JUAN SANTACRUZ

In the life of any comic creator there are a few people you meet along the way that you just click with. For me when writing, it is something I have to happen with an artist or I usually do not work with them ever again.  This happened to me many times over the years with so many great artists, but one of the ones I think I might have worked with the most is someone I have only really met once when I was a guest at a convention in Spain. His name is Juan Santacruz. 

I met Juan through his art agent, my good friend and always dependable guy David Macho. He represents a bunch of very talented people throughout Europe and years ago back in 2000 I was given the gift of creating two or three new series for Wildstorm from one of their new editors, Bob Harris. Yeah, the same Bob Harris that was Editor in chief at Marvel comics just the year before, but he left and was now working for Wildstorm. Bob had liked my writing and offered me to pitch him a few ideas I had. 

Back then I was co-writing with one of the best in the business, Justin Gray and we got together and pitched two books. One was 21 DOWN and we were lucky enough to get one of David’s guys, Jesus Siaz for it and the other book was a science fiction action drama we titled THE RESISTANCE. Yes, at the time no one was using that title but since them video games and other books came out with the same title where I learned you cannot own a title that wasn’t the name of an actual character…found this the hard way. Anyway, for that complicated and insane book we needed an artist that understood world building, was not lazy and that could just about draw everything on earth and even things not on earth. Well, long story short, David showed us the work of Juan and we fell in love. Both books were set and the work began. 

THE RESISTANCE

With the Resistance, a total cyberpunk book, we wanted to make the characters from all different backgrounds. We had a black lesbian police officer, a monk, a goofy teenager, a Spanish tough guy, and even stripper mermaids. It was a story about how in the future the class system became even more divided than it is today and the world changed because of it. The series was way before its time for sure and although we had die-hard fans, it only lasted a total of 8 issues. Here is a description of the book from Wiki: 

The setting is a dystopic New York City in the year 2280.[3] A chemical known as "Toxin 5" has ruined the world's ecosystem, bringing civilization close to collapse.

The Global Control Commission (GCC) has brought order to the chaos and anarchy, but it is also corrupt and oppressive to the point of totalitarianism. It is also very inegalitarian: all people over age 65 are denied medical treatment), and the government, in an effort to maintain the delicate balance between a growing population and dwindling food supplies, regulates childbirth rates in the few remaining cities. People born without authorization are known as "Strayz" and are given no civil rights by the GCC; they may be hunted down and killed by corporate-sponsored machines.

So, Juan Santacruz with the help of colorist Paul Mounts made some of the craziest looking comics I have ever seen and at the time, it was groundbreaking content hardly anyone cared about, but such is life in an overcrowded market. The thing is, the pages we got back from Juan were just stunning. He took the world and ideas Justin and I put on paper and created a fully realized creation. A place where madness was normal, where everything he designed looked like it worked and a story that we felt was so political it had to be ignored. 

TWILIGHT EXPERIMENT

After a wild ride of 8 fun issues and some of the most beautiful artwork ever, the sales were not great and getting less and less each issue and Wildstorm finally gave it the ax and cancelled the book, but another offer came up. Jim Lee and I spoke and he asked us to create a bunch of characters and a book for him to work on and we did right away. I mean, when was I going to get another chance to ever work directly with Jim? Justin and I got to work creating characters, a world with established superheroes and an introduction of a brand new one. The series we wrote was called THE TWILIGHT EXPERIMENT. Jim loved it …but after a month or so came back and said he got too busy with other things and can’t draw it anymore, but he would do the covers. Well, at least we had that. 

Jim asked us to go out and find another artist for the book and we RAN right back to Juan Santacruz and begged him to do it , and he did and again, another world of characters, emotional story beats and stunning work was created. Unfortunately, a lot of people were not in the Palmiotti/Gray business at that time and this series lasted 6 issues, but we knew that in advance and gave it a beginning, middle and end. We got to tell the story we wanted to but it just never caught on. At least Jim was going to do the covers, but again, we got word from the editor that he became too busy and once again, could not do a single thing for it…so this time the covers went to Juan and they were beautiful. At the end of the day, I am super happy with how both books turned out and the work by Juan was as usual, unique to him and ever since I have been using him for anything I could whenever his schedule allowed. 

I have only met Juan once in my life and it was when I was on my first trip to Barcelona Spain. Unfortunately, I didn’t speak Spanish and he did not speak English, so David Macho had a lot of translating to do. Now when we speak via e mail, we did it with Google translate, but honestly, I should just get my Spanish lessons going for the next time we meet up. 

About these two series that we created for Wildstorm, over the years the super generous Legal department has met both our requests to get ownership of the work back to us and we ow have the rights to the books we created, something very rare in comics, let me tell you. They are a great crew over there and to this day we continue to talk about some of the other properties we created. 

Our latest collaboration is the next Kickstarter from me featuring PAINKILLER JANE and we will have more to talk about that next week, but until then, here are some visuals of Juans we would like to show you guys and if interested, we have some digital comics available at www.paperfilms.com featuring Juan’s work we highly recommend you checking out!

 

JUAN SANTACRUZ BIO

The Joso School for Comic-Book Artists also counts Juan as one of its teachers. He started his career with a short story (and some illustrations later published in another book) for the Spanish edition of Savage Sword of Conan, and the books Black Hacker and Zeta, all for the same publisher, Planeta DeAgostini.

His first American work was Cable #78 and has done work on several titles from Peter Parker: Spider-Man Annual 2002, The Resistance, The Twilight Experiment (both with Jimmy Palmiotti), the Hulk ongoing, Marvel Adventures line (Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Hulk), and other books like Mystic Arcana: Scarlet Witch; Giant-Size Hulk; Hulk: Broken Worlds; or Wolverine / Hercules: Myths (still pending publication).

Santacruz created two OGNs for Kickstart Entertainment, Endangered and Book Smart, and after that he’s created the art for the Shifty Look project Rapid Thunder, an update of the classic Rolling Thunder game for Namco Bandai.

BOOM POW

Speaking of amazing artwork, have you been catching up on the BOOM POW series from Amanda Conner?  No, well, the title is available now for all to read on the website.  Make sure you check the series out with more pages coming in soon for the title!

Follow the series here:  https://www.zestworld.com/Paperfilms/boom-pow?ref=popular_comics

That’s all for this week folks!  See you on the other side!