ARTIST AT LAST: Bill Pearson

A Fantagraphics Underground Release. Having worked in comics from just about every position and angle over the last 50+ years (including as the editor of the legendary witzend), Bill Pearson’s first solo art book collects a decades-spanning body of work, never seen until now. His illustrations dance playfully between monstrous and silly imaginary creatures in the vein of Vaughn Bodé, and abstract gems evoking Wassily Kandinsky and humorous nudes. "A culmination of a life devoted to comics, if the title rings with humility, it’s only because Pearson is selling himself short." Born in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, Pearson was employed in 1957 as a technical illustrator at the Ziff Davis publishing firm and began night classes at the School of Visual Arts, including an anatomy course taught by Burne Hogarth. Work as a technical illustrator for the Underwood Typewriter Company in 1959 was followed by two years as a mechanical draftsman at Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona. While serving in the military at Fort Polk, Louisiana during the early 1960s, he met artist Ed Paschke. Working together in Fort Polk's Training Aids Department, they provided illustrations for publications, signs, targets and manuals to explain weapons and procedures to incoming troops. The two remained lifelong friends, and Paschke later was a contributor to Pearson's witzend after Bill took it over from founder Wally Wood. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents While he was still an assistant on witzend in the mid-1960s, he became involved in the creation of Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents team for Tower Comics. In addition to scripting a half-dozen NoMan tales for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and an equal number of Undersea Agent adventures, he did ghostwriting on Wood's Dynamo scripts. In 2003-05, these stories were collected into hardback books as part of DC Comics' five-volume T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents Archive series. The many examples of collaborations between Wood and Pearson include the cover of The Wallace Wood Checklist. Charlton and other publishers While an editor at Charlton Comics during the 1970s and early 1980s, Pearson designed and colored over 200 comic book covers. Equally extensive were the numerous comic book scripts the prolific Pearson wrote for a wide variety of publishers, including Gold Key, Tower Comics, King Comics (Flash Gordon), Charlton, Eclipse, Gladstone and Warren Publications. He was the writer of Gold Key's Popeye the Sailor comic book throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. His work as an inker included Ocean's Popeye: Borned to the Sea (1987) and a Spider-Man spoof. For two decades (1975–95), he lettered for almost every comics publisher, and he was the first art director at Another Rainbow.