Okay, one last artist I want to cover in this blog before we hit the end (and, excitingly, I know what each day between now and the end is going to be now, which is more than I've done before). Previously, most of the artists I've highlighted have been guys who've got a bit of work behind them, but my great joy in telling the world about them is in the fact that their best days are doubtless still to come - they're all pretty young. Not so this fellow, unfortunately.
Seth Fisher was an American artist who settled in Japan, which he grew to call his home (his wife, Hisako, is Japanese). He was known for his delightfully crazy artwork, which merged influences of Frank Quitely and Brendan McCarthy to give an incredibly detailed and totally bonkers view of the world. His linework was painstakingly delicate, and managed to deliver George Perez levels of detail while never being over-busy. Instead, the reader's eye is drawn to individual aspects of each picture he produced, every square inch having as much to appreciate and savour as an entire page of many artists' output. He was nominated for an Eisner award for his superb work on Flash: Time Flies and Vertigo Pop!: Tokyo, and worked with writers like J.M. DeMatteis and Dan Curtis Johnson on DC titles. His Fantastic Four/Iron Man miniseries, Big In Japan, was possibly the most beautifully crazy thing he had done to date.
On the evening of January 30, 2006, Fisher fell from the roof of a seven-story hotel/nightclub in Osaka and was killed. The trade paperback of Big In Japan was released posthumously. Fisher was 34 years old when he died.
By now we're inured to comics legends passing away - most of them are pretty old. In creative terms, Fisher had only just begun to hit high gear, and he surely would have continued to hone his skills and produce ever better works. Below is a sample of some of his work - really, though, the monitor can't do it justice (you really, really have to click these and expand the images to get the full effect), and you should head out and get yourself some of his work in hardcopy as soon as you can. If you've enjoyed any of the artists I've tried to highlight while I've been writing this thing, you should pick up their stuff too, and write to the comics companies they work for and tell them you'd like to see more of it. Appreciate the good ones we've got while we've got them.
A very good post and an excellent blog. I am now a follower. Thanks, Steve @ http://www.study-aids.co.uk
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Posted by: Studyaidsuk | 09/16/2011 at 09:11 PM