This morning, while perusing Drawn!, I caught a headline that drop kicked my heart to my stomach. Mike Wieringo, indefatigueable, incredible comic book artist Mike Wieringo, died of a sudden heart attack on Sunday at the age 44. I didn’t know Mike personally. I never sent him an e-mail or comment on his blog. I’ve never even held one of his comic books in my hands. But I am simply staggered by the loss of him.

Normally, I would read an obituary like that, think to myself “oh, so young! That’s so sad,” pause a moment to think about how deperately short life is, how it can all turn on a dime, and then move on with my day, the way you do when it’s not really someone you know.

But this is different to me. No, I didn’t know Mike. I didn’t know his comic books. I’m not even a comic book aficiando like our own Rama Hughes. But I knew Mike’s art. I knew it well and I loved it. I spent a great deal of the past year admiring it, studying it, trying in someways to emulate it… or more specifically, the wonderful quality of line and character that made it so special, so incredibly unique. You see, last spring I naively accepted the job of creating a comic book on the subject of Climate Change for Scouts Canada. I am not a comic book artist, I have never drawn a comic book before, and as I said, I’m not even a comic book reader. But I am an illustrator and have worked in a comic-compatible style and I thought, you know, I’d just run with it and figure it out as I went along. Wing it. Easy Peasy.

But I had no idea how incredibly challenging it is to create a comic book from scratch. Nonewhatsoever. I had great admiration for a number of comic book artists before this, but let me tell you… that admiration? would better be categorized as worship now. And Mike Wieringo was the artist I worshipped above all others.

I found him through The Drawing Board where he was a regular contributer to the forum, while I was desperately searching for cues that might tell me where to begin, how to go about this thing exactly. I was at first attracted by his calm, kind, always constructive comments. Then I followed a link to his site and discovered exactly what I was looking for. So much comic book art is over-the-top testosterone-driven. So much of it is special effects and pyrotechniques and no heart. So much of it feels… I don’t know… exploitive, for lack of a better word.

But Mike Wieringero’s art is all about heart. It is all about being good and solid. His round, fluid line expressed such humanity, such warmth and clean character. It felt wholesome and real and… well, heroic.

I’ve been reading tributes to him all day and it seems to me that what I saw in his work expressed an essential part of who Mike Wieringo really was as a person. I’m feeling deeply regretful that I never e-mailed him and told him just how much his example helped me, just how much he taught me and how much better an artist I am because I found his work. And that makes me sad. But it also makes me feel better, because he will always live on through his work. His art, expressing the best of who he was the way it does, will live on in ways he never could have imagined… touching and instructing people across the globe he never knew existed. And that’s an astonishing legacy to leave behind.

Thank you Mike, for being the hero I needed.

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