Sometimes it’s takes awhile to be an overnight success. Before Mark Bagley skyrocketed to fame as the modern definitive Spider-Man artist, he toiled for years on various second- and third-tier books at Marvel despite winning a talent contest. This week’s iFanboy Upstart is someone who quitely worked for two years at Marvel before jumping to a new book and being heralded as “the Next Big Thing.”
Portuguese artist Filipe Andrade is currently wowing people as the guest artist on the current Captain Marvel series, beginning with issue #9. His style is bounce, kinetic and fun, reminiscent of Scud The Disposable Assassin’s Rob Schrab mixed with Aeon Flux‘s Peter Chung. Andrade got his start in art by studying at Lisbon’s Fine Arts Academy, earning a degree in sculpture. His professional career began as an artist in Portugal’s comic scene, doing a variety of anthology works before doing doing a longer, serialized story called BRK that won him some festival honors.
BRK and other comic pages were among the samples Andrade sent in to Marvel talent scout C.B. Cebulski’s talent search in 2009. Cebulski quickly took notice, putting Andrade to work first on a digital-first one-shot titled Iron Man: Hack, and then a six-part Nomad story with writer Sean McKeever that was later serialized in Captain America #608 – 614. Andrade drew a portion of X-23 #1, but didn’t take on his first full series until he was chosen to draw the four-part miniseries Onlaught Unleashed. That work was soon followed by Andrade working with Roger Langridge on the licensed book John Carter: A Princess of Mars, which put Andrade out to his biggest audience yet – albeit under the bloated umbrella of the John Carter movie. After doing those five issues, Andrade completed some one-off projects such as Deadpool #63 and Ultimate Comics X-Men #18.1 before stepping into the spotlight with the aforementioned Captain Marvel.
Andrade’s is just a few years into what could be a long and fruitful comic career (if other industries don’t lure him away). His work might be unconventional for the classic superhero fan, but his style is near revelatory for bringing a much needed dynamism to Kelly Sue DeConnick’s depiction of Carol Danvers. I’m keenly interested to see more of Andrade’s work, whether it be doing more Captain Marvel or perhaps doing other heroes in need of his kind of flair. Spider-man, perhaps?
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Huh. I hadn’t read Captain Marvel yet, but it seems to be a charming little book.
I’ve jumped on since he started art duties and am really loving it. Kelly Deconnick is doing a great job writing it too. If I had a daughter, I would give her the issues to read.
Portugal has a small but talented pool of comic artists that deserve wider recognition.
Agreed, I met him and João Lemos at NYCC and you can tell the talent and love for comics that comes from Portugal. They both did this sketch for me:
https://twitter.com/comicbookamir/status/259518383932993538/photo/1
Those Captain Marvel pages are very rad. Might have to check that book out on the art alone.
Filipe Andrade’s art and Jordie Bellaire’s colors are a match made in heaven.
Don’t forget to pull it! 😀
https://ifanboy.com/comics/captain-marvel-11/
A lot of people took a shit on his art in Captain Marvel, but I loved it. Hope to see more from him.
Captain Marvel is a wonderful book
I don’t know if his style is quite right for everything. It seems a bit too loose for superheroes, but those latter sketches are incredible. If he were to team up with DeConnick on one of her Image projects, it might even steal some fans from Saga.
Not gonna lie his art made me drop captain marvel its not right for a super heroes
Actually it’s exactly the shot in the arm superhero comics need.
Yeah, that Batman image makes me think Andrade could draw a really impressive Gotham City.
His art made me start picking up Captain Marvel. The book looks fantastic now.
Just curious..what kind of artist is right for super heroes? (three examples please)
I really like his style on Captain Marvel, then from that same style on the skinny Spider-Man down to 3 colored panels which looks like Wormwood, some Warcraft/FairyQuest/Kung-Fu Panda type character that’s really cool and a Black Widow, then the X-23 panel, the thicker Spider-Man and finally Batman, really shows some unique diversity in style from what I thought was gonna be all his abstract skinny stuff that reminds me of Skottie Young.