Not Frank merely...........

....but Quitely as well:


 Looking at those great Moebius pics I was reminded of  Scottish artist Frank Quietly ( pseudenom of Vincent Deighan) who sometimes displayed a similar style. Winner of several Eisner awards and best known for "All-Star Superman", "Flex Mentallo", "New X-men" and many others..

Quitely began working with the Scottish underground comics title “Electric Soup” in 1990. He wrote and drew “The Greens”, a parody of” The Broons” strip published by D.C. Thompson, the main publisher of children’s comics in Great Britain but, based in Scotland. Thompson are known for long-running British comic magazines “The Beano” and “The Dandy”  which appeared weekly and are still being published, as well as a wide range of British comics oriented towards school students both male and female and additional magazines of practical science and engineering topics which were popular in Britain.

Working on this book, Deighan adopted the pseudonym of Frank Quitely (a twist on the common British expression of "quite frankly"), as he didn’t want his family to know it was his work because of the racy content of the underground comics.

 “Electric Soup” was only distributed locally in Glasgow,until it was picked up by John Brown Publishing for national distribution in the UK.. This brought Quitely's work to the attention of “Judge Dredd Megazine”( a spin-off of iconic British Sci-Fi magazine “2000 AD”) editor, David Bishop, fast rising to prominence and being voted among the fans' favourite five artists in an end-of-year survey. By 1994 he had started work in various stories in Paradox Press's series of The Big Book of graphic novels, as well as work for Dark Horse Presents for Dark Horse Comics.

                        (2000 AD, started publication in 1977. This cover by Brian Bolland)

His big break into American comics was “Flex Mentallo”, a Doom Patrol spin-off written by fellow Glaswegian Grant Morrison for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, in 1996. Quitely's work proved immensly popular and this launched him into more work for Vertigo. Initially he was put to work on strips for anthology titles such as Weird War Tales, and drew three issues of Jamie Delano's 2020 Visions, as well as various covers for DC. He later drew his first full length graphic novel, “Batman: The Scottish Connection”, with writer Alan Grant (in which “The Greens” make a cameo appearance). Quitely and Grant also worked on a one-shot titled “Lobo: The Hand-to-Hand Job” (later retitled as “It's a Man's World”). Although Quitely did all the pencils, the story was not released, supposedly due to reported nakedness of Lobo for at least half the issue, as well as other scenes of a  sexual nature.

Quitely and Morrison collaborated again,in 2000, on “JLA: Earth 2”. This graphic novel was met with a largely positive critical response, and later that year Quitely took over from Bryan Hitch as artist on The Authority, with Mark Millar as writer. This run proved to be highly controversial, and Quitely's art suffered censorship by DC Comics due mainly to the violent content of Millar's stories. In addition, the title was hit  by delays, due in part to Quitely's slow drawing speed and the time he took off to draw the final issue of Morrison's “The Invisibles”. Quitely left The Authority to draw “New X-Men”. Quitely also managed to find time to illustrate a Neil Gaiman-written story for the hardcover graphic novel, “Sandman: Endless Nights”.

(more to follow)

Planetronix, Earth,

12.04.2012