iFanboy Upstarts: Michael Walsh

What’s the best way to get to the top? Start at the bottom, and work your way up. Talent helps too. Lucky for Canadian artist Michael Walsh, he has that in spades.

Walsh is currently riding high as artist of the well-received Image/Shadowline series Comeback, with writer Ed Brisson that launched in November of 2012. The series follows a private company that sells the unique service of saving your loved ones from the icy grip of death by traveling through time and plucking them just moments before their bitter end. It’s an imaginative story, and complimented heavily by the stylish covers by Walsh and colorist Jordie Bellaire. The interiors back up the story’s promise, giving a murky, shadow-heavy rendition of the two time agents at the center of this.

Walsh first got introduced to comics via his father, who gave them to the budding artist at a very young age. The artist attended Toronto’s OCAD University, and in his spare time wrote and drew his own practice comics and even adapted a series of Edgar Allan Poe stories into comics for practice. Walsh made his comics debut just one year prior to Comeback, doing a story in the 2011 webcomic-turned-book, The Murder Book with his future Comeback collaborator, Brisson. It turns out that Walsh was quite busy leading up to the surprise success of Comeback, working on a pitch for another series called The Brother James. While he completed the first issue, he had to step back from the project to focus on Comeback. He also did a very rare licensed comic — a prequel to the Canadian live-action sci-fi series Continuum, which recently got picked up by Syfy. Coming up after Comeback, Walsh is keeping busy — not only is he drawing a portion of Ales Kot’s upcoming Zero alongside a gang of other artists, but he’s also just been announced as the artist of the forthcoming new X-Files comic series from IDW. For this Walsh will again be working with Bellaire, who herself has proven to be a star in the making.

Walsh’s work carries on in the musky, heavy black tradition of artists like Michael Lark and Chris Samnee, but his style veers closer towards earlier illustrators like later-era Milton Caniff or Jorge Zaffino at his peak. We’ve showcased Walsh’s work here at iFanboy on numerous occasions from Weekly Sketch-Up To The Best of the Week In Covers and Josh even mentioning him in the Pick of the Week podcast.