Day: August 6, 2020

Smash Pages Q&A: Sean Damien Hill

The artist of ‘The Hated’ discusses how he works, his influences, drawing horses and more.

Sean Damien Hill has been working on comics for years now, on projects ranging from Dark Shaman to Route 3 to The Gilded Age. His linework shows traces of a number of influences, finding ways to incorporate manga and classic American illustrators. The result is work that manages to be detailed and dynamic, with an impressive sense of design and layout.

Hill is an immensely talented young artist, and his new project, with David Walker, is The Hated #1. The comic is a Western set in an alternative world that Walker described as part spaghetti Western and part blaxploitation. It’s out now from Solid Comix, and Hill was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book and how he works.

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Wally West can’t stop running

Tom Bondurant recounts the history of Wally West, from reluctant superhero to generational avatar.

For many superhero-comic readers of the 1980s and ’90s (not to mention viewers of the Justice League animated series in the 2000s), Wally West was the Flash – the fastest man alive. Created by John Broome and Carmine Infantino for January 1960’s The Flash issue #110, Wally gained super-speed just as his idol did, by being doused in Barry Allen’s laboratory chemicals and struck by lightning. Today Wally has become a symbol of DC Comics’ superhero legacies, so much so that his role in 2016’s DC Universe Rebirth special signaled a wholesale return to a previous timeline. However, when editorial fiat dispatched him in 2011, Wally had arguably done everything he’d set out to do. Indeed, Wally’s history includes a couple of prominent retirement periods already. Now he’s inherited Metron’s Mobius Chair and Doctor Manhattan’s powers, but the question still remains: What’s left for Wally West?

Wally started out as Kid Flash, sidekick and sometimes backup-feature star. At first he wore a kid-sized Flash costume, so his more familiar duds (acquired in March 1963’s Flash #135) represented a significant step in his development. He was a charter member of the Teen Titans from its primeval beginning (June-July 1964’s Brave and the Bold #54) to its February 1978 dissolution (Teen Titans #53). Shortly thereafter, in 1978’s DC Special Series issue #11, writer Cary Bates and artist Irv Novick had Wally tell his family that he would only be Kid Flash through the end of his college career; and upon graduation, he’d retire from superheroics.

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