In Memory of Mike Wieringo

I never got to meet Mike Wieringo. But I was a fan of his work, especially his collaborations with Mark Waid on Flash and Fantastic Four. And on Spider-Boy, the Amalgam one-shot he did with Karl Kesel. Wieringo's art showed the pure joy of comics, and I was really enjoying his daily blog, where he showed new sketches and was talking about a space adventure comic he was thinking about. Now we'll never get to see it, and that's the least of the sadness about losing Wieringo at such a young age.

Below is the first ever sketch I ever got, the first page in my sketchbook, from Chicago Con 1996. The artist? Mike Wieringo.



Edited to add: Scott Kurtz posts this recollection of moments with Mike, and it's incredibly moving. It's starting to sink in just how much we lost, and I'm remembering back to the day that Mike Parobeck died. So many years later, I'm still struck on an almost daily basis of how much that sucked, and I suspect the same is going to be true of losing Mike Wieringo so suddenly and unexpectedly.

Edited to add: I realize that it sounds stupid to say that I never met Mike Wieringo, when I've got a sketch from him. What I mean is that I never had a conversation that went beyond "I really like your art," so I don't really consider that we knew each other at all.