Michael Zulli
As time goes on, more and more people who you’ve followed through their work pass away. That’s the nature of things I guess, but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant. Yesterday, the news broke that artist Michael Zulli passed away.
To be clear, I never met him, and I have no first hand knowledge of him. Maybe I’m wrong about it, but I got the impression he was an east coast guy, and being from the west coast, there are a ton of artists from that side of the country that I have never had the opportunity to talk to or meet. Maybe the national comics convention should be in Oklahoma or something, where we could all meet in the middle and get to thank people for their brilliant work.
I can only offer my thoughts, having read his work for something like 35 years. He was instant buy, if I saw his name on something, I was picking it up without needing anything more. He also was a guy who had his feet in both worlds in comics; indie books and the big time publishers. His most-seen work was probably in The Sandman, for Vertigo/DC. He drew Spider-Man for Marvel at one point, an Alice Cooper series written by Neil Gaiman.
The first art of his that I saw was in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, and it blew my mind. I wasn’t that deep into reading comics yet, just getting my feet wet, but his approach to the Turtles was something I couldn’t make any sense of. Imagine going from the cowabunga pizza dudes to this when you’re 13 years old:
Even still, it visually stands out from the entire TMNT run, and there have been plenty of Turtles comics over the years. A few years later, I discovered an old, unfinished series he’d drawn called “The Puma Blues.” I snagged an incomplete run of it at a comic show, and was blown away all over again. I never could seem to find the missing issues though, so I was very thankful when an omnibus was unexpectedly published by Dover about a decade ago. It’s a sort of an ecological fiction, leaning heavily on his brilliant touch for drawing nature and wildlife. Below is a cover he did way back when for a paperback collection of PB.
Around the same time I found those issues of Puma Blues, I was also diving headlong into Alan Moore’s work (as we all must), and having my brain pried open by his incomparable Swamp Thing run. And then I found out about Swamp Thing #88. This was in the aftermath of Moore’s run, where I was introduced to another artist who would become one of my favorites, Rick Veitch. Veitch was writing Swampy, after Alan Moore, which could have been a disaster. And it was, but not quite in the way you might expect.
Swamp Thing #88 was written by Veitch and drawn by Zulli, and remains unpublished since it was worked on in 1989. Veitch and Zulli created a story that was (and is) too much for DC to publish. You can find a version of the story online that consists of photocopied art (I don’t think it was ever 100% completed). It has something to do with Jesus’ crucifixion, and you know how his fans can be. Periodically, there are murmurs that it might finally see print, but as yet nothing.
Swamp Thing #88 cover, drawn by Rick Veitch.
His work was a staple in the areas that I was most interested in back then (self-published or super-indie book, as well as the DC/Vertigo realm). I think I always thought of his art being somewhere in between Barry Windsor-Smith and Michael Kaluta, although he wasn’t really that much younger than either. That’s not a bad place to be, and he definitely has strengths of his own that neither have. I have no confirmation of this, but you can see shades of Zulli in Guy Davis’ work and linework (another artist I will buy work on sight).
I’m not sure there’s anything else to say. I’d recommend his work without qualification, and I’ve sure read a ton of it over the years. It just somehow feels important to acknowledge him and his work, and that perhaps his linework has been partially absorbed when ever I dip a nib into black, black ink.
c.