The Work of Berni Wrightson.
From a very early age I have always had a great love of American comics. ‘The Beano’ and ‘Dandy’ used to tickle me sometimes, but artwork-wise, they just didn’t cut it. When I bought my comics as a kid they were more along the lines of ‘The House of Mystery’.
Comic art is sadly overlooked a lot of the time. It gets more recognition today than it ever did, but still not as much as it deserves. There are a lot of truly amazing artists in the world of comics and one of my absolute favourites has to be Berni Wrightson.
Wrightson illustrated several of the stories in ‘The House of Mystery’, but he hit the big time when he started working on ‘Swamp Thing’. His highly stylised drawings were perfect for the story and fans could not get enough.
Over the years he has gone on to work in many other areas. He has dabbled with album covers, films and book illustration. Meatloaf’s ‘Bat out of Hell’ and ‘Dead Ringer’ were both drawn by Berni Wrightson, as were the illustrations for ‘Cycle of the Werewolf’ and ‘The Dark Tower’ by Stephen King. He also created a whole graphic novel of the film, ‘Creepshow’ when it was released in 1982. Comics that contain the work of Wrightson are hugely collectable and they always hold their value. If you want to get buy any of his stuff then it is certainly going to cost you.
Some of his greatest drawings are the ones for ‘Frankenstein’ and the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Berni Wrightson really is one of the great ‘daddy illustrators’ in the comic scene and he is very highly respected.