John Cassaday died in his longtime home of New York City on Sept. 9. He was 52. Born Dec. 14, 1971, in Fort Worth, Texas, Cassaday first broke into comics at Boneyard Press and Caliber Press in the early to mid-1990s. But it was after meeting writer Mark Waid at the Big Apple Con in New York that his career took off.
"John came up to me at a convention in the '90s at Madison Square Garden, showing me his work in hopes of a critique,” Waid said. “I had nothing to critique. He was there, as far as I was concerned. His grasp of storytelling and anatomy was in place already.”
“John was pleasant, he was polite and well-mannered, and when he showed me his portfolio, I also knew he was tremendously talented for a newcomer. The next morning, I was having breakfast with writer Jeff Mariotte, who mentioned he was looking for an illustrator for his next series, Desperadoes. Boy, did he say that to the right guy, because I had just the artist in mind," Waid said. “Outside of that fortuitous referral, I refuse to take any real credit for 'discovering' John Cassaday. I can’t take credit for having functioning eyeballs.”
“I mentioned that I was searching for the right artist for a horror-western series I was developing for Homage Comics, the creator-owned imprint at WildStorm Productions,” Mariotte said. “Jim [Lee] wanted a western, and knowing of my love for the genre, he asked me to come up with something. That something became Desperadoes. Anyway, I told Mark of my mission, and to my surprise, he had, the day before, come into some samples of work by a young artist named John Cassaday. He showed me the samples, and I was impressed. The storytelling was terrific, the technical aspects well done. The guy could draw! And he lived in Texas, which meant he would be familiar with western landscapes, horses, cowboy hats, etc. I took the samples home and showed them to Jim, who agreed that Cassaday had a lot of potential. Then I reached out to John, and received an enthusiastic response. I sent him the pitch I'd given Jim, which included brief descriptions of the main characters and the overall thrust of the initial story arc. John sent back sketches of the characters and some of the western scenery. They were brilliant, and my search was over.”
Desperadoes was Cassaday’s first big project, and over the course of that miniseries, he grew as an artist with each issue.
"John definitely improved fast,” Mariotte said. “He was willing to try anything, and I don't remember anybody ever coming up with a scenario that he couldn't pull off beautifully. He inked his own work, and at that time he was being colored by Nick Bell. Everything I saw in those initial sample pages was there, and more. He didn't take shortcuts – he drew backgrounds that lent a sense of concrete reality to the scenes (which helps when you're asking readers to embrace various weird supernatural/horrific storylines. He did the research necessary to get things right. As pages for each issue came in, I was blown away by the beauty of the work, by the creative layouts that looked great and still told the story, by the details he worked onto the pages. I've worked with many good artists, but the only times I really felt that particular sense of joy when I looked at new pages and saw my story looking so much better than it had in my head were when I worked with John Cassaday, and then with John Severin on the second Desperadoes miniseries.”
It was while working on Desperadoes that Cassaday met one of his friends and closest and longest collaborators, Laura Martin. “I was a staff colorist at Wildstorm,” Martin said via email. “I knew about Desperadoes from Jeff Mariotte, who showed me pages as they came in. I connected more to the pages as I helped color them. I was also occasionally doing some graphic design for Wildstorm, and one time I created an ad where I misspelled John’s name. I can’t recall if John corrected me in person or in email, but I never forgot his name (or its spelling) after that.”
Martin continued to work at Wildstorm, which brought her into more and close contact with Cassaday. “The coloring department handled numerous titles at a time, and each title had an AD [art director] who liaised with the editor, assigned pages and tasks to various colorists, and handled corrections and pre-press finalizing. Nick Bell was the AD on Desperadoes, and I worked closely with him. I ended up coloring more and more of the pages as we continued on the series, and if I recall correctly, I was assistant AD on the last issue. Right around that time, the coloring department was experimenting with dedicating single colorists or very small teams to the top titles, rather than everyone coloring everything. We were also phasing out color guides. Stormwatch was one of those books in that transitional phase. When Warren Ellis and Tom Raney took over on Vol 1 #38, I became the book’s AD. We still used color guides up through the first few issues of Volume 2, but I had a smaller team of colorists to manage. When Bryan Hitch came on board, there were no more color guides, and I was the lead colorist. That put me in very regular contact with Warren Ellis, and I kept in touch with John through Desperadoes as well.”
The weird western miniseries showed that Cassaday was a skilled artist, but it also showed that he was interested in storytelling and experimenting with art in ways that would let him tell the story differently, something that would quickly come to define his work. “As anyone who's watched his progress, especially his work on Planetary, where he experimented with all kinds of effects, figuring out new ways to tell stories was a specialty of John’s,” Mariotte said. “An example of his willingness to experiment was on the fifth issue of the book, a standalone issue after the first arc had wrapped up. Large chunks of the story are shown in flashbacks – but not typical flashbacks – a man who protagonist Gideon Brood knew during the Civil War has been cut in half by a train, but the train's still sitting on top of him, holding him together. While he's dying, he's literally manifesting memories from the war, so these "flashbacks" actually impact the real world in the moment. We needed a way to differentiate those scenes from the other "in the moment" scenes, and we didn't want to just do the normal "weird panel borders" thing. Instead, John penciled them with great care, so when they were colored they look almost painterly next to the hard, inked lines of the regular time frame.”
Scott Dunbier, then the editor in chief at Wildstorm, took notice of Cassaday’s growth as an artist over the course of the series: "When I started seeing the artwork it was good. It wasn’t great, but it was good, and as each issue would come in, they would get better and better. He was growing as an artist. By the time he had finished maybe the fourth issue of the five issue miniseries I went in to talk to Jeff Mariotte because he wanted to do a sequel with John and I said, 'Jeff, sorry, he will not be drawing the sequel to this. I’ve got to put him on a big book.'”
“My initial idea was to put him on the relaunch we were going to do of WildC.A.T.S.,” Dunbier said. “He was a new artist, he wasn’t super well known, but I decided to give him a shot because I thought he would rise to the challenge. And when I talked to him about he was thrilled. He was literally over the moon. He was so excited. He wanted to do some redesigns on the characters. He had all these great ideas. It was fantastic for about two days. Then when I was talking to Jim Lee, I told him that I was going to put John Cassaday on WildC.A.T.S. This was the only time Jim ever overruled me. He said, 'We need to make this a big launch. We need an established artist. Put Travis [Charest] on it.' We had a bit of a disagreement, but he was the boss, so he won.
"I was then in the position of having to call John and tell him that he was not going to be doing WildC.A.T.S after all. It was a tough call. He was really broken up about it. He wanted that book. He wanted to make his mark. And in one of those just crazy coincidences, earlier that same day – literally the same day – I had gotten a faxed proposal from Warren Ellis on a book called Planetary. I said to John, I know you’re going to think this is crazy, but I have another book that I think is better for you. He was like, 'Okay, fine. Send it to me and I’ll have a look at it.' So I faxed it to him and twenty minutes later he called me back and he said, 'I’ve got to do this book. I cannot not do this book.' So I put him on Planetary and I guess the rest is history.
In his newsletter Orbital Operations, Warren Ellis wrote about his late friend and colleague, adding to this story. The two had been in touch at their start of their careers and talked about working together on something that fell through:
John and I met properly at San Diego in 1997. We sat down at the far edge of the convention floor and quickly established we wanted to try something together again, at Wildstorm. John said he’d love to try a monthly series, but hated the idea of having to draw the same thing every issue. That right there was the genesis of Planetary. Creating a book for John that wasn’t the same thing every month. That’s the book. Taking that wish right up to changing the covers completely every issue. I believe I sent Planetary over to Wildstorm as a pitch, just to see if they were interested in the idea, without mentioning John. The story goes that Scott Dunbier saw the pitch and phoned John to say he’d found the perfect book for him. Scott had no idea about John and I’s conversations. He just knew.
For many creators and fans, Planetary was a defining work for both Ellis and Cassaday. Although popular, a variety of issues led the the series being delayed a few times, most notably from 2001 to 2003.
“He was getting antsy,” said Albert Moy, Cassaday's longtime art dealer and friend.
“He couldn’t plan his future for other projects because he was waiting for the scripts. There were so many things that were offered to him,” Moy said. “He said, 'Well screw this, I’m going to go do this project and Planetary can wait.' I kept telling him, you're going to be known for Planetary. Well, it turned out great. He wanted to do another book, you know, he was quite fast when he was doing Planetary. For the detail he put in, he was pretty fast. And he pencilled and inked everything himself. I was impressed because not many artists I know are that disciplined. But he was. He was really proud of that.”
In the years between when Planetary first went on hiatus and when the final issue saw print in 2009, Cassaday stayed busy, as if to prove that the delays were not his fault and that he could work fast. He drew the three volume Fabien Nury-scripted series Je Suis Légion for Humanoids (which was eventually published in the United States as I Am Legion). He went to work at Marvel on a new Captain America series with writer John Key Reiber that debuted in 2002. That series, however, which launched in a difficult publishing and political climate following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the wars that followed, made for a muddled and confused project.
Cassaday also wrote and drew a Hellboy short comic and became a prolific cover artist in this period, including on The Lone Ranger, which was part of a long collaboration with Dynamite Comics.
At Marvel, Cassaday drew the other major series for which he became best known. In 2004, working with writer Joss Whedon, he launched a new ongoing series, Astonishing X-Men. Focused less on continuity than the other X-titles, the run was promoted as a back-to-basics approach on the characters following Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. Part of this approach involved going back to the characters’ classic costumes, though in Cassaday’s pen meant that the outfits looked more realistic than what came before.
“One of the things I loved about John’s work was that it was down to earth,” Martin said. “It didn’t look like the hyper-muscular, male-gaze art so popular in the early to mid ‘90s. He had a penchant for fantastic detail and crazy layouts, but he also got gritty and earthy, with a realism that I deeply appreciate. The characters had real proportions, and wore real clothes that had folds and volume, and moved like they had mass, even if they were flying or insubstantial like Kitty Pryde. John knew how to work negative space and how to spot blacks. He could draw anything, from mountain vistas in the Southwest to surreal space stations. There was a scale and space to his environments, with a simplicity of line, that not everyone can manage. Ultimately, it was the functionality of his art that I appreciated. His worlds functioned. They worked. Not only that, John was a superb graphic designer. His covers are so eye-catchingly memorable.”
In 25 issues, the duo brought one team member back from the dead, sent another into deep space with the potential to never return, and created several new characters. When it was over, Cassaday returned to draw the long-awaited final issue of Planetary, after which he seemed to take advantage of the reputation that he developed. In the years that followed, he drew covers and worked as a concept artist on films. His Astonishing X-Men run was adapted into a motion comic. And he directed “The Attic,” a second-season episode of Whedon's TV show Dollhouse. One of the last episodes before the series was cancelled, this 2009 episode is considered one of the show’s highlights.
Cassaday had two short runs at Marvel in the years that followed: first on the Rick Remender-scripted Uncanny Avengers, which introduced a new team in 2012; and then in 2015, when he drew the first six issues of Star Wars. The series’ first issue was the biggest selling single-issue comic in decades, and Cassaday's art was a major reason for fans' enthusiasm.
In 2018, Cassaday became the Creative Director at Humanoids. “The offices were in LA but he was in New York, sort of off doing his own Humanoids project that he was writing and drawing himself,” Waid, who became publisher of Humanoids in 2020, said. “When we did interact, he was always supportive and of great help in looking at newer artists and giving notes and evaluating the visual appeal of the books we had on the publishing slate. I think what might surprise people who expect great talent to come with some degree of ego is that John was staggeringly humble, gentle, and kind.”
His final, unfinished project was Madshadows, something that Cassaday had been working on in recent years. “He was in love with that,” Moy said. “It was something he always dreamed of doing.”
“Alas, no one will see all of it,” Waid said. “Madshadows was a sprawling multimedia project that John wanted to serialize across comics, novels, animation, short films, and other media. What I saw of it was spectacular, John's best and most personal work, but [to the best of my knowledge] he drew from plots in his head and never finalized any scripts or dialogue. It will always be his great unfinished symphony.”
What is perhaps most striking is how many people who knew Cassaday talked about what a good person he was. Besides being shocked by his sudden death, they just wanted to say how much they liked him.
“John was just one of the truly nicest people you could possibly know,” Dunbier said. “Not just in comics but anywhere. I don’t mean to overplay it. I’m not trying to give you a bunch of hyperbole, but he was a genuinely good guy and I’m going to miss the hell out of him.”
“Did you know that he was asked to dance on a table at my bachelorette party?” Martin asked. “It was San Diego Comic-Con 2001; I was just about to move to Tampa to take the job at CrossGen, and I was getting married that November. My friends and cohorts at Sequential Tart threw me a bachelorette party in the bar on the second floor of the Hyatt, where most SDCC after-hours gatherings happened at the time. We girls were all sitting around a couple of low tables in the bar, getting nicely toasted, when John wandered over to say hello. The girls immediately told him it was my bachelorette party and jokingly asked him to dance on a table for me. He declined, of course, but clearly he was greatly amused by the entire thing, and gave me a big hug. John’s hugs were the best.”
The post Remembering John Cassaday, Dec. 14, 1971-Sept. 9, 2024 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment