Leaving behind oceans of ink: George, Neal and Carlos

There have been great losses in the comic book world over the past decade or so - I literally miss Carlos Ezquerra every single day - and some of the artists we are losing are absolute titans.

But most of them have had decades of work in comics, and have produced an amazing amount of art, so it always feels there is so much new wonder to discover, and it doesn't really feel like there are really gone. Not yet.

There is just so much still to discover from such prolific talents, working from such a young age. I can flip through any random stack of silver age comics in the back issue bins of any comic store, and I'll see a Neal Adams cover I've never seen before, and it will inevitably be gorgeous. There are so many covers like this that I've never seen, and it's always a delight to see a new one. There are also wonderfully primitive sketches that have sat unseen in private collections for years getting dusted off and shown off to the world.

Adams did anything and everything for DC for a while, and it's all dynamic and weird. I do definitely  lose interest in his art once he decided comics looked better with a colour palette that literally looked like puke, but the dozens and dozens of covers and fill-ins and pin-ups he pushed out for DC as a keen young artist are still so wonderful.

I still ache for the massively assured line of George Pérez in my superhero comics, and he set the standard for thin detail in superheroics, and I still have my breath taken away by some of the things he did back in the 70s that I somehow missed, kung-fu and sci-fi comics that are 50 years old and still feel more alive than 90 percent of the stuff on the new release shelf.

The various TwoMorrows publications are full of sketches from these two masters, and some of the best covers of Back Issue Magazine in the past few years have been slightly reworked versions of Pérez masterpieces.

But after growing up on a steady diet of Joe Dredd and Johnny Alpha, it's still King Carlos that I miss the most. His sense of bulk, the amazing amount of grit on everything he did, that weird black edging he would do.  And even after devouring everything I've seen of the artist's work for almost a half century now, there is still more to find.

I can google his name and see some sketch I'd never seen before, and there is a tonne of his pre-2000ad war comics that I need to indulge in one day. Ezquerra was a massive talent from such  a young age, and even his earliest, clumsiest attempts are powerful and thrusting. 

All these greats are no longer with us, but their art lives on, and it's as much a privilege to see it as it ever was.