If there’s a road map for artists looking to break into the big leagues, you’ll need to ask artist David Marquez if you can borrow it. In just 18 months, the British expat steadily climbing up the comics ladder from licensed books on the independent scene to small books for the Big Two and into two upper echelon assignments due out in the coming months. Not bad for someone who originally planned to be a high school history teacher.
After graduting from University of Texas as Austin with double degrees in History and Government, Marquez veered off his career path and into the world of illustration by auditioning for a job on the animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. After coming into his own on that project, he landed in the comics world doing several small press and creator-owned projects before gaining noterity with the graphic novel Syndrome from Archaia. Archaia quickly put him to work on a spin-off of their franchise series Days Missing, which put him in the running for the Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award in 2011. That work got other publishers to notice him, as he did two issues of Top Cow’s Magdalena, the one-off Pilot Season: The Asset and a fill-in on Marvel’s Secret Warriors series. That tenacity for work led Marvel to put Marquez on the plum assignment of drawing the upcoming Fantastic Four: Season One graphic novel due out next month, and he’s already landed his follow-up project: joining Brian Michael Bendis on Ultimate Comics Spider-Man.
With his meteoric rise to the majors you might have missed out on seeing Marquez’s work just yet, so now’s your change to get up to speed on an artist who could be considered one of Marvel’s next Young Guns.
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I love that series of panels with Sue being literally invisible. Instead of doing the dotted line nonsense, that’s what an Invisible Woman would look like.
Might give that FF: Season One HC a try now thanks to that preview.
His issue of Secret Warriors was fantastic. Tells a huge story in a pretty short span.
He’s also a really nice guy. I met him at the Dallas Comic Con last year and got a sweet Fury sketch from him.
If you click my name you can see a bunch of stuff that helped earn Dave the Manning Award nomination — thanks to Archaia and Graphic.Ly! But I am stunned and dismayed that Chris neglected to include the headless corpse page from SYNDROME. 😀
Dave’s stuff on Ultimate Spider-Man is going to set the world on fire — I’m very excited for Marvel to release some pages and it’s so cool to see all kinds of different artists take on Miles Morales and cement the character’s place in Marvel history. Very deserving “Upstart” article for a guy I’ve been proud to know and work with for the last three years.
Wow, color me impressed! I really like his style. I definitely need to get that FF hardcover when it comes out, really like his take on the FF. I ALWAYS prefer when Johnny is drawn like he is actually on fire, not just red with black lines on him.