Issue #257 of DC’s House of Mystery wasn’t short on talent when it hit the stands in late 1977. Like all issues of that horror anthology, it had its fair share of clunkers, but you couldn’t fault the art team. Joe Orlando (on the cover), Ernie Chan, Michael Golden, Arthur Suydam… and in between these heavy hitters was a three-pager by a newcomer named Mark D. Bright, raised in Montclair, NJ, and not yet a graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He would have other names in credit boxes throughout the years: M.D. Bright, "Doc" Bright, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Bright would go on to a long and storied career, doing well-regarded work for both Marvel and DC throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He was also the co-creator of Icon with Dwayne McDuffie, one of the cornerstones of Milestone Comics, and co-creator of the oddball superhero comedy series Quantum and Woody with frequent collaborator Christopher Priest. Bright passed away on March 27, 2024, leaving the world of comics a much poorer place.
I would love to say that first story in House of Mystery—a typical ‘hoisted by his own petard’ horror tale, written by Scott Edelman, drawn with Aubrey Bradford, and titled “The Fastest Draw in the East!”—foresaw something about Bright’s career. But other than the fact that the protagonist is a young Black comics artist (did the script specify the race of the character, or did Bright choose it himself?) there is little in common; the plot concerns a young talent using a curse to take over a title from an older pro. The real Bright needed no infernal assistance with his pencil.
Better to read his work on the story. Take a look above at the second page, moving the reader through numerous settings (the older artist’s studio, the comics company offices, the young artist’s home), each complimenting the moods of the characters, without ever disrupting the narrative flow. The panel of the young artist lifting his hands in triumph as light flows through the window into his darkened room communicates a great deal of energy in a small space, while just one panel later the artist is shy and withdrawing against the wall at the offices of a comics company, where Bright draws an amusing, satiric editor, whose response to death of a longtime worker is a thump of the hand on his desk over upcoming deadlines. Already we see the qualities of Bright’s artwork: self-assured; bold without being melodramatic; and, most importantly, human.
In a career that would span the next 25 years, from 1978 through 2003 before pulling back from the field of comics, Bright always brought a human touch to his work. No matter how crazy the scenarios he would be asked to draw—aliens, great military conflicts with sci-fi weapons, exotic locations, gaudily-designed characters—there would always be a warm verisimilitude to his work. What Bright understood is that a successful superhero comic doesn’t live by the ‘cool’ factor alone, though he could certainly play up the action scenes; the reader must develop an affection for the characters in order to keep coming back to them, and to love them we must relate to them. Which means they must act as humans in humanly recognizable environments.
See the above page from his mid '80s work on Power Man and Iron Fist (Bright would pencil the final stretch of that series, #115-125). It's a simple scene of New York in the fall. There’s a lot of physical depth to the image, but also an atmosphere of tension - the last few leaves of the season are fluttering wistfully in the foreground while the human figures are bent, coiled. You would see this kind of attention to detail, the kind that augments rather than overpowers the image, on all of Bright’s work. The common wisdom is that Marvel comics became successful by bringing a true sense of the world outside the reader's window, and Bright was one of the best of his cohort at doing just that.
Bright was predominantly a superhero artist, but the genre did not limit his range of artistic expression. He could draw his stuff in any mood necessary. Spider-Man vs. Wolverine, a 1987 one-shot written by Christopher Priest, probably does not seem like a fresh concept to today’s audience, who have seen these characters interact more than their parents, but Bright draws it as a story of unusual conflict, with the bright sensibilities of Spider-Man’s world clashing horribly with the moral greyness of Wolverine’s. Of course it would have been impossible without Priest’s dense script, or Al Williamson’s typically excellent inking, but reading it again reminds you of what Bright could do with a team that truly pitched to his level: teeming city crowds, startling brutal action scenes, and a grim finale at a cemetery. In a better world it would have been published in the European album format more suitable for both its themes and drawing quality. The Priest/Bright partnership, forged over Bright’s first extended work for Marvel comics, issues #2-4 of the 1983 Falcon miniseries (Priest was still writing as "Jim Owsley" at that time), would prove most fruitful.
These Falcon issues still wear their influence on their sleeve; that knockout punch above is pure Gil Kane (likewise the preceding acrobatics), but Bright—then fresh off a post-collegiate stint painting cover art for prose novels at Berkley Books—would soon come into his own. This could not have been easy in the Marvel of the 1980s. Bright did not sit for many interviews in his life, but Priest has been forthcoming about the often-suspicious attitude expressed toward non-white talent; recall the much-repeated anecdote about Larry Hama taking a young Priest out to lunch and instructing him to “never let the white man take advantage of you.” But whatever obstacles stood in his way, Bright would conquer.
For a while, his best-known work was a long stretch of Iron Man, including the much-loved, much-reprinted “Armor Wars” storyline, drawn with Bob Layton, blending mechanical action and slick design with character drama. Machines are cool, but under Bright’s pencils you never forgot about the man within the iron.
And I couldn’t possibly fail to mention Bright's work on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero with Larry Hama. He drew two issues early on, #35-#36, when anybody and everybody was pitching in, but came back for a long stint in the lead-up to issue #100 and a few beyond that. G.I. Joe asked a lot of its artists: a massive cast of characters, tons of vehicles and weapons, bustling action scenes and much slapstick, but there was seemingly nothing Bright couldn’t do, no matter how ridiculous the remit. The opening splash to issue #100 with an angry Cobra Commander kicking a puppy is one of my favorites for how over-the-top it is in intent, yet how matter-of-fact it is in execution.
Another good example can be found in issue #90, with a group of squabbling Cobra operatives jostling each other to make themselves heard. It’s a very absurd scene, especially considering the character designs (“This throwback wears a monocle and a cape and he’s casting aspersions on my character.”), but Bright doesn't just make it funny - it's also believable within the world of the series. Yes, this is how these people would behave. Yes, this would be their body language. Bright always got the joke, but he never had to oversell it to get a laugh.
The turn of the '90s saw Bright more at DC, including roughly half a dozen fine Batman comics and a 1989-93 run on various titles featuring Green Lantern, including the popular Emerald Dawn miniseries. Still, if we’re talking about Bright's work as published by DC, the most important would have to be his involvement with Icon. Much ink had been spilled on Milestone, the brainchild of Black creators Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis and Derek T. Dingle (Christopher Priest was also involved, but chose to leave before the company started publishing); I would heavily recommend Jeffery A. Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (University Press of Mississippi, 2001) for a more comprehensive take than I could offer. Icon, a riff on the alien-raised-on-Earth superhero concept, was one of the prime Milestone series, running the length of the company's original comics publishing effort from 1993 to 1997. Both writer (McDuffie) and artist (Bright) were at the peak of their powers, and Icon shows it. Bright also wrote a pair of issues of Milestone's Static (#44-45), and contributed art to the 1994 DC/Milestone crossover special Worlds Collide.
Another lamented child of the 1990s was Quantum and Woody, an 'odd couple' comedy plotted jointly by Bright & Priest which took a swipe at pretty much all superhero storytelling devices, from a time when it wasn't such a tired cliché to mock tired clichés. It was published by Acclaim Comics, which was the result of Valiant's acquisition and subsequent mismanagement by the video game publisher Acclaim. Perhaps the enduring cult favorite of that line, Quantum and Woody ran for 17 issues from 1997 to 1998 before going off publication for more than a year. When it returned, it was with a rather funny (but possibly ill-advised) gag of bumping the numbering and the plotline ahead to issue #32, as if the series was still shipping monthly issues that the reader had somehow missed. It then resumed normal numbering, but was cancelled in 2000 with issue #21; Bright was not around for the final number.
A professional to the end, in whatever medium he chose to work. Mark D. Bright's skill was never in doubt, nor is his legacy.
