Mike Wieringo: The First Four Comics

You probably remember Mike Wieringo’s work on The Fantastic Four or Tellos or The Flash.  Maybe Spider-Man or even Robin.

But before his career took off, he did four comics that you’ve likely never seen before.  Even I hadn’t seen two of them until now.  (Thank goodness for eBay!)

What were those four comics? How did Mike Wieringo break into the comics industry? And how much hair could one Fashion Illustrator turned Comic Book Artist could one man draw?

The First 27 Years in 27 Seconds

Mike Wieringo was born on June 24, 1963.  Yes, you’re doing the math right – he’d have been 60 years old today.  

With his father in the military, he moved around a bit before settling in rural Virginia at the age of 10.

After high school, he was accepted to the School of Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, but had to put it off for several years because he couldn’t afford it. He worked in a grocery store and saved up until he could begin college (after applying again!) in 1987 at the age of 24.  He’d graduate in 1991. 

A Bronze Start

After college, Wieringo worked on his samples.  He spent the first summer doing that full-time before going back to work at the grocery store and working on his samples at night and on the weekends.

Along the way, he attended countless comic conventions, talking to editors and fellow artists, always looking for pointers.  He befriended the Gaijin Studios gang from Atlanta.  They connected him with Millennium Productions. Millennium had the rights to Doc Savage and were looking for an artist.

Wieringo got the job.  For two issues under beautiful covers from Gaijin Studios’ own Brian Stelfreeze,  Wieringo drew Doc Savage as his entry into the comics world.

We All Start Somewhere

In the “Modern Masters: Mike Wieringo” book [Amazon Affiliate link], the content for these two issues is not discussed in detail.  They talk about how he got the gig and then there’s one passing reference to Wieringo not liking it, and that’s about it.

Now that I’ve seen the two issues, I can understand why he didn’t like talking about them.  They were published in May and July of 1992, but there’s very little of the style you know from Wieringo in them.  The art looks stiff. There are too many attempts to add 90s-style ink to the art. The coloring overwhelms everything in an attempt to give it that high-end painterly style that prestige format books at the time had.  

And, yet, there are moments when you can see Wieringo through the haze of his early work.  There’s a hairdo or a facial expression that seems very familiar.  But it’s hidden behind all the other layers, and stopped short by a lack of experience.

The story is – well, I’m not a Doc Savage guy, so I may not be the best judge of it. The story is set in three timelines with flashbacks within flashbacks, and I got confused once or twice. Maybe some previous Savage knowledge would have carried me through.  Terry Collins is the writer and we know he can tell a story well.

In the end, there are moments of Wieringo’s future in this art, but a lot of early artwork shortcomings, too.  People stand up too straight, they look like action figures when sitting on chairs. Panels are often sized to fit the art rather than the page. Parts of people pop out of panels at odd times.

It’s obvious there’s something there, though. As bad as I make it sound, it’s only because I know what’s coming next. As a first-time comic book artist, it’s impressive in its own right. There’s a lot more skill on those pages than many others showed who were just breaking into the industry, even around the same time.

The inks on both issues came from Marcus Rollie, who also took over coloring in the second issue, where the overall color palette was a lot brighter. The darker first issue was colored by Rozanna Stanage and Deirdre De Lay. The lettering is uncredited.

Breaking Into DC

In the summer of 1991, Wieringo attended San Diego Comic-Con.  There, he met legendary DC New Talent Director Neal Pozner, who eventually recommended him to the new editors of the “Justice League Quarterly” series, Ruben Diaz and Brian Augustyn.  They took a chance on the new kid and gave him a couple of stories to work on, with an extended deadline to allow for his day job.

Both stories featured the women of the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis era Justice League. Interestingly, they ended up being published in the reverse order from what they were drawn in.  Being a quarterly anthology series, I’m sure it was just a matter of putting the right length of stories together to fill each 64-page issue.

These issues were published with Spring and Summer 1993 dates on them.

Super Powered Slumber Party (JLQ #11)

The first story to see print was made up of two chapters.  Lee Moder drew the second half, but Wieringo drew the opening 15-page chapter of the story written by William Messner-Loebs. Richard Pace is the inker, credited as “Richard Space”.

It features Wonder Woman, Ice, Doctor Light, Power Girl, and Crimson Fox bickering like you’d expect them to, with Max Lord asking them to guard the wife of a fictional middle eastern country’s emir who’s set to appear at the United Nations.  (It feels like the template by which many JL stories started back in the day.)

As a team-building exercise, Wonder Woman invites all the girls up to a suite for a slumber party.  Unfortunately, she learned about those from Blue Beetle, who took some liberties with the traditions.  Hilarity mildly ensues.

It tries hard to fit into the story mold of the time, but doesn’t have the sharp comedic timing of a Giffen/DeMatteis script, for sure.  It has its moments, but it never feels quite right…

Wieringo’s art is instantly recognizable, though still in its early days.  As a debut story, it’s very impressive.  Backgrounds are all there.  The perspective looks good.  Anatomy looks good with some moments of Kevin Maguire-esque facial expressions.  The hair gets out of control sometimes, but that’s also a bit of a Ringo stylistic trademark. He did, after all, have a Disney animation influence. (Seriously, check out Ariel’s hair sometime…)  His storytelling is clear.  There are a couple of odd transitions, but I think that’s in the script more than the art.

WIeringo didn’t skimp on anything in drawing this story.

OK, so Wonder Woman is a bit too skinny here. Check out the always-amazing MikeWieringoArt.com for later renditions of the same character to see how far he came.

You can see the Kevin Maguire influence here a little bit, but Wieringo was also always good with facial expressions to begin with.

So many comics feature rooms with floors that have a checkerboard pattern. My theory on that is that no artist wants to erase all those perspective grid lines, so they make them look purposeful. Instant checkerboard pattern floors everywhere!

Bad Men and Big Hair (JLQ #12)

This story happens under the most 90s of 90s covers you can imagine. Just look at that thing. It’s magnificent!

“On the Road” is a complete 13-page short story, written by Kim Fryer with inks from Mike Christian. Naive Ice wants to visit Albuquerque to see the painted desert, the tumbleweeds, and the road runners!  (DC was owned by Warner Bros, after all.)

Nobody else wants to go, except Doctor Light. So begins their road trip! Except, their car breaks down along the way. The closest mechanic is a male chauvinist pig.  They meet up with some rough-and-tumble bikers who are, well, male chauvinist pigs and all the other cliches you could imagine.

There’s some attempt at a message of strong independent women doing their thing and showing the boys what they are capable of, but it’s not very convincing.

Eventually, Ice uses her powers to literally cool off the motorcycle gang and Doctor Light uses her smarts to sort of fix the car and then asserts herself to get the mechanic to do his job when it doesn’t actually work.  Valuable personal lessons are learned and –-

No, it’s a mostly unfunny and awkward story.

Some artistic points worth talking about:

Guy Gardner’s right hand and elbow break the pattern border, but his head doesn’t. His elbow is behind his head, so they both should break the panel border. I’d even argue that Gardner should be repositioned a bit so his other hand breaks the border, too, for clarity’s sake.

We saw a lot of this effect in comics at the time: TV screens get this pattern put over them that kind of erases every other line of pixels.  (Except these would be cathode ray tubes, so it’s just lines of the picture, not lines of pixels.). These days, that effect is super simple to do with a computer.  I wonder how they did it in 1993?  Some kind of Zip-a-Tone type pattern that gets cut and pasted over the art?  Leave a comment if you know.

Doctor Light’s hair is gloriously lopsided. She pulls it all over to the right side of her head, but at times it crosses over and in front of her face.  It’s wild. 

Putting aside her hair, though, those are unmistakably Wieringo faces. His style is already coming into focus here more regularly than in that Doc Savage book.

Overall, for a first-timer drawing a DC comic, this is really good work.  Ringo does the best with the script he’s given, varying camera angles, using repeated panels for comedic effect, and drawing non-superhero people wearing actual clothes, not spandex suits. His slight homage to Thelma and Louise along the way works for being a reference without being a parody or trying to draw laughs from it.

The Next (Quick) Step

On the basis of those two JLQ stories (and some sample Flash pages), “The Flash” editor Brian Augustyn offered Mike Wieringo the gig as regular artist on the series.

It’s a comic that I bought off the newsstands because I had heard Flash was a good series and this was a good jumping-on point, but also because it had an Alan Davis cover. Finding Wieringo’s art between those covers was a nice bonus.  At the time, I’m sure I didn’t realize how new he was to comics.

Augustyn had one condition on giving Ringo the job:  He had to finally quit his day job at the grocery store where he had worked since high school.  Wieringo agreed.

It also meant he was able to move out of his parents’ house at the age of 30.

On Breaking In

Every comic creator breaks into the industry in a different way. On the surface, Wieringo’s story looks like a simple case of the kid who went to art school, got experience with a small independent comic, and then broke into the wild world of Marvel/DC through some short stories before landing a monthly book.

But there was much more to it than that. It was the story of a guy who worked a regular day job for years just to afford art school many years after most would go. Bonus: he planned on majoring in Fashion Illustration but had to change when that industry suddenly collapsed and the school canceled the program.

He left art school and faced a comics industry where the predominant art style was the complete opposite of his own, but he didn’t change styles to take an easier way in. He just continued to become a better artist in his own style, and that won him some fans in the right places at the right time.

Those fans and that timing were no doubt helped by his push to visit as many conventions, meet as many people from all corners of the industry, and send as many samples out as possible, combined with the humbleness to ask for and accept advice.

It’s a different world today, but it’s still an inspiring story in its own right.

P.S. If you don’t have the “Modern Masters” book for Mike Wieringo, find it. It’s really turned out to be the definitive biography of Wieringo, and I pulled lots of material for this article from it.