World´s Greatest Comic Artists : Paul Ryan

I´m still a bit in shock over the news that one of my favorite artists, Paul Ryan passed away during the last weekend at only 66 years of age.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I mentioned him and his five year run on FANTASTIC FOUR quite a few times. For me this was one of the good comics that came out in the dark comic age of the 90s.

Originally I wanted to do a long post but since I spent most of the day looking for Paul Ryan art - as my picture archive is not as extensive as it once was - I´m just going to post some of his great covers to remember all the series he has worked on. Maybe with comments here and there.

I guess I should start this little retrospective with D.P. 7 issue 10 because it is probably the first comic book with Paul Ryan artwork I ever saw.

Either this or issue 11. Those issues were always in the 1 Deutschmark bins at german comic conventions or comic trade shows. Anyway, my brother has most of the series but I never got around to read it. It was part of Jim Shooter´s NEW UNIVERSE and as much critique as he gets comic readers are only now starting to understand how far ahead of his times he was. It was ULTIMATE MARVEL before people wanted to read it.

QUASAR was of of the first series that I put on my pull list because of Paul Ryan. It´s crazy but I just recently read the overpriced and badly printed ANNIHILATION CLASSIC that reprints the first issue. I only stayed on the book until Paul Ryan left with issue 6 or 7 which were Acts of Vengeance tie ins and returned when Greg Capullo turned it into a must read book.
 

The same happened on Ravage 2099. Yup, I was one of the people who read it despite of Stan Lee´s more than generic writing. Still it had beautiful Paul Ryan art. But as soon as that ended I was out the door.

Speaking about Acts of Vengeance, you will find art from Paul Ryan in most Marvel omnibus or collections reprinting that storyline and others like Operation Galactic Storm or John Byrne´s Vision Quest / Darker Than Scarlett Scarlett Witch saga ( which was just recently reprinted in the new Avengers by John Byrne omnibus hardcover that comes out in July ) in AVENGERS WEST COAST since he was the only artist who drew that series and the main AVENGERS book at the same time, following such artistic titans like John Buscema and John Byrne and he made it look easy.   

And speaking about following John Byrne, he handpicked Paul Ryan to follow John Romita Jr on his stint on IRON MAN. I was a bit surprised when I got the Epic Collection WAR GAMES because more than half of it is by Paul 'Ryan and this may be one of the best Epic Collections yet since it includes the complete run by John Byrne in one volume. The transition from John Romita Jr to Paul Ryan is pretty smooth and Paul incorporated the new much bulkier look of the Iron Man armor in the Avengers books. 

I have always preferred the original 12 issue limited SQUADRON SUPREME series to WATCHMEN ( since I have already explained the reason for this on many occasions I won´t bore my readers by repeating them ) partly because of Paul Ryan who finished up the last issues. While the series has its fans many are not aware of the brilliant graphic novel SQUADRON SUPREME - DEATH OF A UNIVERSE by Mark Gruenwald and Paul Ryan that at least as good if not better than the original series. The story ended their universe and brought the team to the 616 Earth - which of course is all but a moot point at this moment thanks to Disney. Thankfully the graphic novel is included in the SQUADRON SUPREME OMNIBUS hardcover. 

Speaking of parallel universes Paul Ryan also did the art on FANTASTIC FIVE from the M2 universe. I always enjoyed that parallel world since they had some great books like SPIDER - GIRL ( on which I will do a post very soon ) with a positive outlook for the future, a rare thing in comics now.

A few more covers for Marvel. I´m not sure if he also did the interiors.

Paul Ryan also worked at DC where he drew the big icons like Batman or Superman, the last one mostly in the title SUPERMAN - THE MAN OF TOMORROW which was created to have a Superman book every week.

Back then there was ACTION COMICS, THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, SUPERMAN and MAN OF STEEL which was created to give Jon Bogdanove his own Superman title. Those four books came out every month and they were scheduled so that every title would come out at a different week of the month. Still that left DC with four books coming out once a month which made only forty - eight Superman issues a year. But the year has fifty - two weeks so they did SUPERMAN - THE MAN OF TOMORROW to have a book for those weeks in - between. I know it sounds like a lot of trouble for comic readers but back then DC really had a tight continuity and they had a little triangle on the cover so the fans knew in which order to read them. And despite the overlapping stories you could still only read one Superman title without getting the feeling you were missing out on something. There were sadly only four issues each year but Paul Ryan more than made up for it by drawing the entire Justice League on occasion and doing a few extras like the SUPERMAN - GHOSTS annual 10. 

He even got to draw an entire different Justice League ( and most of the other heroes in the DC universe ) in the LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE : CRISIS - THE UNTOLD STORY special. As the cover is not by Paul Ryan here´s some of the interior art of which you can see more in this review. 

I also have to post interior art for Paul Ryan´s last DC book because while he did a long run on FLASH - issues 119 to 136 the cover were by other artists. But because they were of such high caliber like Mike Wieringo and Steve Lightle I didn´t complain. And I still had Paul Ryan inside the comic.

But Marvel and DC were not the only companies Paul Ryan worked for. When CrossGen comics was the third big comic publisher they had all the best talents and while Paul Ryan did not get his own title he always delivered on those fill in issues he did to relieve the regular artists.

Last but not least Paul Ryan did a lot of work for the swedish comic PHANTOMEN about one of the greatest pulp comic icons ever, The Phantom, The Ghost Who Walks and I hope that some american - or german - publisher makes those stories available for the general readers.

And that is all for this post which I hope has been able to show the books Paul Ryan has worked on. He always managed to combine great design and elegance with solid storytelling while throwing in strong perspectives and dynamic action. And he could drawn anything that writers threw at him and was never afraid to do crowds with dozens of characters. Artists like him, who always stay within their deadlines and who can do two books a month - and do them good - there are not that many left.

As I had to look for stuff from Paul Ryan all over the internet there are quite a few links I have to add to the post. First of there are the posts on the passing of Paul Ryan and as representatives of all the numerous ones that are without any doubt going to be on the internet in the weeks to come I selected the ones by COMICBOOK.COM and CULT FACTION . 

Dan W from IT`S A DAN`S WORLD has a write up and an interview with Paul Ryan and Ed Rhoades at THE PHANTOM REFERENCE GUIDE has an interview with Paul Ryan about his work on PHANTOMEN with a lot of original artwork. As you can expect Paul Ryan pops up in quite a few posts from COMIC BOOK RESOURCES like Drawing Crazy Patterns : Avengers Falling For The Scarlet Witch , Drawing Crazy Pastterns : The Entire Marvel World Is Destroyed ! Wait, Now It´s Back ! , Knowledge Waits : Nine Times Doctor Doom Cheated Death Itself and Gimmick Or Good ? Fantastic Four 371 - 375 . They also have an orbituary on Paul Ryan and Gimmick Or Good ? Flash 80 about Mike Wieringo´s first issue on FLASH.

I know there was not a lot of Superman in this post but I want to include something for my spanish speaking audience so here´s almost an hour of the classic cartoon. THIS is what the real Superman looks like, Hollywood.



Today would have been Heinz Rühmann´s 114th birthday. There always was some controversy because he kept making films in Germany during the Nazi´s reign and was close with Goebbels and Goehring although he never made outright propaganda movies. He starred in a few movies that critiqued the military like Die Abenteuer des braven Soldat Schwejks ( I had the luck to be able to read the novel it was based on during my military service and not a lot has changed in the last hundred years ) or Der Hauptmann von Köpenick - which is one of my favorite movies.

I remember seeing it on one of the 5 Mark matinees the local school in Neckarweihingen used to do and being impressed by the social issues that were tackled in the movie. Besides showing how conditioned germans are to obey authority figures - especially those in uniforms - it also reveals the problems with bureaucracy that haven´t changed that much. Take it from one who has been in the position of the main character. It´s the old dilemma : without a permanent residence you don´t get papers, without papers you don´t get work and without work you don´t have a chance of earning money for a permanent residence. It´s a neverending spiral.      



Sadly I only found a short clip of The Captain of Köpenick - even if it is the most important scene - but I found another cinematic jewel I had not seen before. Der Herr vom anderen Stern is an early science fiction movie that was ahead of its times. The movie was produced by Heinz Rühmann and in it he plays a traveler who lands on earth via mind powers and has to deal with the german authorities, politicians and other criminals. 



I´m staying with my german speaking audience for a video from .... really ? Smartypants is the actual translation for Klugscheißerin ? That´s really putting it mildly. Anyway, here´s a video from Miss Smartypants about if comics are art and you should watch her videos which are smart.



Comic Misconceptions with interesting facts about The Ghost Who Walks.



Today´s music video was picked for this special remembrance post.



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Old jungle saying : when the jungle sleeps, the Phantom wakes.

Bart Sears continued or This is your life !

Because the post about Bart Sears I started Yesterday has become too long I decided to put this stuff in a separate post. You can go to the first post if you want to read about Bart Sears on JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE.

I really should be finishing the material for the post on Alyssa Milano, who celebrates her 42nd birthday Tomorrow instead of still writing on what is practically Yesterday´s post. But as usual I did spend most of Yesterday putting the original art pages I found while making the post into folders and looking for the Bart Sears art I had scattered all around my laptop instead of actually writing the post. It also doesn´t help if you have to go to the bank and write a post without any preparation on the same day.

Especially if - like me - you have to take a bus to get to the bank and no matter when you arrive at the bus stop the bus leaves right under your nose. Anyway, I will probably have to wing it on the Alyssa Milano post or do it at a later time as usual and I also don´t have the time necessary to do a post on Christina Aguilera who celebrates her 35th birthday Today.

So in our last post we covered Bart Sears on JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE and here we get to all the other stuff he did in his long and illustrious career.

After his stint on JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE Bart tackled another DC icon in the three issue story Faith in issues 21 to 23 of LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT before drawing the bookend issues to the big ECLIPSO crossover of the 1992 annuals and the first issues of the following ongoing series. Some of you may remember that the first issue of the ECLIPSO event had a little violet plastic Eclipso diamond glued to the cover ( which wrinkled it a bit ). Yep, the 90s with the crazy gimmick covers were in full effect.

I read until the issue after Bart Sears had left but the drop in the quality of the art was so dramatic and the story had become convoluted that I left the series. I have to add that most of the ECLIPSO annuals were if not great reads at least entertaining ( I bought them all ) which can´t be said for a lot of crossovers these days which have become formulaic.

Around that time Bart Sears started doing art tutorials in WIZARD which I still read at that time. He did over thirty of them and if you have one of their How To Draw books there is probably some of his stuff in there. He went freelance and did work on Marvel´s SILVER SABLE and MIDNIGHT SONS, Dark Horse´s TITAN and WILL TO POWER and image´s VIOLATOR.

He also began working for VALIANT where he did some issues of TUROK ( which in my opinion was a big waste because there were not enough hot babes for him to draw there ) and X - O MANOWAR which was a better fit.

He returned to X - O MANOWAR as one of the regular pencilers in 1995 for which would become the title´s swan song. I read many VALIANT books but X- O MANOWAR was the best. You just could not beat the concept which was putting Conan, the Barbarian in a piece of space armor more sophisticated than Iron Man´s suit. I mean, X - O Manowar´s armor was doing things Tony Stark had never dreamed of like battle camouflage or morphing and his Iron Man suit looked like cheap trash compared to this.
   

At this point his style had become so detailed that it was impossible for him to do a monthly book but the guys at VALIANT had the brilliant idea of alternating issues between him and Andy Smith who had a pretty similar style at that time. So the reader got a art two punch combo and X - O MANOWAR really picked up some speed during the last 24 issues or so.

VALIANT folded, or better was bought by ACCLAIM which turned some books into unsuccessful video games and the comics into bad versions of their former glory before folding. And that was that for a time. Thankfully VALIANT has returned again and so far all of their books I have read are awesome. Bart Sears even returned to the company to do some promo art, covers and issues 18 and 19 of BLOODSHOT AND H.A.R.D.CORPS.

In 1994 Bart set up his own comic company OMINOUS PRESS where he sadly only published three issues of BRUTE & BABE. These issues have some of his best art but because of the fragile market his company went out of business. After the collapse of the first incarnation of VALIANT Bart Sears went to PENTHOUSE COMIX where he did art for YOUNG CAPTAIN ADVENTURE and HERICANE. Since I was buying all of those issues ( come on, comics, superheroes and boobs, this was like the best of two worlds ) I devoured the pages which gave you an idea what a POWER GIRL series could have looked like if those guys at DC had real cojones. The art on these is pretty amazing and he started using the thick outlines here.

He returned to Marvel where he did a very successful BLADE series and a not so good SPIDER - WOMAN series. You would think that a series written by John Byrne and drawn by Bart Sears with more Spider - Women than you can shake a stick at would become a huge success. But it didn´t.  

Marvel was totally schizophrenic because at that time they already HAD a long running comic book with a female version of Spider - Man that was beloved by their readers ( they started three letter campaigns to stop Marvel from cancelling it ! ) but they did their best to kill that book ( like restarting the numbering to prevent that the book got more than 100 issues under its belt ) while at the same time coming up with one failed attempt after another to establish a new and different Spider - Woman.

Coming back to SPIDER - WOMAN this was not a good time for John Byrne aficionados and after the atrocious SPIDER - MAN : YEAR ONE, which was supposed to do for the Spider franchise what Bendis´ ULTIMATE SPIDER - MAN achieved years later, he was just phoning his scripts in. This of course didn´t excite Bart much and the art suffered accordingly. It also didn´t help that the main character changed her outfit like every other issue so besides having the original Spider - Woman Jessica Jones in the book they only lasted 18 issues. And I´m not kidding, if you look at the covers Spider - Woman has a different outfit on almost all of them.

After this unsatisfactory work experience Bart went to CROSSGEN where he did THE PATH ( a samurai story set in feudal Japan - I think - where he continued his heavy lined art ) and THE FIRST a series of two warring clans of beings with godlike powers. The latter one was one of the first ( no pun intended ) comics where I got an inkling hwat it must be like for a non comic reading person to read superheros. Because every person in that comic was wearing a costume but unlike the iconic costumes  we know from Superman, Batman, Spider - Man, Nexus or other costumed crusaders they all looked very similar and it was as hard to keep them apart as to remember to which of the two fractions they belonged to.

I think Andy Smith also did some of the work on THE FIRST. For a while CROSSGEN become one of the top five comic companies with each new slew of books being better and I was reading almost all of their titles. My brother was reading most of the books I didn´t have on my pull list.

Well, CROSSGEN also went belly up when it failed to find new investors ( it is telling how many companies go out of business in one man´s career ) so Bart returned to Marvel where he did the limited series CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON, WEAPON X : DAYS OF FUTURE NOW and SABRETOOTH which I haven´t read so I can´t comment on them. 

What I DID read was the awful WARLORD series he did when he returned to DC much to the dismay of my younger brother who had the misfortune of having to pay for the issues while I only needed to suffer through it.

Man, you just can´t beat the original series. Even original creator Mike Grell failed when he tried to add a new chapter. Anyway, if you don´t believe me just check out DIVERSIONS OF THE GROOVY KIND where Old Groove has posted the latest installment " Trilogy " from WARLORD 12.

And that´s it. Bart Sears is still working but since I have not read THE SCREAM or THE HELM at Dark Horse or TUROK : DINOSAUR HUNTER and JOHN CARTER, WARLORD OF MARS at Dynamite Entertainment for which he did covers this is where the post ends. And I will definitely be checking out the BLOODSHOT AND THE H.A.R.D.CORPS issues from VALIANT.

As usual there are a lot of websites to thank for and I want to start with the ones that were most instrumental in deciphering Bart Sears´ personal work timeline. I hope I managed to get it right and my readers will correct me on any mistakes. Firstly the guys at GRAND COMICS DATABASE are to thank for all the covers and info on Bart Sears which were invaluable as were his entries at wikipedia and COMICBOOK DB and his biography at TALES FROM A BART SEARS COLLECTOR which seems to be the inofficial Bart Sears homepage. I also have to include the Bart Sears gallery at COMIC ART COMMUNITY which provided more much needed artwork as did A WORLD OF THOUGHTS where you can read the entire issue 1 of NEGATION WAR which you absolutely should do if you haven´t read the series or any CrossGen books. Kudos and many thanks to all of these.

Man, my brain is turning into mush because I blanked on Today´s 40th birthday of fitness model, Sexbombe and WWF ( for me it will be always the real WWF and not this new WWE ) Diva Trish " The Dish " Stratus.

Both her AND Christina Aguilera celebrate their birthdays at the same time ? It must have been the day for hot and busty blonde sexbombs. While Trish Stratus never won any fitness competitions, long before she stepped into the squared circle, a lot of us saw her in MUSCLE & FITNESS.

Trish Stratus ( born Patricia Anne Stratigias on December the 18th 1975 in Richmond Hill, Ontario ) is a former canadian fitness model and semi - retired professional wrestler ( on September 17th, 2006 after winning her 7th Women's Championship ). She´s the first in WWF history to have held the Women's Championship seven times, three more than the four reigns of Lita and the four recognized title reigns of The Fabulous Moolah. She is also one of only four women to have held the Hardcore Championship.

As a fitness model, Stratus has been on the cover of major health and fitness magazines such as MUSCLEMAG, FLARE, and TOTAL WOMEN´S FITNESS. She also released a calendar series called " Dream Team " with fellow model, Stacey Lynn. As a sports entertainer, she was proclaimed the " Diva of the Decade " on the WWF RAW X Anniversary Show . She was voted " WWE Babe of the Year " three times between 2001 and 2003.

For more about Trish Stratus check out The Best Of  Trish Stratus ( with more pictures ) on DIVALICIOUS , if you are really interested go to LETHALWOW where you can find a really long bio and various galleries and if that´s still not enough the only place left is ADAM´S WRESTLING BLOG ( Best in the World ). As for me I´m going to watch some of my favorite Trish Stratus videos ( which are not from the Divas DVDs but I don´t want to go into a long rant right now ) to get my Stratusfaction.
 

It´s been a while since I posted a Yaya Han video and there is one I am saving for Christmas. In the meantime here´s one with Yaya as Chun Li.



Because we also covered Spider - Woman in this post here´s a video about all the going ons behind the scenes concerning the REAL origin of Venom and spider - Man´s black costume. Which ties in to SECRET WARS.



A lot of comic readers have no idea that such a thing as CrossGen Comics ever existed so here´s one of the few videos I found on YouTube on the subject. If you don´t know the comics you definitely have to check them out as almost every title is among the best comics you will ever read.



And speaking about the only videos I could find on YouTube Today´s cartoon clip is one of the few with Julie Bruin from the TINY TOONS.  I bet her giant bouncing boobs turned quite a few kids into furries for life.

Was Julie Bruin in any other episodes or was she only in the Tiny Toon Music Television episode  ? Her tOOns were definitely not tiny. Daimn !



Coming from one green garbed buxom sexbomb to another I couldn´t end this post without a Christina Aguilera video. It´s the least I can do if I can´t do a post on her. This is her breast appearance on the Ellen show.



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