Posted in: Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: barry windsor smith, BWS, conan, weapon x, wolverine, x-men
Barry Windsor-Smith suffered an Ischemic Stroke on May 20, spent 8 days in an ICU and weeks in rehabilitation. He is now recovering at home.
The following notice was posted to Barry Windsor-Smith‘s Facebook page.
On May 20, 5 days before his 73rd birthday, Barry Windsor-Smith, author of WEAPON X and MONSTERS, suffered an Ischemic Stroke. He spent 8 days in an ICU and some weeks in rehabilitation. He has been released from the hospital and is slowly recovering at his home in NY.
Barry Windsor-Smith was the first British comic book creator to seek work from the big American comic book publishers back in the sixties. Roy Thomas had Windsor-Smith draw Starr the Slayer, in Chamber Of Darkness #4 in 1970 which saw Windsor-Smith get the job drawing Marvel’s Conan comics, starting with Conan the Barbarian #1 in the same year. This saw Windsor-Smith move to the US and become involved in writing Conan and, with Roy Thomas, adapted a number of R.E. Howard short stories and original adventures based on R.E. Howard’s other characters. Red Sonja was loosely based on a character from one of Howard’s non-Conan stories but has now become a major comic character in her own right.
Barry Windsor-Smith would later be feted for his X-Men work, particularly writing and drawing the 1991 Weapon X story that showed the origins of Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton, and was the basis for the X-Men 2 movie, as well as X-Men comics Lifedeath and Lifedeath II with Chris Claremont, and the 1984 Machine Man limited series with Herb Trimpe and Tom DeFalco that launched Iron Man 2020.
Barry Windsor-Smith became the creative director and lead artist at Valiant Comics, recreating Solar, creating Archer And Armstrong and designing the Unity crossover storyline in the early nineties. He would then co-create the vampiric character Rune with Chris Ulm, for Malibu Comics’ Ultraverse – and which made a minuscule return a few weeks ago. He then moved on to an oversized anthology series Storyteller through Dark Horse. Since then, BWS has released his work through Fantagraphics, including a reworking of the never published Lifedeath III for Storyteller, his retrospective work Opus, and Monsters, a massive graphic novel that had originally been created as a Hulk story
It’s always a good time to remember your favourite Barry Windsor-Smith work. But now seems a particularly opportune time. We wish Barry Windsor-Smith and his friends and family, the best right now.
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