Fournier moved on to the hugely popular French-Canadian humor magazine Croc (1979-95), contributing to every issue either by illustrating his own strips or writing for a who’s who of Quebec artists. With his longtime friend and collaborator, artist Réal Godbout, Fournier co-created and co-scripted the popular Michel Risque and Red Ketchup strips that were serialized over a period of 15 years in both Croc and Titanic magazines. By 1986, Fournier was the founding president of the Association des Créateurs et des Intervenants de la Bande Dessinée; in the late ’80s, he was inking for Marvel Comics and acting as editor for Montreal’s English-language Matrix Comics; and he entered the 1990s contributing to the Quebec edition of MAD magazine and editing Anormal (Abnormal), a humor and comics magazine aimed at young teens. In 2008, the same year he was inducted into the Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame, his Capitaine Kébec character was chosen as the most iconic image of Quebec comics and featured as the cover of Mira Falardeau’s Histoire de la bande dessinée au Québec, a history of Quebec comics spanning the mid-1800s to modern times.

“My colleague and collaborator, Gabriel Morrissette, introduced me to Pierre almost 40 years ago, just after we launched Northguard,” recalled cartoonist Mark Shainblum in a social media post. “Pierre took us under his wing and supported us tremendously in the early days. He and Gabriel were also my entry into the parallel world of French-language comics in Quebec, a world that welcomed this Jewish anglophone comic book writer from West End Montreal with open arms… I just don’t know what else to say now. I’ll miss you, Pierre.” Died November 12

21. Fred Carter (b. 1938) 
Born in Danville, IL, Carter was encouraged to draw and paint at an early age by an older brother who died while both were young; he later won a scholarship to attend Chicago’s American Academy of Art but was forced to drop out after one year. After working as a busboy and at a decal factory, his life changed forever in 1970 when a friend at church showed Carter something he had picked up during a trip to Chicago: a Chick Tract. “I had always wanted to use art in a Christian setting,” he later said. “I saw it and it impressed me because that’s what I always wanted to do.”

Carter became the close artistic collaborator of Jack Chick, pioneer of the widely distributed evangelistic cartoons known as Chick Tracts. According to the website Christian Comics International, Carter’s first tract titled “Frame-up” marked the beginning of Carter’s decades-long association with Chick Publications. Aside from the mini-sized tracts that were published in the millions (exact numbers are hard to come by, but it’s estimated sales of Chick’s tracts and comic books have exceeded 500 million copies worldwide, with half of them drawn by Carter), he drew the full-size comic book The Crusaders starring two Christian action heroes from 1974-2016. In 2003, Chick Publications released Light of the World, a DVD featuring over 300 religious-themed paintings by Carter.

Despite the obvious differences between the artists’ styles, Carter worked with Chick for eight years before Chick acknowledged their partnership. Some suspected Chick (who died in 2016) was trying to hide Carter’s contributions, either out of a desire to claim all the credit or out of fear that the presence of a Black artist in his enterprise would spark controversy among some of his readers. For his part, Chick said the decision was Carter’s (“Fred is rather shy and declines to put his name on the art”); regardless of whether that was true, what we do know is that Carter — who was also a pastor at a non-denominational church in California — did not seek the spotlight, granting only one interview that we know of to a Los Angeles Times reporter in 2003. “It’s almost not like a job,” he said at the time. “It’s like a ministry I always wanted to be in.”

One of Carter’s first tracts — and a typical example of the kind of work he and Chick produced — was The Last Generation, a story that starts with the Rome-based supreme court of a one-world government in the “near future” ruling that anyone who says Jesus is the only way to salvation will be committed to “a mental camp for treatment and or [sic]… be executed!” “The story reflected the paranoid apocalypticism common among evangelicals and fundamentalists at the time, mixing references to indoctrinated children, Nazis, New Age spirituality, and high-tech surveillance used by an expansive, powerful government,” wrote Daniel Stillman of Christianity Today. “The art, however, was more sophisticated than anything Chick Publications had produced previously. The panels wouldn’t have been out of place at Marvel Comics or in the popular illustrated versions of classic novels like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe.” Died May 9

22. Gordon Shaw (b. 1990)
Here’s Gordon Shaw in his own words: “In the autumn of 2012, I was 32 and living in London, still smoking and enjoying a drink. I was working in hospitality but hoping to find my way into a more creative industry. I had become close friends with Timba who was planning to launch his own studio. We shared common interests, including good food and watching films. It was at Timba’s house that I had my first seizure while we were having dinner. It took him a while to realise I wasn’t OK as I couldn’t explain what was happening…. I had a CAT scan and was told that I might have had a stroke. At 1 am I was transferred to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and at around 8 am I was moved onto a ward where I saw a consultant who decided it wasn’t a stroke. Later I was transferred to neurology; by this time, I think they suspected I had a brain tumour…. Five days later, I had an MRI scan which confirmed the diagnosis. The neurologist was pretty sure it was a grade 2 tumour, but one which was inoperable and incurable. It was earth-shattering and left me feeling very depressed, often incapable of getting out of bed.”

The tumour would progress to a highly aggressive glioblastoma, and by December 2021 Shaw was told he had just months to live. In between his first diagnosis and his death, the Edinburgh-based cartoonist published five comics about living with cancer (including Bittersweet, with all proceeds going to brain tumor charities), focusing on not just himself but also the impact the tumor had on his loved ones and the challenges faced by all unpaid caregivers in the health system. In March 2022, Gordon’s story and his long-distance love with an American man he met in June 2017 was the focus of the BBC documentary Long Live My Happy Head.

“Having a brain tumour has changed the way I live my life,” Shaw wrote. “When I am in my happy head, I often think I might not see too many more of these times, so I try to recognise good moments when I am in them and thank people who are there sharing them with me.” Died September 11

23. Jean-Claude Mézières (b. 1938)
Jean-Claude Mézières drew the sci-fi adventure comic Valérian et Laureline, which he created with writer and childhood friend Pierre Christin, from its debut in 1967 until its conclusion in 2018. Starring a dark-haired spatio-temporal agent and his redheaded colleague as they travel through time and space, the strip’s art by Mézières emphasized a lived-in universe, diverse aliens, and unique spaceships.Though not many North American comic fans might recognize his name, he’s been cited as a major influence on artists like Walt Simonson (Thor, Fantastic Four) and Star Wars prequel artist Doug Chiang.

Speaking of Star Wars… Mézières’s influence on George Lucas’s original trilogy has been a topic of much speculation among fans, with the artist himself reportedly joking that seeing the films left him “dazzled, jealous… and furious!” He cheekily commented on the similarities in 1983 with a cartoon of Luke and Leia (in her slave girl bikini outfit, because of course) meeting Valérian and Laureline in a bar; when Leia says, “Fancy meeting you here!” Laureline responds, “Oh, we’ve been hanging around here for a long time!”

Born into an artistic Parisian family, Mézières and Christin first met while in an air raid shelter during the Second World War. His drawings were first published by the newspaper Le Figaro in his early teens, and he enrolled at Paris’s Institut des Arts Appliqués in 1953 at age 15. His first professional work, a Robin Hood comic strip called “Robin des Bois” ran in Bonjour Philippine magazine from 1955 to 1957. After college, Mézières entered mandatory military service, which he carried out in Algeria (during the Algerian War) until 1961. Following his return to France, Mézières and Jean “Mobius” Giraud (whom he met in art school) formed an advertising agency where Mézières juggled photography, model making, and graphic design. In 1965, Mézières, who grew up loving American westerns, fulfilled his childhood dream of visiting the United States, where he reunited with Christin (who was teaching at the University of Utah) and met his future wife, Linda.

Valérian et Laureline debuted in the pages of Pilote magazine in 1967. As the story goes, Christin noticed his friend was unhappy with the work he was being given by the magazine, and he suggested they collaborate on a comic together. They chose to do a sci-fi series because the French market was already saturated with western comics. The story of Valérian, a spatio-temporal agent from the 28th century, and Laureline, an 11th-century peasant girl who becomes his partner, proved to be a hit, paving the way for more French sci-fi comics like the ones that would appear in 1974’s Métal hurlant magazine (which itself would go on to inspire 1977’s Heavy Metal magazine in the U.S.).

Aside from his comic work, Mézières worked on various film and television projects, starting with Billet Doux (Love Letter), a 1984 television series starring Pierre Mondy as a comic strip editor for which Mézières mocked up comic book covers and characters. In 1991, Mézières was approached by director Luc Besson, a lifelong fan of Valérian et Laureline, who wanted Mézières to work on designs for a sci-fi film; after a few stops and starts, his artwork would prove to be a major influence for Besson’s The Fifth Element, a 1997 film set in the 23rd century and featuring all the futuristic trappings (including flying taxicabs) that were hallmarks of Mézières’s work. Besson would later go on to helm the 2017 film version of Valérian et Laureline titled Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets; starring Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, it was considered a flop but received some critical praise for its visuals.

News of his passing was met with many tributes from those who were inspired by his wondrous images of the future. “I am deeply saddened to learn that Jean-Claude Mézières has become a spatiotemporal agent permanently and vanished into the ether, hopefully to join Valerian and Laureline,” wrote Simonson. “A great inspiration to me from my earliest days in comics in NYC. Thank you, Jean-Claude. Godspeed.” Died January 23

24. Tom Veitch (b. 1941)
Born the eldest of six children, Veitch grew up in New Hampshire and Vermont before moving to New York City to attend Columbia University. He published his first book, Literary Days, in 1964. He was a contributor to several underground comix in the early 1970s, with his collaborations with artist Greg Irons including such titles as Legion of Charlies and Deviant Slice, and contributions to many other underground comix, including Skull Comix and Slow Death Funnies.

His creator-owned comics included The Light and Darkness War with artist Cam Kennedy, The Nazz with artist Bryan Talbot, Clash with artist Adam Kubert, and My Name Is Chaos with artist John Ridgway. He also wrote for DC’s Animal Man as well as two Elseworlds series, Kamandi: At Earth’s End and Superman: At Earth’s End.

And then there was Dark Horse’s Star Wars: Dark Empire. When Return of the Jedi left theatres with no immediate plans for future sequels, the late 1980s was a tough time for fans. And then came two significant additions to the franchise, both appearing in 1991: Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire novels and Veitch’s Dark Empire comic series from Dark Horse, which he would later follow up with Dark Empire II and Empire’s End.

“Veitch came up with many of the ideas that eventually came to fruition decades later on the big screen,” wrote Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier, “even after the end of the EU [expanded universe], chief among them the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine in clone form.” It was also Veitch who introduced the Old Republic era in his Tales of the Jedi comic series, introducing new characters and concepts and allowing the franchise to expand without hampering future creators from building on the stories of Luke, Leia, and the rest of the franchise’s most popular characters. Died February 18

25. Ron Zimmerman (b. 1958)
When Ron Zimmerman pitched ideas for stories with Marvel editors in the early 2000s, he had no idea that an offhand remark about the classic Western film Shane would lead to him working with veteran artist John Severin to re-invent Marvel’s Rawhide Kid as a gay gunslinger in a light-hearted Blazing Saddles-esque satire. But what surprised him even more was the reaction his five-issue mini-series would receive once it hit the stands in early 2003.

The Rawhide Kid, he told a reporter that year, was “supposed to be a little book that nobody noticed. We thought it would be so under the radar for everybody.” Not quite; the mix of comic books and gay cowboys was too tempting for culture-war commentators to pass up, and while Stan Lee appeared on news talk shows to rebut professional hand-wringers arguing that depicting gay people in comics was harmful to children, Zimmerman received letters from outraged parents swearing they would never let their children read a comic again — which was strange, he thought, because even though the book was published under Marvel’s explicit-content MAX imprint, there was nothing remotely sexual about his Western hero who just happened to be gay. “It was the most innocently conceived book imaginable,” Zimmerman said.

According to his friend Howard Stern, Zimmerman was a comedian would go up on stage and improvise to the point of fist-fighting with the audience. Leaving behind the life of a stand-up comic, he went into writing and producing for film and television, most notably TV shows like 7th Heaven, The Michael Richards Show, and Shake It Up (a Disney Channel series starring future Spider-Man sweetheart Zendaya). He was also a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, and it was because of those appearances that he was hired by then-Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. Once at Marvel, Zimmerman wrote the mini-series Spider-Man: Get Kraven (a Hollywood satire that followed Kraven the Hunter’s son as he tried to make it in show business) and the Ultimate Adventures series, as well as stories starring the Punisher, Spider-Man, and (why not?) The Tonight Show host Jay Leno… and, of course, the Rawhide Kid (in both the aforementioned mini-series subtitled Slap Leather and a 2010 sequel with Howard Chaykin dubbed The Sensational Seven).

Groundbreaking in its own right, Zimmerman’s take on the Rawhide Kid was divisive among comic fans; some criticized the book for perpetuating gay stereotypes while others praised it for subverting the brand of masculinity typically associated with classic Westerns. Wherever you land on that debate, the version of the Rawhide Kid in Zimmerman’s stories remained a skilled gunslinger who was more than capable of handling himself in a fight. According to Zimmerman himself, the message of the comic was simple: “Don’t call people names… because if you do, you just might get your ass kicked .” Died July 28

26. Brian Augustyn (b. 1954)
Good editors get the books out on time; great editors build teams that make those books worth reading. “At a time when I’d gone freelance and couldn’t get arrested at DC, Brian — and only Brian — was interested in keeping me employed,” wrote Mark Waid in tribute to his former editor, writing collaborator, and friend. “He went to bat for me when everyone at the company — everyone — was discouraging him, telling him I was just a fanboy who didn’t have anything to bring to the table, and when Brian decided to assign me the Flash, upper management made it abundantly clear they disapproved. He didn’t care. He gave me the gig. It seems to have worked out.”

Waid wasn’t the only professional to benefit from Augustyn’s faith in him. Breaking into the comics business by editing Tru Studios’ Trollords in 1986, Augustyn arrived at DC in 1988 working as associate editor or assistant editor on such books as The Question, Action Comics, Wasteland, and Green Arrow, where he had a hand in guiding the careers of Humberto Ramos, Mike Wieringo, Howard Porter, Travis Charest, Oscar Jimenez, and Mike Parobeck, just to name a few.

There’s a good reason for why Augustyn recognized good talent when he saw it. Not long after he joined DC as (in Waid’s words) one of the “new kids,” he sold his higher-ups on the idea for 1989’s Gotham by Gaslight, a story that follows a 19th-century Bruce Wayne as he begins his crime-fighting career right around the time Jack the Ripper arrives in Gotham. The comics had seen plenty of “imaginary stories” before (hello, Supermen Red and Blue), but this particular imaginary tale (with art by a young Mike Mignola) would prove so successful it went on to spawn a sequel (1991’s Master of the Future, also scripted by Augustyn) and inspire an entire line of alternate-history standalone stories published under DC’s Elseworlds imprint (as well as a 2018 animated film of the same name, with Bruce Greenwood voicing the Caped Crusader). Among Augustyn’s accolades are a Wizard Fan Award for Favorite Editor (1994); some of his final projects saw him team up once again with Waid to write Archie: 1941 and Archie: 1955, stories that cast the Riverdale gang in period dramas. Died February 1

27. Robert Charles “R.C.” Harvey (b. 1937) 
It seems only fitting to let The Comics Journal, Harvey’s longtime haunts, have the final word on his legacy: “For more than five decades, ‘Happy Harv’ helped to determine, and sometimes define, the myriad discourse surrounding comics professionals, fans, teachers and scholars. His contributions include seminal works of history and criticism; a number of landmark interviews and biographies of leading creators including Milton Caniff, Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson and Aaron McGruder; and a wide variety of edited collections, archival compilations and curated exhibits. All told, Harvey leaves behind an unequalled oeuvre of thousands of separately published articles, blog posts, columns, prefaces, commentaries and small-press pamphlets spanning every facet of cartooning and comic books.”

After graduating from the University of Colorado in 1959, Harvey worked as a freelance cartoonist in New York City before entering the U.S. Navy for three years, where he served as a paymaster aboard the USS Saratoga. After his discharge, he was a high school teacher for five years before spending the majority of his career serving as a convention manager for the National Council of Teachers of English (basically an advance man for teacher’s conventions). It was during his 30-year career as a convention manager that he also became a well-regarded comics scholar.

During the 1970s, as adventure comic strips started to fall out of fashion in the newspapers, Street Enterprises launched The Menomonee Falls Gazette to collect the major adventure comic strips. Harvey began writing a column about comics for the paper in 1973; that led to another column, “Comicopia,” for the Rocket’s Blast-ComiCollector, one of the earliest magazines about buying and selling collectible comics). In 1980, Harvey started writing a column for The Comics Journal that ran until he died — almost certainly earning him the title for the longest-running column in that magazine.

What did he talk about in all those columns? Everything and anything. “Bob was a devoted chronicler of his favorites,” author Bob Levin, himself a longtime Comics Journal contributor said. “He loved cartoonists and the medium, and he seemed an indefatigable researcher in tracking down their work and documenting their lives. I always learned something from whatever he wrote, and I always looked forward to spotting his byline — sometimes with trepidation at how much free time it was going to cost me.”

Harvey wrote or collected and edited 13 books on comics and cartooning, including his Milton Caniff: Conversations (2002) which he followed up with by a full biography of Caniff titled Meanwhile… A Biography of Milton Caniff, Creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon (2007). Other titles by him include The Art of the Comic Book, Cartoons of the Roaring Twenties, The Genius of Winsor McKay, and Children of the Yellow Kid.

“About 12 years ago I read this book by RC Harvey about the power of comics,” wrote filmmaker Tom Tanquary on Facebook. “I thought this was the movie I wanted to make. So I set about doing just that. I cold called RC Harvey at the beginning of the project and something just clicked. It was like we had known each other for decades. He became one of my best friends. He showed me the power and the art of cartooning. Showed me that it was so much more than just a drawing… Rest in peace dear friend. You left your mark.” Died July 7

28. Ron Goulart (b. 1933)
Back when I was a young reader making the transition from “comic fan” to “comic fan curious about the history of this art form,” one of the first books about comics I picked up ($15 at a used bookstore, according to the penciled in price on the first page) was Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books: The Definitive Illustrated History from the 1890s to the 1980s. Over the years, that book would be joined on my shelf by Ron Goulart’s Over 50 Years of American Comic Books, Ron Goulart’s Comic Book Encyclopedia, Ron Goulart’s Comic Book Culture, Ron Goulart’s The Great Comic Book Artists (both volumes), and Ron Goulart’s The Comic Book Reader’s Companion. Not a bad collection, but fair warning: anyone with plans to acquire Goulart’s complete bibliography will need a bigger bookshelf.

Definitive numbers are hard to come by, but it’s estimated he published more than 180 books of fiction and non-fiction in his lifetime, both under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms. He wrote at least 17 history books focusing on comic books and pulp fiction (three of them published in 1986) and at least 26 standalone novels (from 1971’s Clockwork Pirates to 1996’s Murder on the Aisle), created or contributed multiple novels to at least 13 fictional series (including series starring Flash Gordon, The Phantom, and Vampirella), was ghost writer of several pulp novels attributed to Kenneth Robeson, and — as if all that weren’t enough — also authored and adapted several comic stories, including Marvel’s TekWar comic series, which were based on the TekWar novels that Goulart wrote with input from William Shatner.

Born in Berkeley, CA, Goulart’s first professional publication was a satirical “Letter to the Editor” he wrote for UC Berkeley’s humor magazine The California Pelican; it would go on to appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1962. Following graduation, he worked as an advertising copywriter in San Francisco; as The Comics Journal’s Michael Dean wrote, “Goulart’s time in the advertising business may have instilled in him the straight-faced sense of absurdity that characterized much of his fiction.” (See also: his series of mystery novels with Groucho Marx in the detective role.)

Goulart died one day after his 89th birthday from COVID and pneumonia-related causes; among the outpouring of sympathy from fans and fellow pop-culture historians he received was a message from cartoonist and fellow pop-culture enthusiast Craig Yoe: “When I was starting out in the comics field, there were only a very few people I considered comics historians. Ron was basically the only one of them that focused a good deal on comic books…. I have tried to keep in touch with him over the last number of years because, frankly, I was disappointed that he hasn’t got the credit that he so richly deserves in that so many of us have stood on his shoulders in trying to understand and document comic book history. R.I.P. old friend.” Died January 13

29. Mike Pasciullo (b. 1972)
Shortly after his colleague and good friend died at age 50, comic writer Frank Tieri shared an anecdote about him on Facebook: “It was the SDCC [San Diego Comic-Con] before Ant-Man came out. They were preparing to do a panel or some other promotional whatever the hell for the film when my friend Mike Pasciullo, wearing a Philadelphia Flyers T-shirt, backwards baseball cap and shorts, introduced himself to Michael Douglas. ‘Hi, Mr Douglas. I’m Mike Pasciullo. I’m Senior Vice-President of Marketing for Marvel.’ Douglas looked him over. ‘Well,’ said Douglas, ‘you certainly don’t look like the Senior Vice-President of Marketing for Marvel.’ He often didn’t. Mike was a regular guy who drank Miller Lite, rooted for the Eagles, listened to Poison and was way too into the Rocky movies. And he loved Marvel.”

Pasciullo’s passion for collectibles and trading cards in his younger years led to a position at Fleer where he was involved in the art development and creative direction for Marvel’s trading card sets. He would later take that passion to Marvel itself, where through his 25 years with the company he would lead the company’s marketing strategy across publishing, films, and television. As Marvel wrote in its official tribute: “His work included landmark campaigns for seminal Marvel comic book moments like Secret Invasion, Marvel NOW!, Civil War, and many others, and key contributions in establishing the vision behind Marvel Studios’ early promotional strategy, engaging fans with unforgettable live events and promotions at conventions and beyond.”

“Sometimes you meet someone and immediately know you’ll be friends for life, which is what happened the day Mike Pasciullo burst into mine,” said Marvel Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski. “From our shared love of Marvel comics, ’80s metal bands and Philly cheesesteaks, we just clicked. While Mike always preferred to work more behind-the-scenes, Marvel would not be what it is today without him.” Died June 22

30. Nancy Murphy (b. 1932)
In her obituary, Nancy Murphy of Jackson Heights, NY, is described as a “voracious reader, amateur stamp collector, and captivating storyteller.” That could be said about a lot of people, but the next line is hers and hers alone: “Nancy retired from Marvel Comics after more than 40 years of archiving original art and managing the subscription department. She was well-known at Marvel as Fancy Nancy and has been fondly remembered by her Marvel contemporaries as kind, intelligent, strong-willed, and fiercely protective of original artwork.” One of those contemporaries, former Marvel staffer Irene Vartanoff, went even further: “It is totally thanks to Nancy Murphy that Marvel Comics was ever able to reprint anything from earlier than the mid-1970s, when Marvel started to pay attention to what it owned.”

In the old days — we’re talking the 1960s, when the Marvel Comics as we know it was just beginning to make its mark on the world — no one paid much attention to the original artwork or materials that came back from the printers. Once the finished comic books rolled off the presses, all the physical materials used to make those books were tossed out, given away, or pilfered by anyone who seized the opportunity to help themselves. And it’s not like anyone who did that was committing a crime; as Vartanoff said in 2014, Murphy was often told by her superiors she was wasting valuable time and office space by keeping the artwork and film left over from the printing process; the editors didn’t even see the value in keeping them for reprints.

But her file cabinet full of negative photostats of covers was the only such archive in the office, and the fact that Marvel is able to reprint anything from its earlier years is largely because of Murphy seeing the long-term value of those assets (which makes sense since she was one of the longest Marvel staffers, second only to Stan Lee). “We are saddened to hear of the loss of Nancy Murphy, who was a pillar of the Marvel office for over 40 years,” Marvel Entertainment wrote in tribute. “Overseeing subscriptions & mailings, her kindness, care, and foresight paved the way for Marvel’s history to carry on.” Died February 17

31. Kevin Conroy (b. 1955)
In the 2013 documentary I Know That Voice, Conroy — the voice of Batman for a generation of animation fans — recounts a story from when he worked as a kitchen volunteer in New York City just after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. After another volunteer found out he was a voice actor — and not just any voice actor, but the voice of the Dark Knight himself — he was challenged by the other volunteers to prove it. He did so by reciting one of the most famous lines from the 1992 animated series. “So, from this back kitchen: ‘I am vengenace, I am the night, I am Batman!’” he said. “There’s this long pause and you hear from the back: ‘Holy fuck, that is Batman!’ And suddenly the whole place was laughing.”

Conroy studied acting at New York City’s Juilliard alongside his roommate, actor/comedian Robin Williams, and future Superman Christopher Reeve. He began his acting career in the New York theater scene before breaking into television with soap opera roles and making guest appearances on such classic TV series as Dynasty, Cheers, Murphy Brown, and Matlock. But as he detailed in “Becoming Batman,” a story he contributed (with artist J. Bone) to the comic anthology DC Pride 2022, it was difficult for a gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s — particularly one with a troubled family life — to find steady work. After he got the call from a voice-over agent about a new Batman cartoon, he talked about the character with the show’s producers and was asked if he could relate to a man who presents “a mask of confidence to the world” and a private one “racked by conflicts and wounds.” “I began to speak and a voice I didn’t recognize came out,” he wrote. “It was a throaty, husky, rumbling sound that shook my body… Yes, I can relate. Yes, this is terrain I knew well. I felt Batman rising from deep within.”

In all, Conroy voiced Batman over 15 films, 400 episodes of television, and two dozen video games, in addition to making a live-action appearance as an older Bruce Wayne in the 2019 “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover that aired across the CW’s superhero shows. His version of Batman was so iconic that it couldn’t help but be an influence on the performances of Christian Bale, Robert Pattinson, and others who have since played the character over the years.

“Kevin was perfection,” said Mark Hamill, who played the Joker to his Batman. “For several generations, he has been the definitive Batman. It was one of those perfect scenarios where they got the exact right guy for the exact right part, and the world was better for it. He will always be my Batman.” Died November 10

32. William Hurt (b. 1950)
In the comics, especially the ones featuring earlier appearances of the Hulk, General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross was a blustering blowhard who would stop at nothing to neutralize his gamma-powered nemesis. It was a take that made sense at the time, but over the years the character evolved (he even died and came back, as comic characters are wont to do), and by the time he was introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe it made more sense to present him more as a military man who walks softly and carries a big stick. Lucky for us, “quiet authority” is what William Hurt did best.

After starting his acting career in the theater, Hurt made his film debut playing an obsessed scientist in the 1980 sci-fi film Altered States. That led to roles in decade-defining films like Body Heat, Children of a Lesser God, Broadcast News, Kiss of the Spider Woman (for which he took home a Best Actor Oscar), and others that cemented his status as one of the biggest leading men of the 1980s, a status underlined by his being nominated for Best Actor three years in a row (from 1986 to 1988).

Not one to relish the spotlight, he passed on the opportunity to star in blockbusters like Jurassic Park and Misery and settled into a life of smaller supporting roles in such films as Into the Wild, The Good Shepherd, and 2005’s A History of Violence, based on the graphic novel of the same name and a role for which he received his fourth Oscar nomination playing a vicious mobster; it was a master class is doing the most with the little bit of screen time he had.

Then came 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, which brought Hurt’s Ross into the MCU; he would come back four more times to lay down the law for our heroes. “I loved playing Ross the first time because I was able to try and create an ego as big as the monster he was chasing,” Hurt said while filming Captain America: Civil War. “And one that was as warped, too. [Ross in Civil War] is different because it’s a different style. It’s a more modernized style. And what they’ve done is they’ve taken a character who was the Ross from the older film and made a new version. This is a much newer Ross. A much different Ross. And I liked that a lot. I haven’t had a lot of time to understand it, but I’m doing the best I can. And they haven’t fired me yet.” Died March 13

33. Charlbi Dean (b. 1990)
Born in South Africa, Dean began modeling at age six, appearing in commercials and catalogues before hitting the runways in Tokyo, New York, and London. At age 18, she and fellow model Ashton Schnehage were in a car crash; though she survived, her injuries included a broken wrist, four broken ribs, and a collapsed lung.

Dean took a break from her career after the accident, and in 2010 she made her acting debut in Spud, a South African film based on a popular series of books set in a boys’ boarding school. She went on to star in the films Don’t Sleep in 2017 and An Interview with God in 2018; that same year, she landed a recurring role in the CW’s Black Lightning as Syonide, the hard-to-kill henchwoman working for the series’ main antagonist, crime lord Tobias Whale. In February 2020, it was announced Dean had joined the cast of Ruben Östlund’s satirical film Triangle of Sadness, which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d’Or; it was released in the United States Oct. 7.

Dean was admitted to a New York hospital on Aug. 29 after feeling unwell; while her initial symptoms were mild, her condition deteriorated rapidly and she died several hours later. An autopsy found she died of a viral infection in her lungs; it’s possible the removal of her spleen following her car accident may have increased her risk of serious infection. Died August 29

34. Peter Robbins (b. 1956)
Born Louis G. Nanasi in Los Angeles, Robbins started acting at the age of seven, appearing in such popular television shows as Rawhide, The Munsters, and The Donna Reed Show. Later in his career as a child actor, he appeared as a guest star on shows like F Troop, Get Smart, and My Three Sons before landing the role of Alexander Bumstead on Blondie, a short-lived 1968 sitcom based on the comic strip of the same name. But it would be another character from the comic strips that would end up becoming his role of a lifetime.

Starting with the 1963 documentary A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Robbins gave voice to the star of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts in several film and television productions throughout the 1960s, including the classic TV specials A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). Even after he was replaced by younger actors in the 1970s, his trademark scream of “AAUGH!” — first uttered in the 1969 film A Boy Named Charlie Brown — continued to be used in later specials for Charlie Brown and other Peanuts characters.

Robbins left acting in 1972 and pursued a career in real estate, with brief stints in radio. He remained attached to Charlie Brown, though, signing autographs at conventions almost up to the time of his death, and even had a tattoo of Charlie Brown and Snoopy on his arm. He made headlines in 2015 when he was sentenced to five years for making threats to several people; after his release in 2019, he opened up about his struggles with mental health. “I would recommend to anybody that has bipolar disorder to take it seriously because your life can turn around in the span of a month like it did to me,” he said. “I came out of prison and I’m a better person for it. I’m much more humble and grateful and thankful that I lived through the experience.” Died January 18

35. Gaspard Ulliel (b. 1984)
Born in the suburbs of Paris to a runway show producer mother and a stylist father, Ulliel studied film at the University of Saint-Denis, and he got started on his acting career while he was still in school. During the late ‘90s and early 2000s, he appeared in a slew of French television shows and made-for-TV movies and soon began making a name for himself in the French acting world; by 2010, he was also the face of the Chanel men’s fragrance Bleu de Chanel.

In 2007, he starred in his first English-language film, Hannibal Rising, where he played a younger Dr. Hannibal Lecter, but comic fans will more likely remember him as Anton Mogart, a wealthy and dangerous collector of ancient artifacts who clashes with Moon Knight during the third episode of the hero’s 2022 streaming series. (In the comics, Mogart is a master thief who targets high-value works of art and strikes only at midnight, earning a reputation for himself as the Midnight Man.) Their encounter leaves the two men of action with some unresolved business; with Ulliel’s death, it’s not yet known if Marvel will recast the role for future outings or retire the character.

Ulliel was skiing in the Savoie region of France when he and another skier collided at an intersection between two slopes. He suffered brain trauma and was taken to hospital via helicopter, where he died the following day. Ulliel was on vacation at the resort with his ex-girlfriend, Gaëlle Pietri, and their six-year-old son. Marvel dedicated its Moon Knight episode to Ulliel, paying tribute to the actor with a title card during the end credits. Died January 19

36. David Warner (b. 1941)
In an interview, Warner described his upbringing as “messy” and his family as “dysfunctional,” and said that going into acting was “a means of escape.” When a teacher encouraged his interest in drama, Warner saw it as a choice between between acting or “being a juvenile delinquent.” It seems ironic, then, that he often found himself playing naughty characters throughout his long career.

There was Ed Dillinger, the main antagonist in 1982’s Tron… Spicer Lovejoy, Billy Zane’s ruthless henchman in 1997’s Titanic… Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich in the 1978 TV mini-series Holocaust… Gul Madred, the Cardassian interrogator who tries to break Picard in a memorable two-part episode (“THERE… ARE… FOUR… LIGHTS!”) of Star Trek: The Next Generation… and 1982’s Time Bandits, where he’s listed in the cast as simply “Evil.”

It’s not that Warner didn’t get the chance to play kinder characters — he was particularly fond of his time as Bob Cratchit in George C. Scott’s A Christmas Carol, and he pops up as Jor-El in a 1994 episode of Lois and the Clark: The New Adventures of Superman — but the Manchester native and Royal Shakespeare Company excelled at being bad. Small wonder he was tapped to give voice to one of the baddest of the baddies, Ra’s al Ghul, for the 1992 Batman animated series, a role he would reprise in other DCAU series like Superman and Batman Beyond. It was the first time the character appeared outside the comics, and for many comic and cartoon fans Warner’s rich voice performance remains the definitive take on the enigmatic head of the League of Assassins. Died July 24

37. Robert Bruce (b. 1959)
When Robert Bruce’s brother broke the news of his death on New Year’s Day, filmmaker and comic fan Kevin Smith was among the many fans and colleagues who expressed their condolences on social media. “I’m truly sorry to read this John,” Smith said in response. “@popculturizm was always a welcome addition to any episode of @ComicBookMenAMC, as well as a nice guy. I’ll miss Rob.”

Smith appeared in and produced the AMC reality show Comic Book Men (2012-2018) alongside Bruce, who appeared in 34 episodes as a “popculturalist” and had producing and consulting credits on 82 episodes. Set at Smith’s comic book shop, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, in Red Bank, NJ, the show — once described as “Pawn Stars for geeks” — featured experts looking at various items that customers brought in for appraisal; in one memorable episode, Bruce reached out to comic artist George Pérez to create an original piece for a fellow collector who lost his Teen Titans poster in Hurricane Sandy.

Ben Leach, a fellow collector and longtime friend of Bruce, told The New York Post, “I think for people who knew him through Comic Book Men, where he would appraise toys and other various collectibles, that really did not scratch the surface of the knowledge that he had. He knew genuine quality antiques, he knew early 20th century, pin-back buttons for political candidates, he was an expert on those. He’s really one of the early people to bring awareness of Japanese toys to the East Coast.” Died December 31, 2021

Also leaving us in 2022:

• Shinji Mizushima, 82, Japanese manga artist for Yakyū-kyō no Uta, January 10.
• Guy Mouminoux, 94, comic writer and artist for Goutatou et Dorochaux, January 11.
• Narayan Debnath, 96, Indian comic artist for Handa Bhonda, January 18.
• Ian Kennedy, 89, British comics artist for Dan Dare, February 5.
• Mino Milani, 94, Italian comic artist, February 10.
• Miguel Gallardo, 66, Spanish comic book author for Makoki, February 21.
• Antonio Seguí, 88, Argentine cartoonist, February 26.
• Mia Ikumi, 42, Japanese manga artist for Tokyo Mew Mew, March 7.
• Fred de Wit, 75, Belgian painter and comic artist for Marnix van Sanmarty, March 15.
• Garry Leach, 67, British comic book artist for Judge Dredd, Miracleman, March 26.
• Stelio Fenzo, 89, Italian comic artist for Jungla, April 8.
• Daniel Bardet, 79, French comic writer for Malefosse, April 23.
• Luca Boschi, 66, Italian comic writer and artist for Disney comics, May 3.
• Dijjo Lima, 34, Brazilian comic book artist and graphic designer), May 16.
• Serge Diantantu, 62, Congolese comic book artist, June 1.
• Dick Vlottes, 89, Dutch cartoonist and comic artist for Hinter en Minter, June 5.
• Raymond Briggs, 88, British writer, illustrator, cartoonist and graphic novelist, August 9.
• Jean-Jacques Sempé, 89, French cartoonist, illustrator and comic artist for Le Petit Nicolas, August 11.
• Patrick Nordmann, 73, French journalist, comedian, and comic writer for Lucky Luke, August 20.
• Francisco Martín Morales (aka Martínmorales), 76, Spanish comic artist for Polícleto, August 21.
• Rob Harren, 78, Dutch comic publisher of De Boemerang, September 10.
• Vincent Deporter, 63, Belgian storyboard artist and comic book artist for SpongeBob Squarepants, September 27.
• Alfredo Chiappori, 79, Italian comic artist for Up Il Suvversivo, October 14.
• George Booth, 96, American comic artist and longtime contributor to The New Yorker, November 1.
• José Ruy, 92, Portuguese comic book author, November 23.
• Laurent Gillain (aka Lorg), 66, Belgian comic writer and artist, November 25.
• Ron Forman, 79, American comics direct distributor for Comics Unlimited, December 8.
• Lee Lorenz, 90, American cartoonist and editor for The New Yorker, December 8.
• Han Peekel, 75, Dutch singer, comics scholar, and host of Wordt Vervolgd (To Be Continued), December 14.
• Eduardo Pelegrín Martínez de Pisón (aka Calpurnio), Spanish comics artist and illustrator, December 15.