Whilce Portacio became a famous artist while working at Marvel Comics working on such titles as Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor and Punisher. His gig was originally inking titles but he climbed up the ladder and was later used for his abilities with pencils. Portacio was one of the founders of Image Comics but had to withdraw due to his sisters health. Even though he didn't have his own imprint, Portacio later came back and put out his new book called Wetworks through Jim Lee's Wildstorm imprint. At this point in time Portacio was considered a big star on the rise like the other Image founders but he also shared a problem that most of the other Image founders seemed to have. That problem was delays.
Portacio went into a diabetic coma in 2000 due to a failing pancreas. When he was able to wake up about a week later he had lost a lot of weight and couldn't do much of anything for about six months. I can't imagine how scary of a time this must have been for him but somehow he managed to get back to work quickly.
In 2006, Portacio returned to Wildstorm and Wetworks when he relaunched a volume 2 for the series but as with previous runs on titles, Portacio quickly fell behind with his work and ended up leaving his book pretty quickly. After only 15 issues the new volume of Wetworks got axed and the title is currently in limbo. The Wetworks crew showed up in Wildstorm: Armageddon and DC/Wildstorm Dreamwar but other than that the team has gotten little to no attention the past couple of years.
In 2008, it was announced that Whilce Portacio would be taking over pencil duties for Spawn. At this particular point in time it was announced that Image co-founder and creator of Spawn, Todd MacFarlane would be going back to Spawn as co-writer. Needless to say, this collaboration has caught attention and there has been quite a bit of buzz over Spawn ever since.
In additon to his work on Uncanny X-Men, X-Force, Punisher, Wetworks, Spawn and numerous other titles, Portacio received a lot of positive attention for his work on DC Comics Batman: Confidential title. In fact, there's a pretty good podcast interview available that Whilce Portacio recently did with The Batman Universe Podcast. You can find it under the episode guide of Batman Universe Specials on iTunes for free. In the interview, Portacio mainly touched on his work with Batman: Confidential and his more recent work on Spawn.
Personally, I think Whilce Portacio is hands down an amazing talent who can ink and pencil just about anything but like the other Image founders, he has never been the best at meeting deadlines which is something big with me. In an industry where there's solicitations, advance solicitations and solicitations for the advance solicitations I think it's paramount to get your work out on time. I don't just blame this on artists and writers though, I also blame publishers because they have no business soliciting these titles until they are in the can. Fortunately, this seems to be a lesson that Wildstorm has learned in the past year or two after suffering from this problem for about 15 years.
If you're interested in learning more about Whilce Portacio check him out on comicbookdb.com. You can find his profile there as well as profiles for everybody elses that I talk about in this blog. Not only will you find information about the creators, you can also find a detailed chronological listing of all of Whilce's work on the website. I opted to talk about him in this spotlight as I plan on doing a Dane spotlight in the very near future after my Jenny Sparks spotlight. For my next set of reviews I also plan to review Wetworks vol. 2 and most likely DC/Wildstorm Dreamwar after that.
I liked Whilce Portacio's work on Uncanny X-men when he was doing that while Jim Lee was doing X-men but I never fully got into Wetworks. I loved the idea of the team but was surprised when they had them turn to dealing with the Supernatural aspect of the WSU.
ReplyDeleteI have the two Vol. 2 trades and read most of them, but still lack the last few issues and just haven't been motivated to go back and read them. Although, it was Wetworks: Armageddon that led me to get the trades because I didn't follow it when it came out. I like them as part of the WSU but so far it's been hard for me to continue to follow them otherwise.