John writes:
Bleedingcool.com said Rich Buckler died of cancer. I saw Buckler and his wife at SpringCon (Minneapolis) years ago, nice guy. I happened to be in Paris just prior and mentioned I saw his gallery exhibition while there, which knocked him out.
Vu writes:
The first time I saw Rich Buckler, he was at Fallcon 2003 (04 October 2003). I rarely take photos with artists, celebrities, or musicians - but I had to get one with Rich because I knew that Buckler was the guy that gave George Perez his first professional break. R.I.P.
George Perez, in an interview in Wizard #35, talked about how he accidentally got into the business: I got in with [Factor Unknown], but meanwhile Sal Quartuccio [now head of Sal Q Productions] had shown my stuff to [artist] Rich Buckler. Rich need an assistant and called me up with an offer. I was working as a bank teller at the time. My first published pro work was on Rich's first issue of Deathlok, Astonishing Tales #25. He gave me a two-page cartoon sequence at the end showing how he and Doug Moench came up with Deathlok from discarded ideas in a trash pail. My art being what it was at the time, I penciled everything except the Deathlok figure. By being Rich's assistant, people at Marvel got to know me. And people like [editor] Jim Salicrup and [writers] David Kraft and Bill Mantlo saw my work, liked it, and got me my first work under my own name.George Tuska needed a break on the Man-Wolf feature in Creatures on the Loose and Dave Kraft liked working with me, so he asked me to stay. Around the same time, I was given a fill-in on the Sons of the Tiger feature in Deadly Hans of Kung Fu #6, but Bill Mantlo asked for me to stay on as well. Thanks to them, I was given
regular work fairly quickly. That was around 1974, only two years out
of high school. Within six months after that, Rich Buckler fell behind.
Since I was Rich's assistant, they asked me to pencil what was
supposed to be a Fantastic Four annual and turn into two issues of the regular book [#164-#165]. |
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