This week we celebrate the great Kyle Baker for Comics Illustrator of the Week! Baker contributed the variant cover to this week’s Bizarro Comics #1. I first saw Kyle Baker’s work gracing the covers of Web of Spider-Man and Marvel Age when I was a kid. The first full interior work I saw by him was DC’s excellent Mature Reader’s version of The Shadow with writer Andy Helfer.
After working as an intern for Marvel Comics during his senior year of high school and then working on art assists for a period of time, Baker started to pick up penciling & inking assignments for The Big 2, including drawing the Howard the Duck movie adaptation for Marvel. Not being satisfied with just doing work that others wanted him to do or drawing in the style that was considered popular & marketable for the time, Baker decided to write & draw his own comics. This led to the publication of The Cowboy Wally Show graphic novel. Although, it was a low-printed indy book, it was enough to get the attention of editors looking for new original voices. So, 2 years later DC Comics published Baker’s next original comic Why I Hate Saturn, which would go on to win an Eisner Award and help solidify Kyle Baker as a creative force in the industry.
During the 1990’s Baker began to branch out, contributing regular comic strips for major magazines & newspapers, as well as work on animation projects, including an animated music-video with KRS-One in 1994.
Kyle Baker, to this day, continues to be a diverse artist, working on films, games, music, comics, illustration, etc. You can see what he’s been working on, including animation storyboards and preview comics pages on his Quality Jollity website here.
Other notable works by Kyle Baker: Nat Turner, Plastic Man, Instant Piano, Deadpool MAX, Justice INC, King David, You Are Here, Special Forces, and Truth: Red, White & Black.
For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates