Obituaries

Adrienne Roy, a popular colorist of the '80s and beyond, has passed away, an email from her ex husband Tony Tollin informs us. She was only 57. Adrienne was a fixture of the comics of...

The new issue of Revolver magazine salutes the rock greats who died this year, and has a special painted cover by JG Jones, artists of such things as WANTED and FINAL CRISIS. The cover depicts Ronnie James Dio, Slipknot’s Paul Gray, Avenged Sevenfold’s the Rev, Type O Negative’s Peter Steele, Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell, Metallica’s Cliff Burton, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Ozzy Osbourne’s Randy Rhoads, Queen’s Freddie Mercury, and Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley and it is available as a free poster in the issue. rocking together in heaven. The cover painting also appears as a free poster

We are remiss in not mentioning that Irvin Kershner, (above left) director of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, died over the weekend. Kersh, as he was known, was the last person ever known to argue...

While he will be long remembered for his timeless, side-splitting, searing portrayal of Lt. Frank Drebin, we shouldn't forget Leslie Nielsen's earlier stint as a stolid, upright leading man that allowed his later send-ups of this same role to pack such punch. And of course, he was pretty memorable in FORBIDDEN PLANET, a classic '50s SF version of The Tempest that also introduced Robbie the Robot on a waiting world.

One of The New Yorker's most iconic cartoonists, Leo Cullum has passed away at age 68. The NY Times obituary has an associated slide show, and proves that some New Yorker cartoons will actually make you laugh out loud.

Silver Age inking manstay Mike Esposito has passed away at the age of 83, according to numerous online sources. Esposito was best known for his collaboration with penciller Ross Andru on Superman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man and hundreds of other books.

The Wildstorm blog has a series of tributes to colorists Jonny Rench who died over the weekend at the age of 28. Among those he worked with, Neil Goodge, Liam Sharp, Trevor Hairsine, and this from Gail SImone, whose Welcome to Tranquility series he colored:

Colorist Jonny Rench passed away this weekend of a heart attack at the insanely young age of 28, it was reported via Twitter. Rench was a Wildstorm mainstay and colored such books as The Authority, The Highwayman and many, many more. More of his art can be seen here.

The late John Callahan -- the paraplegic cartoonist who passed away last month -- is remembered with some excerpts from one of his cartoon collections.

Or at least that's what the poster says. Click for the full size version so you can see the single sinister spot of moisture on Yogi's nose—mucus? phlegm? or...something else???—and the light glinting off his vampire fangs. Brrrrrr. "Good things come in bears." How much did the people who sat around coming up with this slogan get paid?

It would have pleased Harvey Pekar, I think, that his passing yesterday was noted in every media outlet from the New Yorker to EW, and not just because they made a movie about him, but as a literary figure of worth and stature. Harvey's life's work was in showing that the ordinary was important, and a working class existence was not a prison but a journey through the profound and beautiful that anyone could experience if they took the time. He found that beauty in simple, quotidian things and experiences that others might have found trivial or mundane, but in the end his message was that what else is there? Life as it is lived is the most precious gift of all.

The Cleveland Plains Dealer is reporting that underground comics legend Harvey Pekar died last night. Pekar's wife, Joyce Brabner found him dead at about 1 am. Pekar had battled lymphoma previously, as chronicled in Our Cancer Year, but the cause of death is awaiting an autopsy. Pekar was best known as author of American Splendor, an autobiographical comic that adapted Pekar's lowly life as a filing clerk at the Cleveland VA into a journey of humor, drama and insight as memorable as any fictional hero, hiring artist friends such as R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Frank Stack and others to illustrate his stories. American Splendor was an early self-publishing success story of sorts -- while its acclaim gained Pekar enough notoriety for him to become a semi-regular on the David Letterman Show (until erratic on-air behavior got him banned) he still had to work at the VA to rely on getting a pension and continuing to make a living -- indie comics was not a cash cow.