Barry Windsor-Smith and Bob Wiacek - Archer and Armstrong #6 Splash Page 3 Original Art (Valiant, 1993)

Source

some Paintings by Barry Windsor-Smith.

Barry Windsor Smith Bloodshot #1 Cover Original Art and Hand-Colored Color Guide Production Art (Valiant, 1993)

Eternal Warrior, Vol. 1 # 08 and Archer & Armstrong, Vol. 1 # 08 had interlocking cover artwork by Barry Windsor-Smith.

Archer and Armstrong #4: If Killer Ninja Nuns Be My Destiny

by Barry Windsor-Smith; Bob Wiacek; Maurice Fontenot and Jade Moede

Valiant

I really like the title.😄

This series showcased one of the best things about BWS’s work. He’s funny. His comics are often really, really funny. His sense of humor pervades all of his published work as well.

And if you look back through the list of the truly great creators that have worked in comics, they share some common traits.

1.) They write and draw their own stuff, almost exclusively. They bounce from publisher to publisher, but they are at their best doing their own books. Alan Moore is the only writer that’s in the Hall of Fame. Everyone else is a writer/artist.

2.) They all regularly produced light-hearted humor based work. For playboy, for Mad magazine, for Cracked, National Lampoon, or whoever. They all made funny comic book stories on the regular. Comics aren’t just action and babes. To be great, there has to be a mix of humor, sadness, suspense, action, romance, and more. And being able to handle shifting tones and emotional content like that is the hallmark of the truly special artists in this field.

Barry Windsor-Smith - Archer & Armstrong #6 Cover Original Art

Bob Layton inked Barry on this one.

Rune #1

by Barry Windsor- Smith; Alex Bialy;Keith Conroy and Patrick Owsley

Valiant

pages from Deathmate: Prologue by Barry Windsor-Smith, with Inks by Jim Lee, and Colors by Joe Chiodo.

Remember the time when Solar and Void banged so hard that they destroyed the entire universe? 😈

I remember an incredibly beautiful prologue issue of a comic book, followed by months of waiting between each issue, and then Valiant folded amongst a shit-storm of controversy, and the whole comic book collectors market went belly up.

In a few short months, everything awesome about the ‘90s comics turned into everything horrible about the ‘90s comics.

Valiant in the ‘90s represented both the best and then the worst of that era.

GORGEOUS artwork. Flat out, some of the prettiest stuff ever published, using the best available publishing qualities. The paper, the colors, all of it was top notch. With BWS as the art director.

The writing was equally fantastic. Valiant scared the crap out of Marvel and DC when it debuted, because Jim Shooter had all of the best talent in the industry working together in a brand new, completely cohesive universe that was designed from day one to work as a fully formed line of stories. All of the ships sailing in the same direction.

Deathmate was a crossover promotion with Image.

Everybody wanted to make money by combining the hottest new property on the shelves - Valiant - with the highest selling artists on the shelves: the Image founders.

And it was a complete shit-show.

The Image founding artists were famous for their sales records in the public eye. From the publishers’ point of view, they were famous for missed deadlines.

Rob Liefeld is notoriously undependable for monthly books. Jim Valentino reportedly had to fly over-night in order sit in a hotel room and make Rob finish pages of Deathmate so he could ink them. Seriously.

Jim Lee needed about a year of lead-time to get Batman: Hush on the shelves as a monthly.

Marc Silvestri once told the story of how he got hired by Marvel: TL, DR-he lied to the portfolio reviewer about how long a single pinup took him to complete (he said it was a single day, it was more like a week). And to this day, Marc uses a studio of understudies to finish his backgrounds. That’s how Mike Turner got his start: backgrounds for Silvestri.

I loved the first iteration of Valiant, but it’s bittersweet.

I do remember hearing about the chronic lateness of Image books. I also recall that Liefeld’s issue of the crossover, Deathmate Red, came out after the entire event was already over! Very unprofessional.

Yep. Read the credits on Comics.org for the Deathmate tie-in books. All dream-teams, and every book was late. One of the issues had a cover by Joe Quesada, with Inks by Marc Silvestri.

Pretty artwork, but unprofessional attitudes are what killed the popularity of Deathmate. Readers lost interest, and both publishers lost a lot of money. Talent costs money, and when the talent does not come through, it turns opportunity into a risky venture, and then it snowballed into a disaster. Lots of variant covers with different colors of chromium holofoil, and the whole thing just imploded. I know store owners that had multiple longboxes full of variant covers that sold on NBD for over a hundred bucks, and those same variants became worthless almost over-night. Deathmate was the death of Valiant’s first run of comics, and it weirdly heralded the end of the ‘90s comics boom, which culminated in Marvel Comics going bankrupt under Bob Harras.

Fans today have a weird nostalgia for ‘90s comics that I, as a fan that grew up reading during those years, do not understand. I get why they were popular, but I also remember the context of those books. I lost interest in comics by the time the Onslaught crossover happened at Marvel. I was not surprised when they went bust.

I came back to the fold in College, and the people that complain about Joe Quesada’s tenure as Marvel’s EIC clearly do not remember the Bob Harras years.

Serialized Comic book stories reflect the culture of their time. They don’t create it. They reflect it. Context is therefore inherently vital to understanding comic book stories and illustrative artwork. It’s not just what pictures are pretty, it’s why and how those pictures came about, and the stories being published are often the tip of the iceberg for what was happening on the creative end of things.

As for Rob, I defend that guy as much as I can, but he habitually makes it difficult for his fans to defend him. His comics are fun to read. They are mindless, and the artwork is pretty much awful, but it makes me feel like I’m 10 years old.

Rob’s artwork is not great, but from what I have heard and read over the years, the real problem is that he is unprofessional. He is hard to work with, notoriously slow to produce, and there are numerous reports of him being shady when it comes to payment.

Rob’s work is like that classic Woody Allen joke: “The food here is terrible! And such small portions!”

That being said, I love the guy. He’s awesome in person, and he is enthusiastic and he has created some great stuff.

Context. It’s all about context.