iFanboy Upstarts: Matteo Scalera

Like a pitcher winding up for a fast ball, some creators start out slow but once they get going… well, they’re like lightning. This week’s iFanboy Upstart is one of the growing number of overseas artists recruited by C.B. Cebulski for Marvel, but between his debut at Marvel in 2008 and where he is now, he spent time working the indies to hone his skills. Italian-born Matteo Scalera just debuted as the new artist of Secret Avengers on this month’s #29, and series writer Rick Remender (an artist himself) has a keen eye for understanding Scalera’s skills.

“Matteo is an artist I have had my eye on for years now and I couldn’t be happier that we finally found a project together,” Remender said in a press release. ” He has God-given chops in both illustration and storytelling, a rare breed. And he somehow gets better and better every few months. Watching the way his inking style has developed as well has been incredibly exciting.”

That developing “inking style” Remender refers is the scratchy blacks and heavy shadows Scalera employs, and its something Scalera has only started using fairly recently. Over the course of his brief career so far, Scalera has shown a variety of styles like a bouncy animated look to a unique no-line technique. This artist has been a frequent face in iFanboy’s Daily Sketch-Up posts, and his one-off illustrations have served as informal previews of his ever-developing style.

Scalera got his start in comics in his native land of Italy’s publishing scene in 2006, doing small books for Cut-Up and VeneziaComix after studying at the Arts College of Parma and Milan’s School of Comics. In 2007 Marvel’s art scout C.B. Cebulski toured the world looking for new talent as part of his “ChesterFest” talent search, and Scalera was one of a number of future stars such as Sara Pichelli who were chosen. While talking to Marvel about work, Scalera didn’t waste any time jumping into the American comics scene as he drew the 4-issue Image series Hyperkinetic in 2008 and also contributed shorts to the third and forth volumes of Popgun. In 2010, Scalera’s first published Marvel work,  a story in Breaking Into Comics The Marvel Way #2, hit shelves and  Scalera hit the ground running, following that up with one-off stories for four different Deadpool series. After that he took a break from Marvel, and returned to the indie scene doing fill-ins on Boom!’s Starborn series, drawing the self-published one-shot Agents of W.T.F. and writing and drawing his first creator-owned series, Retrievers. This four-issue series that he describes as about “funny super-villains” was published in Europe by Lucca Comics, but has never yet reached American shores. In 2011, Scalera debuted his newer scratchier style as the artist of Boom!’s Valen The Outcast, and soon after his dynamic new work started hitting shelves Marvel called the Italian artist back to take over Secret Avengers after Gabriel Hardman’s departure.

Scalera’s style has seen some radical evolution in his short career, so fans looking back into his older work will be surprised to see how different one artist can be. Here’s some samples of his work over the years, so tell us what you think!