With an Assist from ‘Absolute Batman’ and DC, the Comic Artist Superstar Rises Again

Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text At the end of January, comic artists Nick Dragotta and Daniel Warren Johnson sat at two separate tables in a small conference room at a Marriott Hotel in Monterey Park, Calif. From morning to deep into the night, they signed comic book after comic book, while workers carefully took the issues and placed them into holders to be graded and slabbed for preservation. Fueled on coffee and with breaks for lunch and dinner, the two men signed more than 15,000, maybe even upwards of 20,000 comics, in a span of four days under the watchful eyes of reps for a signing and grading company charged with handling the comics. Despite being bleary-eyed, it was a relatively quiet affair for the duo, who have been friends since the 2010s. The days were peppered with light conversation under the whirring of miniature fans that dried the ink on the comics’ covers. Dragotta , who is the regular monthly artist for DC’s Absolute Batman title, and Johnson, the indie creator who last year wrote and drew the Absolute Batman annual, have emerged as two of the biggest artists that the comics world has seen in a long time. They are at the center of a seismic shift in the industry. Call it the return of the superstar artist. For most of the 21 st century, comics, despite being a visual field, has been a writer-dominated medium. Even though some artists gained a degree of popularity, it has been authors such as Brian Michael Bendis, Robert Kirkman, Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV and Brian K. Vaughan that have been the stars in the field, rising off a platform built by a previous generation of wordsmiths, names such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Dragotta, Johnson and a handful of others that include names such as Hayden Sherman, Jorge Jimenez and Peach Momoko,...