Marvel Artist Jerry DeCaire to give presentation at the NW library today
Marvel Artist Jerry DeCaire is making a stop in Southwest Florida at many Lee County Public Library locations to give presentations on how to create a comic book.
DeCaire will provide a 90-minute presentation at Northwest Regional Library, 519 Chiquita Blvd., N. from 4:15-5:45 p.m. today, Sept. 3; at Cape Coral-Lee County Public Library, 921 S.W. 39th Terrace, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5, and Tuesday, Sept. 9, from 4-5:30 p.m., at North Fort Myers Public Library, 2001 N. Tamiami Trail. The presentations will provide patrons with the ability to learn how to create a comic book from start to finish – writing, penciling, inking, and coloring.
“They’ll also see a live drawing performance with original sketches given away to select audience members, and a semi-animated slide presentation showing the connections between mathematics and drawing a superhero,” he said.
The spark of drawing drew him in at a very young age.
“When I was only 7 or 8, I recall looking at a drawing of a German shepherd hanging on my mother’s living room wall,” DeCaire said. “I thought to myself, more than anything, I want to do this. The first serious drawing that I did was of a Halloween mask of a clown.”
That passion of drawing began in the 1960s.
DeCaire became fascinated by the Marvel publications – Spiderman, Hulk, Avengers, Thor, and especially The Fantastic Four and The Silver Surfer.
“It was John Buscema’s wonderful illustrations that mostly compelled me to pick up their monthly mags. Stan Lee called Big John ‘The Michelangelo of the Comics,’ and indeed he was,” DeCaire said. “Coincidentally, my original goal was to be the next Michelangelo or daVinci, before getting into comics. Whether it’s John, Michelangelo, or Leonardo daVinci, they were all masters of the human form.”
The artist is currently writing and illustrating his own here-line production, the time-traveling Which-When Man. His other brainchild is an esoteric take on consciousness for a coffee-table form book, “The Other YOU,” which can be viewed at www.superheroworkshop.org.
DeCaire is one of the artists for Wolverine and Deadpool. His Deadpool was featured in Marvel’s Secret Defenders series. In 1991 he was assigned an illustrative job for “X-Men Annual #15,” his first professional assignment. From there, he was offered “Wolverine #47, which turned into “The Essential Wolverine Volume #2,” “Wolverine Weapon X Unbound” and finally “Wolverine Omnibus Volume 3” in 2023.