Thursday, May 28, 2009

Profile Antics: Mike Parobeck

Mike Parobeck died from complications resulting from diabetes in July 1996. He was only 30 years old. I can't believe that it has been that long since he passed away. He was a remarkable talent, with a long future ahead of him.
In his short comic career, he produced some really memorable artwork on such DC Comics titles as El Diablo, The Fly, the 1992 Justice Society of America series and the Elongated Man mini-series. I had issues of all of those books and not only were they very well-done comics, they were also lots and lots of fun.

However, Mike Parobeck gained his greatest fame working on The Batman Adventures, again for DC Comics, which was done in the style of the popular Bruce Timm Batman animated series. Both a critical and commercial success, The Batman Adventures spinoff meshed well with the style established on the cartoon show and helped make the comic more popular than was usual for a cartoon spinoff. His art helped establish Batman Adventures as a fun alternative to the regular Batman comics of the time, which were thought by many to be excessively grim and gritty.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was reading all the Batman books at that time and everytime anyone asked me about Batman, I would tell them the real Batman is in The Batman Adventures.

Paul was a wonderful artist and I choked up pretty badly when he died.