iFanboy Upstarts: Gabriel Hernández Walta

There’s a certain style in comics. While not a house style with imperceptible differences, many of today’s comic artists fit into a general mold of superhero art that was built up by names like Kirby, Toth, Adams and Byrne. So when an artist tries to break in with something different, it’s something special. Bill Sienkiewicz did it, as did Ashley Wood. And now an another artist is following on that path by not following along the common route or common style in comics.

Spanish-born artist Gabriel Hernández Walta graduated art school in 1996, and worked as both a cartoonist and a painter in the European art scene for years, doing work-for-hire and even doing his own series, A Thief Of The Day. But it wasn’t until 2003 that he began his climb in the world of American comics, breaking in by drawing one of the miniseries for Jeff Mariotte’s CVO at IDW. Although his style might have been out of vogue at other publishers, seeing how Ashley Wood and Ben Templesmith were IDW’s primary artists at the time Walta fit in well. After CVO, Walta moved over to adapt Clive Barker’s Thief Of Always novel and that’s where he first got the attention of other publishers. In 2006 the Spaniard drew the lead story in Scholastic’s Goosebumps graphic novel and then chipped in on an issue of DC/Vertigo’s Crossing Midnight. He kept up his commitment to IDW however, drawing the miniseries The Veil which showed the artist really stepping out and being noticed. IDW later published his European graphic novel The Suicide Forest, while Walta himself was working on new pages for a new publisher who liked him quite well: Marvel. Pegged early on as a talent to watch with a story in 2010’s Breaking Into Comics The Marvel, Walta did a variety of X-Men related shorts in various anthologies like X Necrosha: The Gathering #1, Nation X #3 and Age Of X: Alpha #1, he got his first solo issue for the Big Two when drawing 2010’s X-Men: Curse of the Mutants – Smoke & Blood. Pairing Walta with darker stories, this one being vampires, was an ideal pick and Walta has continued to be connected to dark stories. Most recently, Walta did a segment of Magneto: Not A Hero series showing Magneto in a flashback, and was also drafted to do a one-off issue of DC/Vertigo’s The Unwritten.

Walta’s next big project is doing part of Marvel’s FF series with Jonathan Hickman; that might be considered a wierd pairing, but given the great Thing illustration above and the fact that the two worked together back on Walta’s Breaking Into Comics The Marvel Way short back in 2010 it might be something special.  What about you — where would you like to see Walta’s work pop up next?