Dawnstar of the Legion of Super-Heroes by George Perez

Dawnstar of the Legion of Super-Heroes by the legendary George Perez. I’m not the person who originally commissioned it, but I’m grateful to the person who did and was willing to part with it.

I’m reposting below what I wrote when George passed away last year. The posting was originally included in the description of a page from George’s all-too-brief stint on Action Comics that I had in my CAF gallery. That page is on its way to a new home, so I deleted it from my gallery. However, I wanted to preserve the George story, so here it is reprinted with the author’s permission (since the author was me).

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Given the passing of legendary artist George Perez, I thought I would post a piece of his that I picked up a few years ago. Like pretty much every fan of superhero comic books, I am a huge fan of George’s art. George was also responsible for one of my favorite single days as a comic book collector back when I was 14 years old.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the greatest comic book store I ever visited was Mike’s Comic Hut in Flushing, NY. George designed the store bags for Mike’s, and Mike’s hosted George for a signing the Saturday after the release of Infinity Gauntlet #1 in May 1991. My friends and I showed up about an hour early for the signing, and a long line had already formed before we arrived. By the time the signing started, there must have been at least 150 people lined up around the block. To keep things moving, customers were limited to getting one copy of IG #1 signed, and then we were strongly encouraged to leave the store to keep the crowd manageable. We were thrilled to get George’s signature, even if we were out of there in what felt like seconds. After leaving the store, my friends and I spent the afternoon wandering around Flushing, visiting Mike’s inferior competition. We decided to head back to Mike’s late in the afternoon to do some shopping, figuring that George would be long gone. Lo and behold, he was still there, and with the crowd now much smaller, he was simply chatting with fans and casually signing anything put in front of him. I quickly bought as many Perez back issues as I could afford to get them signed (Mike’s was ready for us with stacks of New Teen Titans and Crisis on Infinite Earths back issues next to the cash register). I know I asked George a couple of stupid questions that I’ve blocked from my memory, but I do remember that he answered all of them with a smile on his face.

The best part of the afternoon was the raffle – the winner would receive a drawing by George of a character of their choice. Each attendee at the signing got one raffle ticket on which to write their name, phone number and the character. They did the drawing late in the afternoon, and I did not win. The person who did win wasn’t even there, but that’s why we wrote our phone numbers on the tickets. George picked the winning ticket, looked down at it, and said “he wants me to draw Ghost Rider?” George chuckled, said that he could not recall a fan ever asking him to draw Ghost Rider, and said he would need reference materials to do it. I didn’t think we would see George create the artwork, but the store gave him recent issues of the then-popular Daniel Ketch GR series, George flipped through them, and he got to work. A group of maybe fifteen of us formed a semi-circle around George and watched in amazement as he created out of thin air a full-figure inked image of Ghost Rider. This was the first time I had ever seen a professional artist at work, and I was amazed at how quickly (and what appeared to be effortlessly) he created the art. It was like he was performing magic in front of us.

I can’t fully express how much I enjoyed that afternoon at Mike’s Comic Hut over three decades ago. George was funny and gracious to a bunch of kids and created memories that I’m sure all of us there that Saturday treasure to this day.