FOCUS ON GEORGE PEREZ

Having had success with their FOCUS ON JOHN BYRNE volume dedicated to perhaps the most popular mainstream artist of the decade, Fantagraphics decided to follow up with a similar volume on one of the other hottest artists of the era, George Perez. At the time this volume saw print, George had garnered great acclaim for his work on NEW TEEN TITANS and he was in the midst of illustrating CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS–hence, the cover image. He hadn’t yet taken on WONDER WOMAN nor branched out into writing as well as drawing. But he was still a major force on the landscape.

For this release, Fantagraphics commissioned comics journalist Heidi MacDonald to interview the subject himself. As opposed to the earlier JOHN BYRNE release, this one doesn’t appear to have had any assistance from DC, and so it needed to be illustrated with either images photographed right out of the printed comics or else black and white material that Perez was able to provide.

This volume also reproduced three pages from the aborted AVENGERS/JLA crossover that Perez had been penciling, one of the earliest times those pages could be seen by the public.