Jackson “Butch” Guice, the artist who rose to fame drawing Micronauts, X-Factor, The Flash, Doctor Strange and more, has passed away. He was 63.
The news was reported by his brother-in-law, James Hettel, on Facebook. Guice had reported on his own Facebook page in early April that he was experiencing health issues that landed him in the ICU, and noted he had been in a “losing a fight to a strong case of pneumonia.”
“Words to describe Butch: Solid. Dependable. Influential. Kind (in a very straight forward, get your ass back up and get back in there kind of way). Loving. Love for his family like a mountain. And a Holy Anger like a Mountain Slide if he saw you looking sideways at those he protected,” his brother-in-law said in his post.
Guice was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1961, and became a fan of comics not long after that.
“From the moment I read my first comic (whichever one it was… I really wish I could remember three decades back), I knew this was what I wanted to do,” he told Jennifer A. Ford in an interview in 2000. “Honestly. It consumed me day and night. I just had to be a comic artist. A neighbor friend who read comics happened to have hauled his collection to my house in a large cardboard box. Maybe fifty to one hundred issues. He was called home during the course of play and I took them inside for safekeeping. That evening I started flipping through them and the rest is history.”
Guice’s first credited work in the comics industry came in the 1980s, when he penceilled and inked The Crusaders #1 for the the husband-and-wife writing team of Henry and Audrey Vogel. The comic’s title would change to The Southern Knights with its second issue, which Guice also drew. Prior to that, he “ghost penciled” a chapter of Rom Annual #1 for artist Pat Broderick. About a year later, his first credited work for Marvel was Micronauts #48, and he would go on to draw many more, working with writer Bill Mantlo as he perfected his craft on the title. He quit his day job and became the regular artist on the book, drawing it through issue #58.
From there, he would continue working at Marvel, drawing the X-Men and the Micronauts miniseries, their adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, New Mutants and the first few issues of X-Factor, which featured the first appearance of Apocalypse. He also did work with First Comics, working on Badger, Nexus and The Chronicles of Corum with writer Mike Baron.
Following Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC hired Guice to draw The Flash reboot, which put Wally West into the role. Guice worked on the earliest issues of the title, helping to set the tone for the series. He returned to Marvel after that to work on Iron Man and then Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. His cover for issue #15 of that title became notorious, as he had used an Amy Grant album cover as reference for the image. That led to a complaint by Grant’s management team and an an out-of-court settlement between Grant and Marvel.
In the early 1990s, Guice return to DC and drew a run of Action Comics, contributing to their blockbuster “The Death of Superman” storyline running through the Superman titles. He worked with Roger Stern on Adventures of Superman, which spotlighted the Eradicator while Superman was “dead,” and would go on to draw a Supergirl miniseries that spun out of it.
The 1990s were an interesting time in comics, and Guice found mainstream success there as others fled Marvel and DC. In addition to working on Death of Superman and related title, Guice also co-created Resurrection Man with writers Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett, which ran for 27 issues and recently had a revival that he contributed to. He also had a lengthy run on Birds of Prey and drew the four-issue DC/Marvel crossover All Access. He also did work for Valiant, drawing Eternal Warrior and a miniseries base don the TV show Sliders.
Guice also had a long career, of more than 40 years — establishing himself in the 1980s, solidifying his style in the 1990s and still willing to take risks in the new millennium. He joined the fledgling CrossGen in 2001, moving to Florida to co-locate with the other creators working on the line, where he worked with Mark Waid on Ruse.
“R.I.P. Butch Guice, an extraordinary artist and comrade-in-the-trenches at Crossgen back in the day,” Waid posted on social media. “I’m blessed that we got to work together one last time on a short Dr. Strange tale a few years ago. He will be missed.”
Guice left CrossGen before it imploded, returning to Dc to work on JLA: Classified and Aquaman, and then to Marvel for another run on Iron Man, followed by Captain America and Black Panther and the Crew.
More recently, he worked with writer Chip Zdarsky on Invaders.
“I’d wanted to work with him right from the start of my career,” Zdarsky said in a touching post to his newsletter. “Very few people know this but he was going to be the original artist on my run of Daredevil, but ended up not being able to commit. I was heartbroken but swore we’d eventually work together.
“And we did, on our Invaders series a few years ago. Butch was the perfect fit for our flashback scenes and he jumped at the chance and showed us all how it’s done. He cared about the page, about story. Even though he was one of the best to ever do it, he never phoned it in. He thought about these pages and gave them his all.”
We share our condolences and in the grief of Guice’s friends, family and fans, as the industry has lost a legend.