iFanboy Upstarts: Mitch Breitweiser

It takes a sizable link of time for a comic creator to break through, no matter how talented they are. Sometimes it’s a matter of getting in the right place at the right time, while for others it’s about honing their style and finding their own niche. Take for instance Bryan Hitch; long before he founded what would become “widescreen” comics with Warren Ellis on The Authority, he was breaking in and finding his own style on books like Transformers and She-Hulk. This week in iFanboy Upstarts we focus in on another artist who has seemingly found his groove and people are starting to notice.

Artist Mitch Breitweiser began his comics career full-time in 2005, but his secret original goes back two years where he was plucked from obscurity to pencil two fill-in issues of Marvel’s Agent X and into a pair of indie series, Awakenings and Phantom Jack. On first glance you might mistake him for a harrowed experienced artist and contemporary of Butch Guice, Ralph Reese and the like, but Breitweiser wasn’t born until 1978. Although he’d worked for Marvel before, it wasn’t until 2005 that they really took notice and offered the Little Rock native an exclusive and his first chance launching a series: Drax The Destroyer with Keith Giffen. Although that series proved short lived, the job put Breitweiser on the map for Marvel and turned into a short stint on Ultimate Fantastic Four. It’s after that assignment that Tom Breevort’s office took notice and gave the artist what was destined to be an ideal muse: Captain America. Through work on 2007’s Captain America: The Chosen mini, the 2008 one-shot Captain America: Theater of War, Operation Zero Point, 2010’s Captain America: Patriot and several guest stints on the primary Captain America series. Breitweiser last popped up in the final issue of Ultimate Marvel’s lynchpin series Ultimate Fallout but his next Marvel project is under wraps. What we can say is that it has something to do with Volstagg, as the artists showed a sneak-peak of a page featuring him recently online.

With a bevy of work coming from him in 2011, 2012 could be a banner year for Mitch Breitweiser. Here’s a sample of some of the pieces that show his greatness.