George Pérez was one of the most popular and prolific artists in the US comics industry, drawing nearly every superhero for DC and Marvel Comics and collaborating in the creation of quite a few of them. Yet his work has largely been neglected in comics studies, which tends to focus on other genres and other modes of comics production; even scholarship on superhero comics has prioritized writers at the expense of artists. George Pérez, a new monograph by Patrick L. Hamilton, aims to remedy this. Published as part of the University Press of Mississippi’s Biographix series, the book makes a case for including Pérez in the critical conversation about comics. That case is largely premised on his art, a decision that appropriately foregrounds Pérez’s talents as an artist but also restricts the scope of the book.
The first chapter surveys Pérez’s artistic development from his earliest years working for Marvel Comics in the mid-1970s to his return to Marvel in the 1990s. In the course of tracing this development, Hamilton cites Pérez’s increasingly experimental page layouts as evidence of his struggles to break free of the house styles and artistic conventions of his publishers. He also defends Pérez against critic Robert C. Harvey’s assertion that these layouts are mere “visual gimmickry.” Hamilton conducts deft close readings of Pérez’s use of spatial manipulation, time dilation, and visual continuity to suggest both physical motion and psychological turmoil, creating immersive environments that simulate three-dimensional space on the comics page. Harvey may have dismissed these techniques as having “little narrative impact,” 1 but Hamilton, building on Charles Hatfield’s concept of narrative drawing, convincingly argues that Pérez’s technical command establishes the narrative—that is, his art does not simply illustrate the writer’s script, it creates and shapes the story in its own right. Hamilton also contends that the sheer visual density of Pérez’s art supports the narrative density of the heterogeneous storyworlds that he creates. While this quality made Pérez ideally suited to draw the superhero-heavy team books and continuity-obsessed crossovers of Bronze Age comics, Hamilton suggests that it also places him in the tradition of artistic forerunners such as Jack Kirby. Like Kirby, Pérez conveys the awe and terror of new technologies, though Hamilton makes the case that Pérez’s particular vision of the technological sublime balances the rational and the fantastic to create a kind of exaggerated realism that naturalizes the hyperbolic spectacle.
Subsequent chapters turn from Pérez’s artistic techniques to some of the thematics that emerge in his work, with particular attention to his representation of various forms of identity. Chapter two focuses on his depiction of race and disability, areas in which Pérez worked to diversify the superhero genre. Hamilton carefully traces Pérez’s contributions to comics that he produced in collaboration with other writers, noting his storytelling input without assigning him sole authority over the final product. However, the discussion is largely confined to his art. This approach is useful for breaking out of common patterns in comics scholarship that emphasize literary elements over visual ones, but perhaps too restrictive to do justice to Pérez’s work given his frequent involvement in plotting and character creation. Moreover, Hamilton’s analysis is largely limited to observing whether racialized and disabled characters are depicted heroically or not, reducing complex fields of representation to a single binary. Ignoring the narrative elements of plot, characterization, and dialogue, Hamilton discusses characters such as the White Tiger, Marvel’s first Latino superhero, solely in terms of their anatomy and blocking—perhaps not the most productive approach, given that elsewhere in the book he observes that Pérez gave all his characters the same body types in his early Marvel work. A discussion of the black superheroes Cyborg and Triathlon is more promising as both characters saw more extensive narrative development, yet the chapter still invests most of its attention in the visual representation of these characters, establishing their heroic portrayals but making the same basic visual point. The discussion of disability in The New Teen Titans receives less space but achieves more nuance as Hamilton looks beyond the art to give greater consideration to the plotting and scripting, charting the contradictions of narrative prosthesis and impairment that attach to nearly all depictions of disability in superhero comics.
The third and final chapter shifts to Pérez’s representation of gender. The chapter focuses almost exclusively on depictions of femininity, implicitly conceding masculinity as normative and unmarked. However, that still leaves Hamilton with a wealth of material given Pérez’s highly influential revamp of Wonder Woman in 1986. Unfortunately, this chapter also focuses primarily on his graphic representation of superheroic bodies, leading to lots of itemizing of muscular thighs and spherical breasts and the like—the same basic descriptions of the same heroic forms. Hamilton provides a useful overview of Perez’s changing visual vocabulary as his human figures became more differentiated, though the chapter doesn’t include any illustrations of the more recent work that demonstrates his expanded visual range. Hamilton’s analysis is more successful when he breaks away from the anatomical catalogues to consider Pérez’s writing—an essential consideration, as Pérez quickly assumed responsibility for the plots and scripts as well as the art. Hamilton demonstrates how Pérez avoided the hypersexualized poses and misogynistic plot devices of his artistic contemporaries while still recycling some problematic assumptions in his depictions of the Amazons and the mortal supporting cast, exposing a contrast between the comic’s stated aims and its execution. Ultimately, the chapter is most successful when it abandons the visual taxonomy, as Pérez brings more to the discussion of gender than just his repertoire of body types.
The book closes with a brief discussion of the artist’s final work, George Pérez’s Sirens. Unfortunately, that discussion provides little sense of what the series is about or why it merits attention, settling for an inventory of the various types of diversity highlighted in the series. This tendency to itemize rather than analyze, along with the narrow range of issues that receive such itemization, speaks to one of the book’s main limitations. While Pérez’s long history of representing marginalized figures is both noteworthy and laudable, it isn’t the only part of his work that deserves our attention. There is still more room to engage with the content of his comics, to recognize that narrative drawing extends beyond the politics of the human figure, and to show that Pérez’s comics are important for more than just their inclusivity.
With this particular book, however, there really may not have been more room. The Biographix series publishes slender monographs on prominent comics creators at a size that keeps prices affordable but necessarily limits what each volume can accomplish. Patrick Hamilton’s study offers an astute analysis of Pérez’s art and makes a solid case for his inclusion in comics studies, but it has not begun to exhaust the discussion of this major comics artist.
Footnotes
Hamilton, George Pérez, 24.