NAM’s Place

This is the first cover to my new series (click on it for a larger image).

Just so that it is on the blog record (and we all know how vital that is), I am currently inking the new Wonder Girl miniseries from DC. New Top-Gun maverick penciler Sanford Greene is penciling. Guy Major is coloring and J. Torres is writing. Sanford and I have worked together previously on a series of animated books (”Batman Strikes!” - “Justice League Unlimited” and the long-winded title “Legion of Superheroes in the 31st Century”).

Sanford, like another good ole artist bud of mine, Mark (I’m a Yankee but they call me “Tex”) Texeria, is a kind of graphite elemental…A penciling force of nature…You just never know what their wild pencils will throw at you next. The only thing you can be sure of? It’ll be exciting.

…Well, there is no adult-life memory of my not knowing Mike (I never actually called him “Ringo”; I am thinking that nickname came later and I just got used to knowing him as “Mike”) outside of my two college years at the Joe Kubert School…He just springs up in my memory as if he had always been there. I was probably 20 years old when I met him, and a damnably young 20 that was. Mike was seven years older than me, but I never thought about the age difference, even with his prematurely gray hair. Mike had such an open, innocent, utterly accepting nature that he seemed like a Billy Batson temporarily inside Captain Marvel’s adult body…Childish, but only in the best ways, like he had cherry-picked the best aspects of being a kid. A reluctant adult. Doubtless, that was one of the secrets of the pure heroes he created; those heroes were representations of an inner self he held to (or recreated) from his childhood dreaming.

Anyway, Mike was simply a great guy. He is one of the prime examples of why people in comics think of themselves as “family”. He also exemplified why, no matter how accomplished comics artists might or might not become, comic book artists are typically humble. Mike was very humble, and since it is an obviously gauche hubris to imagine ourselves on anything like an artistic par with Mike, egos gotta go. Mike, and others like him, have made inflated egos quite bad form in our business. Another great artist notable in this respect was Curt Swan. Curt *was* Superman to me…To this day, his art pops first into my head when I think of the Man of Steel. But to meet Curt, he seemed absolutely unconscious of his status as artistic icon, and dismissive (just shy of contemptuous) of the idea that his work was so valuable and meaningful. In the same way, Mike’s work *is* Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and other super-icons to a whole generation of readers, just as as Curt’s Superman visually *was* that character for me. And Mike had the same way of having compliments bounce off him like bullets in a superhero’s world…I wish more of them had stuck. I hope in Mike’s quieter, reflective moments, some did.

I’m not sure the world needs another blog, but I am sure that there was one it could not afford to lose. That was the blog of Mike “Ringo” Wieringo (http://mikewieringo.com/), who was sadly lost to us less than a week ago. This blog will be a comparatively feeble attempt to add something back to the world that lost so much with his passing. I will be putting my memories and thoughts of Mike into this confection of bits and bytes, and mix in other things as well…Thoughts about the comics field, random drawings and artistic miscellanea, and some personal and philosophical musings, which I will spare you from by leaving them in separate categories so you can weed them out as desired. For all who read, thank you sincerely, since you are the reason an artist or a writer lives…maybe even how they live. Your participation as a reader or contributor will not go unappreciated or unnoticed.