Al Williamson
Alfonso Williamson was an American cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator specializing in adventure, Western, science fiction and fantasy.
Born in New York City, he spent much of his early childhood in Bogotá, Colombia before moving back to the United States at the age of 12. In his youth, Williamson developed an interest in comic strips, particularly Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon. He took art classes at Burne Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School, there befriending future cartoonists Wally Wood and Roy Krenkel, who introduced him to the work of illustrators who had influenced adventure strips. Before long, he was working professionally in the comics industry. His most notable works include his science-fiction/heroic-fantasy art for EC Comics in the 1950s, on titles including Weird Science and Weird Fantasy.
In the 1960s, he gained recognition for continuing Raymond's illustrative tradition with his work on the Flash Gordon comic-book series, and was a seminal contributor to the Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror comics magazines Creepy and Eerie. Williamson spent most of the 1970s working on his own credited strip, another Raymond creation, Secret Agent X-9. The following decade, he became known for his work adapting Star Wars films to comic books and newspaper strips. From the mid-1980s to 2003, he was primarily active as an inker, mainly on Marvel Comics superhero titles starring such characters as Daredevil, Spider-Man, and Spider-Girl.
Williamson is known for his collaborations with a group of artists including Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, Angelo Torres, and George Woodbridge, which was affectionately known as the "Fleagle Gang". Williamson has been cited as a stylistic influence on a number of younger artists, and encouraged many, helping such newcomers as Bernie Wrightson and Michael Kaluta enter the profession. He has won several industry awards, and six career-retrospective books about him have been published since 1998. Living in Pennsylvania with his wife Corina, Williamson retired in his seventies.
Williamson was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2000.
Biography
Early life and career
Al Williamson was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, one of two children of Sally and Alfonso Williamson, who was of Scottish descent and a Colombian citizen. The family relocated to Bogotá, Colombia, when Al was two years old. "My father was Colombian and my mother was American," Williamson said in 1997. "They met in the States, got married and went down there. I grew up down there so I learned both English and Spanish at the same time. It was comic books that taught me to read both languages." At age nine, Williamson took an interest in comic strips via the Mexican magazine Paquin, which featured American strips as well as Underwater Empire by Argentine cartoonist Carlos Clemen. Later, Williamson was attracted to Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon strip after his mother took him to see the Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe movie serial. While living in Bogotá he met future cartoonist Adolfo Buylla, who befriended him and gave him artistic advice. At age 12, in 1943, Williamson moved with his mother to San Francisco, California; they later moved to New York.Image:AlWilliamsonearly.jpg|alt=Drawing of a young man looking intently into the eyes of a smiling young woman while holding her hand.|thumb|left|Late 1940s sketch
In the mid-1940s Williamson continued to pursue his interest in cartooning and began to take art classes with Tarzan cartoonist Burne Hogarth, and later at Hogarth's Cartoonists and Illustrators School. There he met future cartoonists Wally Wood and Roy Krenkel. According to Williamson, "Roy broadened my collecting horizons, he became my guide to all the great illustrators — the artists who directly influenced adventure cartoonists like Raymond and Hal Foster| Foster. He showed me J.C. Coll, Franklin Booth, Joseph Franke, Dan Smith, Norman Lindsay, Fortunino Matania, and the great Blue Book illustrators like Herbert Morton Stoops and Frank Hoban." As he continued to learn about the cartooning field, he would visit the comic-book publisher Fiction House, meeting such artists as George Evans, Bob Lubbers, John Celardo, and Mort Meskin.
Williamson's first professional work may have been helping Hogarth pencil some Tarzan Sunday pages in 1948, although Williamson, who had initially believed so, reconsidered in a 1983 interview and recalled that his Tarzan work had come after his first two pieces of comic-book art: providing spot illustrations for the story "The World's Ugliest Horse" in Eastern Color's seminal series Famous Funnies #166, and a two-page Boy Scouts story, his first comics narrative, in New Heroic Comics #51. Williamson explained that while Hogarth had offered him Tarzan work, Williamson "just couldn't do it.... I couldn't get it into my little brain that he wanted me to do it exactly the way that he did it," and instead successfully recommended Celardo, artist of the Tarzan-like feature "Ka'a'nga" in Fiction House's Jungle Comics. As Williamson recalled:
During this period Williamson met his main stylistic influence, Raymond: "I had just turned 18. I had been in the business about six months or so. He gave me about two hours."
1950s
From 1949 to 1951, Williamson worked on science-fiction and Western stories for publishers such as American Comics Group, Avon Publications, Fawcett Comics, Standard Comics, and, possibly, Toby Press. He began collaborating with Frank Frazetta, who often inked his work; and with Roy Krenkel, who often did backgrounds. Examples of his work from that period include "Chief Victorio's Last Stand", in Avon's Chief Victorio's Apache Massacre ; "Death in Deep Space", in Magazine Enterprises' Jet #4 ; and "Skull of the Sorcerer", in ACG's Forbidden Worlds #3, inked by Wally Wood.File:Williamson 50Girls50.jpg|alt=Comic strip in which a woman dressed in a cape tells a man that she does not need him in order to become queen, then shoots him while he begs for mercy.|thumb|350px|Five Williamson panels from "50 Girls 50", in EC Comics' Weird Science #20.
In 1952, upon the suggestion of artists Wally Wood and Joe Orlando, Williamson began working for EC Comics, an influential comic book company with a reputation for quality artists. While at EC, Williamson frequently collaborated with fellow artists Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel and Angelo Torres, a group which, along with Nick Meglin and George Woodbridge, became affectionately known as the "Fleagle Gang", named after a notorious criminal gang. Williamson primarily worked on EC's science-fiction comics Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and Weird Science-Fantasy, illustrating both original stories, primarily by writer Al Feldstein, and adaptations of stories by authors such as Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, but his work occasionally appeared in EC's horror and crime comics as well.
Williamson worked at EC through 1956 until the cancellation of most of the company's line. Williamson's EC art has been lauded for its illustrative flamboyance, evident in such stories as "I, Rocket", in Weird Fantasy #20, co-penciled and co-inked with Frank Frazetta; and "50 Girls 50", in Weird Science #20, co-inked by Williamson and Frazetta. His final published EC story was the 10-page "A Question of Time", in Shock Illustrated #2 with partial inking by Torres, who put his initials on the last page. In the fall of 1956, writer Larry Ivie introduced Williamson to future comics writers-editor Archie Goodwin, with whom he would become friends and, later, a frequent collaborator. Williamson eventually helped Goodwin enter the comics field, having him script a Harvey Comics story, "The Hermit", penciled by Reed Crandall and inked by Williamson.
From 1955 to 1957, Williamson produced over 400 pages of three-to-five-page stories for Atlas Comics, the 1950s forerunner of Marvel Comics, working in various genres but primarily Westerns. He continued to collaborate with Torres and Krenkel, as well as with Gray Morrow, George Woodbridge and Ralph Mayo. With Mayo, one of the first editors to give Williamson work, at Standard Comics, Williamson collaborated on the jungle girl series Jann of the Jungle #16–17. Following Mayo's death, Williamson drew stories solo for the planned #18, but the series was abruptly canceled before that issue could be published. His "prolific though somewhat uneven two-year stint at Atlas", where he first drew war comics, yielded superlative art in such stories as "The City That Time Forgot", in Marvel Tales #144 ; "Menace from the Stars", in Mystery Tales #44 ; "The Unknown Ones", in Astonishing #57 ; "Dreadnaught", in Navy Tales #2 ; and "Helpless", in Battle #55. While "something appeared to be missing from a lot of his Atlas work: enthusiasm," Williamson's Atlas Westerns, at least, "form a strongly consistent body of work, characterized by minimal to nonexistent action, a preponderance of closeups and reaction shots, and well-defined figures set against sparse backgrounds."
From 1958 to 1959 Williamson worked for Harvey Comics collaborating with former EC artists Reed Crandall, Torres and Krenkel and inking the pencils of Jack Kirby. On inking Kirby, Williamson relates: "I remember going up to Harvey and getting work there. They said, 'We haven't got any work for you, but we have some stories here that Jack penciled. Do you want to ink them?' I'd never really inked anybody else before, but I said, 'Sure,' because I looked at the stuff, and thought, I can follow this, it's all there. I inked it and they liked it, and they gave me three or four stories to do."
Additionally, Williamson drew stories for Classics Illustrated ; Canaveral Press's line of Edgar Rice Burroughs books ; Westerns for Dell Comics and Charlton Comics, including two complete issues of the Cheyenne Kid with Angelo Torres, and science-fiction stories for ACG, including "The Vortex", in Forbidden Worlds #69. He also worked with former EC artist John Severin on the "American Eagle" feature in Prize Comics Western #109 and #113.
Williamson's work during this decade was his most prolific in terms of comic book work and has garnered considerable praise for its high quality. He has been noted for his perfectionism and love for the medium. Despite its high reputation, S.C. Ringgenberg felt that Williamson's artwork from this period could at times be uneven and uninspired. Williamson was single during this period and, according to The Art of Al Williamson, had a bohemian and undisciplined lifestyle.