Honoring Marvel And DC’s Greatest Artist – George Pérez – Cracked.com | Articles

2 Pérez Finally Drew “All Of Them”

Once his legend was fully established, Pérez received three chances to achieve his oft-stated goal of drawing “all of” a company’s heroes. 

My fellow Cracked writer Maxwell Yezpitelok recently explored JLA/Avengers, so I won’t go into that again.

Almost two decades before JLA/Avengers, Pérez drew every single DC Comics character in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Wolfman was an editor at DC at this point and pushed for a series like Crisis to reconcile and simplify the company’s continuity encompassing many realities. He turned to his trusted creative partner Pérez to draw the comic and–for the first time–be his co-plotter. 

Together, the duo pioneered an art form ubiquitous to modern comics: the company-wide crossover. Crisis allowed Pérez to have a hand in defining the visual language of this new storytelling vehicle. Pages feature an average of seven to eight panels, an economical use of space to fit in all the characters and action involved. Pérez also created the iconography of “crisis” stories in the DC Universe: red skies, multiple Earths hovering in space, fractured “walls” between universes rendered as shattered glass, and more.

While his obligation to the “War of the Gods” crossover at DC would cause him to leave midway through the fourth of six issues, Pérez produced some admirably demented imagery in Jim Starlin’s Infinity Gaunlet. Worth the price of admission alone is a splash page of Thanos wielding the titular gauntlet while surrounded by images of tidal waves attacking Earth and a dinosaur vomiting its own skeleton; I am including screenshots with this article, so you don’t think I’m making this up.