Through the outstanding use of light and shadows, textures and angles, Wrightson walks us to the incredible payoff panel. The characters simply listen or read! The action all takes place in an apartment! This has failure all over it.Įach page and panel begins the building of tension. Lovecraft’s Cool Air in Eerie #62 should have been a disaster in lesser hands, or at least a tough slog to get through when reading it.Īs a script, it’s boring and would be the least interesting thing ever to draw. OK, I know that’s a dodge, so I’ll be quick and digress for a moment on Bernie’s great courage as an artist, at least in my opinion.īernie’s adaptation of H.P. I’m not going to go on about Wrightson’s great skill, his draftsmanship and technical brilliance. All the important stuff to feed my obsession with him - my parents owed Wrightson a lot and never knew it. Bernie also taught me to not take no for an answer when asking my brother to drive me to all the local convenience stores and used book shops to get Bernie’s books. This to guarantee my allowance to afford his comics.

Me, it was Bernie, no doubt.įirst, to do my chores without being told to. Other kids it was Wille Mays or an astronaut. There was this strange name… Wrightson.Īnd Bernie Wrightson was my hero from that instant. I flipped to the credits page, something I’d never done before. My whole opinion changed and that’s when it happened. Swamp Thing #2 bothered me, so two hours or so later I went back and reread it. The Un-Men, creepy Arcane, the strange architecture of the castle and deep-shadowed forests, and Swamp Thing himself. Pretty dramatic to say, you think, then consider: I read Swamp Thing #2 when I was 12. That’s because it’s still influencing me to this day… to this very hour. I contacted Kelley and he graciously agreed to write this moving tribute to his hero, an artist for all time: Bernie Wrightson. For my money, there’s no artist working today whose work unsettles in the same way as Wrightson’s, who can make a printed page come alive with the creeps in such an evocative way.

And when I thought of his spiritual descendants, the artists who carry his torch highest and brightest, I immediately thought of Kelley Jones. When I heard last weekend that Bernie Wrightson died, I thought not just of his considerable body of work (some of which you can enjoy here and here) but also his considerable impact, his influence. This first ran in 2017 when Wrightson died and I’m deeply proud to present it again in honor of his birthday. UPDATED 10/27/19: The late Bernie Wrightson was born 71 years ago.

Berni wrightson a look back