R.I.P. Jason Pearson

Jason Pearson, who forged a career as an artist for Marvel and DC but also worked for years on his own series, Body Bags, died on December 19, 2022, at the age of 52. Pearson’s family posted the news and a remembrance on Twitter.

Pearson was born in 1970 in Los Angeles and made his artistic debut at the age of 20, drawing the cover for Tony Isabella and Mike Gustovich’s The Justice Machine #6, published by Innovation with a cover date of November 1990. Pearson, who drew a wraparound cover for the issue, was billed as a “special cover artist” in the jacket copy. In 1991 he penciled a 22-page story in DC Comics’ Starman #35, launching a career as an interior and cover artist that spanned over 30 years. His work for DC included several short runs on Legion of Super-Heroes and the one-shot Joker’s Asylum: Penguin, and for Marvel Comics his interior work included X-Force Annual (2011) and the story “Monstrous,” by Daniel Way in Astonishing X-Men #36-37.  His inking on Ultimate Spider-Man Special #1 garnered him a Squiddy Award in 2002, and he was also a frequent cover artist for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, and Image, contributing to Marvel’s 2015 line of hip-hop variants (see “Preview: Fall Hip-Hop Variant Covers”) and its 2018 New Mutants variants (see “Preview: New Mutants Variant Covers”). In 2008 he was one of the contributors to The Ride, an Image anthology, which got an A- review from Entertainment Weekly (see “EW’s ‘Comic Books 101’”).

In addition to his Big Two work, Pearson was one of the founding members of Gaijin Studios, a collective of freelance comics artists whose membership included Adam Hughes, Brian Stelfreeze, and Cully Hamner, among others. It was there that he began developing his creator-owned series Body Bags, which was originally planned to be part of a Gaijin anthology to be published by Dark Horse Comics. Publication was stalled by the turmoil in the comics market in the mid-1990s, and in the meantime, Pearson began rethinking his story. Body Bags was finally published in 1996 as a four-issue miniseries that was the debut title for Dark Horse’s Gaijin imprint Blanc Noir and made Wizard magazine’s influential Top 10 list. 12 Gauge Comics published a collected edition in 2005, and later Image Comics published two one-shots, Body Bags: 3 the Hard Way in 2005 and Body Bags: One Shot in 2008.