10 Reasons George Pérez Is the Greatest Comic Book Artist of All Time

Savas Abadsidis August 10, 2022

George Pérez, the greatest comic book storyteller of our generation, died this past May 7th from pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

According to Deadline: During his career the Bronx born Pérez worked on nearly every best selling title from both DC Comics and Marvel including launching The New Teen Titans in 1980 with writer Marv Wolfman (they created Cyborg, Raven and Starfire and had Dick Grayson become Nightwing).

But their most massive achievement came late in the ’80s when they helped reshape the DC Universe with Crisis on Infinite Earths, a reboot that saw several major characters killed off in a multiverse saga that still resonates in popular culture.

Pérez is also credited with rebooting Wonder Woman in 1987, and for two separate runs with the Avengers series.

Born in the South Bronx of New York City on June 9, 1954, Pérez went to work as a studio assistant at Marvel before he turned 20. Pérez’s first published comic book work came in 1974, Deathlok in Astonishing Tales #25 in 1974.

He soon moved on to his first regular feature, the Sons of the Tiger feature in the book the Deadly Hands of Kung Fu.

He began drawing the Avengers in 1975, then added work on the Fantastic Four. He also began work for DC in the 1980s, drawing Justice League of America, which meant he had locked up the art for the most popular heroes of the era.

In 2014, he drew his last regular series, the Sirens miniseries for BOOM!

In 2017, Pérez was inducted into The Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. In 2019, he officially retired from regular comic book art citing ill health.

Following his death, Jim Lee, DC’s Publisher and Chief Creative Officer said: George had an art style that was both dynamic and incredibly expressive. His art was the perfect storytelling canvas for some of the most important events in DC history. While he will be sorely missed, his work will live on with a countless number of fans, as well as all the talent he’s influenced over the years.

We think Pérez is the GOAT.

Here are the ten reasons why:

1. The New Teen Titans: If Pérez had done nothing else, the success of Titans would be a in and of itself a crowning achievement for most. But the fact that Pérez and writer Marv Wolfman took a team book that had been previously an underperforming, if not outright failure, that featured some of the company’s biggest trademark heroes, all of whom were the teen sidekicks to members of the Justice League and made it DC’s number one selling book for a quarter of a decade was a phenomenal achievement.

For the much of the 1980s Titans and Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men vied for the top selling title every month. Wolfman and Pérez also created three new characters who became iconic in their own right: Cyborg, Raven, and Starfire. Numerous TV, movie, and toy franchises endure including current hits Teen Titans Go!, Young Justice, and HBO Max’s Titans. Indeed Victor Sone aka Cyborg’s story is the heart and core of both Joss Whedon’s and Zack Syder’s edits of Justice League. Stone is also the main and POV character of HBO Max’s Doom Patrol. He is one of the most prominent and well known African American comic book super hero characters in the world.

Above: The New Teen Titans # 1 published by DC Comics on August 14, 1980 would become the company’s best selling title for the next 25 years.

2. Crisis on Infinite Earths The reason we throw words and phrases like the multiverse, parallel universes, and variants around in daily convos today is largely due to the success of DC’s 1985 company wide crossover that was intended to streamline the fictional company’s fictional universe for its 50th anniversary year. Crisis changed everything, and killed everyone from Supergirl and Wonder Woman to the Flash.

Above: Crisis on Infinite Earths (Volume 1) with a cover date of October, 1985 was published on July 4, 1985. It featured the death of Superman’s cousin Kara Zor-El aka Supergirl murdered by the villainous Anti-Monitor. “We live on remembering and honoring the past, but always looking to the future. Good-bye, Kara… Linda Lee… Supergirl. I will miss you forever,” says Kal-El aka Superman at the end.

3. Victor Stone/Cyborg “Victor,” Pérez begins, “is probably the closest to my own history, because of the fact that he’s a ghetto youth. He had the disadvantage of being a smart kid in a dumb society. He ended up becoming a very warm person even though he’s very big, and very strong. He’s not afraid to be warm. He’s got a big heart.

Above: Per a 1987 interview George Perez based his New #TeenTitans character designs on these real life folks. Vic Stone (Cyborg) was based on NFL fullback Jim Brown.

Pérez said this in an interview with the now defunct magazine Amazing Heroes #50 in 1984 via Comics Vine.

“Since Marv was doing the majority of the plotting for the first year, and I was helping after the fact, he had more of an idea of what Victor would be. I was honing it up via body language and other character aspects, directing Marv into his interpretation. Marv always intended, from the very beginning, that those first issues where he came off as the stereotyped angry Black man was just the fact that he had a legitimate reason to be angry, which had nothing to do with being Black.

Once he got rid of the reason-namely the resentment of his father over the death of his mother-he became a very warm individual. That was the first sequence that showed the warm side of the Titans, the death of [Silas] Stone, which led immediately into issue #8, ‘A Day in the Lives.’ We really were cooking by that point.”

Since then, the only anger Victor has shown has been borne from a point of insecurity, like the dilemma with Sarah Simms which culminated in issue #33. It would have been so easy to present the close White female friend of a Black male as the classic liberal fluff, and cop out on all sides. Wolfman and Pérez have avoided that, and have made the young instructor a very three-dimensional person, and her friendship with Victor a warm, straightforward, honest camaraderie.

“Also,” Pérez says, “we didn’t want to go into a valid criticism we heard about the usual Black-White relationship. Some use the cliche that, in order for a Black character to be legitimate, he must prove it by loving a White person. They could very well be lovers at any given time. But the fact is that they’re just very good friends. It’s not very often, and particularly the young fans don’t understand it, that we just have the concept of a man and a woman being very good friends without being lovers.

There are certain things we want so spin off from, such as his hold on humanity. There’s a possibility that with science progressing, his cyborg body will be modified. Who knows, Victor may look totally different in a couple of years. One thing STAR. may suggest so him is that they’d like to replace more of his human flesh wish robotic parts. Victor starts dealing with a problem that he’s never had so deal with before; not just she loss of his humanity, but the loss of his being Black! Because writers don’t want to deal with race, Black characters are sometimes not dealt with appropriately. But Victor is Black, there’s no getting around is. He wants so hold onto his Blackness; he’s proud of it, he was born with it, and he’s not going so run away from is.

Part of this also will explain why he lives in Hell’s Kitchen, in a predominately Black neighborhood, despite the fact he could afford to live someplace else. I want to establish that he’s like the “Shane” of his neighborhood. He’s the local hero here. I’m also establishing little things he does to hold onto his humanity, like wearing an eye patch sometimes over his cybernetic eye so that his human eye does not get weak because there’s a better eye he can rely on. He’s holding onto his humanity and his Blackness.

A lot of the edge that Marv and I felt Victor had has been missing from him lately, and we’ll go hack to honing down on what makes him unique and on the elements of his personality that were always from what I knew of the character rather than what Marv knew of him. Marv was never raised in that type of neighborhood, and I was. I understand his personality better. We’re using that so bring back the edge to Victor Stone.

Above: Perez’ rendering of Victor Stone/Cyborg in 1982. Perez has said that his design sensibility was influenced by Marvel Comics’ Deathlok. Perez broke into comics as an assistant to Rich Buckler, co-creator of Deathlok.

4. The Avengers Perez work on Marvel’s Avengers took the book into new territory and set a high bar for the top tier book it would later become.

His work on Avengers ironically led to Perez becoming penciller on DC’s Justice League of America where Perez also raised the bar on what that team book should be.

Pérez’ influence on the look of Wanda Maximoff aka The Scarlet Witch endures through her significance to this day.

5. Justice League of America When Perez started doing Justice League of America and brought his eye for detail to the flagship title it was a game changer. In fact his iteration of the semi-annual Crisis on Two Earths crossovers between the JLA and Earth-2 home to DC’s golden age heroes, the Justice Society of America that would lead him to do Crisis on Infinite Earths.