Remembering George Pérez, a Superhero of Superhero Comics

The iconic artist and writer died this week at 67. It’s hard to imagine comics without him.

Paul Butterfield/Getty/Amazing Comic Conventions

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

One of the first comics I remember reading was Crisis on Infinite Earths, an altogether ridiculous DC Comics series from the mid-’80s that featured approximately 1 billion characters fighting a villain named the Anti-Monitor. I don’t know why or how I stumbled upon a collected edition of those 12 comics, which require a PhD in dense comics lore to understand, but I absolutely loved them.

And the reason why was George Pérez.

The Anti-Monitor’s days are numbered.

George Pérez/DC Comics

For young fans like me, superhero comics felt like a secret passcode only you and your friends knew. Sure, the world might think this is silly, but to us, it’s the coolest thing going. How can you explain to someone what works about a bunch of weirdos in spandex fighting aliens or robots? It just does.

Pérez, an iconic artist and writer who died Friday, at 67, following a battle with pancreatic cancer, was as important as anyone else in giving comics that sense of wonder and dynamism. 

His prolific career extended across decades at both major comics publishers, DC and Marvel, but his ’80s work is what I remember best. The ’80s was an incredible decade for superhero comics. The year Crisis wrapped up, DC started publishing two massively influential series: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, arguably the most critically acclaimed comic of all time. Those comics, like much good art, revolutionized the form by making its competition look dated, overly simplistic, and morally suspect. Superheroes are not to be idealized or worshipped, Watchmen tells us. They are just as greedy and vain and violent as the rest of us. If anything, their power makes them act worse.

But in Crisis and his long-running stint on The New Teen Titans, Pérez had an old-school appreciation for the joy of serialized superhero comics. His colorful characters burst off the page and sometimes barely fit on it—literally. His ability to draw crowd scenes, something other comics artists loathe, was legendary. In a time when superheroes have taken over popular culture, Pérez reminds us why they appealed to readers in the first place. 

Superhero comics are not just for children—sorry, Alan Moore—but at their best, they do evoke a sort of childlike wonder that is hard to explain. (Though when your boyfriend is 20 minutes into explaining the Doctor Strange post-credits scene, you may know what I mean.) I can’t remember much about Crisis or the individual issues of Teen Titans, but I know how important the characters felt to me. I was invested in Robin and Beast Boy and Raven as if they were longtime friends.

Part of the beauty of comics—despite being an industry rife with some not-so-beautiful things—is how easy it is for fans to come to know, or at least feel like they know, popular creators. When Pérez announced in December that his cancer was inoperable and that he had denied further treatment, I was struck by the unbelievable generosity he showed his fans. “I hope to coordinate one last mass book signing to help make my passing a bit easier,” he wrote on Facebook. “I also hope that I will be able to make one last public appearance wherein I can be photographed with as many of my fans as possible, with the proviso that I get to hug each and every one of them. I just want to be able to say goodbye with smiles as well as tears.” 

The following months brought more Facebook updates as Pérez visited with fans and fellow comics creators like Kurt Busiek, with whom he published an amazing DC/Marvel crossover series featuring the Avengers and the Justice League. That series, like Pérez at his best, evoked the thrill of seeing your childhood dreams made manifest. 

I’ll never feel about today’s comics now the way I did as a kid. The ever-expanding superhero-industrial complex has robbed some of that context-free glee from the material, but every time I look at one of Pérez’s pages, I remember what made me sit next to a bookshelf in my parents’ basement, racing to see how the Anti-Monitor would be defeated.

I don’t remember how the heroes won. I just remember how it made me feel. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate