Mark deserves his own thread.

Sadly, artist Mark Bright has passed away at the age of 68. Far too soon.

For me, I'll always remember him for his work on Power Man and Iron Fist as well as Iron Man. Others will remember him for his work on Green Lantern.

Regardless of what series you think of first when you think of Mark (or M.D.), he did some really good work.

I always liked his layouts. Clean lines, nice sense of depth and perspective. He was the guy who did Quantum and Woody with Priest.

As a kid I was confused whether M.D. was the same as Mark and why he switched back and forth.

I loved his work but his Transformers number 5 (Shockwave) cover is probably the one that sticks in my mind.

We're losing too many notable people from my comics heyday. Here's another that guts me. He was one of the first artists I could identify because of that very clean linework.
Loved everything I saw him do.

I credit this cover with starting my fifteen year obsession with comics. One of many, many great Iron Man covers by Bright (and Layton).


RIP, Doc. Thanks for the great memories.

This is the final page of Iron Man #274, which was the first new comic I ever bought off the rack. It was a pretty dull issue, but I used to look at this page all the time. In 2016 I contacted Bright through his what looked like a circa 1999 geocities website to see if he would draw a reproduction of the page for me. It didn't look like the site had been updated in a decade and I wasn't convinced it was even still active. To my mild surprise he got back to me right away and his response was something along the lines of "I drew this?! How did I not get my job back as the full-time Iron Man artist after drawing this page?" (He was filling in for Paul Ryan on that issue.) Anyway, he did the commission and turned it around in like 2 or 3 weeks. He couldn't have been a nicer guy. It's sad that he's gone at such a young age.

Man, that's a great story. I've only now been getting in to his art from Power Man and Iron Fist as well as Iron Man (I got a couple Epic Collections from his era on both titles). I was struck by how much better his art was than the people who preceded him. He's not a favorite, but I like his work a lot. If I were a writer in that era I would have been very happy to have him doing the art (there were a lot of artists whose work I was not a fan of in that era).

Yeah, 68. Not old enough to die. (That would only give me another 12 years. No, thanks - I want a lot more than that!)

Sounds like he was a good guy. Too many comic artists have gone before their time. I wonder if some of them just don't take care of themselves? Or if they didn't have good health insurance or something? Rock musicians living hard, I get them going out in their mid 60's and early 70's, but comic artists? Maybe the sitting all day, eating bad diets, and not getting enough preventative health care is all it takes.

His work on Iron Man with Bob Layton was outstanding. Maybe my favorite comic run ever. Not because it was groundbreaking, but because it was so consistently good. I loved it.

And then Icon. i was such a huge Milestone fan. Great comics all around.

RIP Mark Bright