by David Lawrence
Homeless, a young man in tattered clothes and ratty hair steps through the trash and muck of a garbage dump. He "lives" there. Finding an old tire and a discarded sheet of transparent plastic, he fashions a makeshift drawing table and practices inking a comicbook page with whatever tools and supplies he can scrounge.
A married illustrator in a small foreign city works long hours as a newspaper paste-up artist to house and feed his wife -- weeks away from giving birth to their daughter -- on less than five dollars a day.
An unemployed commercial artist survives a tragic public bus crash where others lost their lives, only to be turned away from his hard-won job interview after arriving disheveled and bloody.
A student, poor and uncommonly thin, struggles to learn to draw comicbook pages before a congenital heart defect ends his dream and his life. His family cannot afford to have the necessary surgery performed.
Sad stories with more in common than undiscovered talent and a love for the comicbook medium, they share a happy ending called Glass House Graphics -- a company well known by editors and publishers but something of a secret to comicbook fans.
Happy Endings Are Only The Beginning* The homeless inker became
Jeffrey Huet, star Marvel embellisher on
The Incredible Hulk,
Iron Man,
New Avengers Annual, and other titles
. He has bought a home for himself and his family.
* The undiscovered paste-up artist was
Mike Deodato, Jr., the Marvel superstar on
Spider-Man,
The Avengers,
Hulk,
Thunderbolts, and more.
* The rejected crash survivor was
Will Conrad, soon a prized inker who later became a top Dark Horse penciller on
Conan,
Serenity, and the upcoming
Kull.
* The artist needing open-heart surgery was
Wilson Tortosa, now healthy and noted for his work on
Battle of the Planets,
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and the upcoming
Wolverine: The Manga. All were discovered and trained by, with careers carefully molded and developed by, Glass House Graphics. But they're just the tips of the comicbook iceberg.
Celebrating its
15th Anniversary this month,
Glass House Graphics is a professional service firm and agency that is home to those and 118 other artists, writers, designers, painters, and colorists hailing from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, England, Portugal, the Netherlands, Australia, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.
Founded in 1993, Glass House Graphics’ genesis came when its C.E.O.
David Campiti was founder and publisher of Innovative Corp. (Innovation Publishing) in 1988. Under his leadership that little company became by 1991 the fourth largest comicbook publisher in the United States -- its success built upon adaptations and tie-ins of books, TV shows, and films, helping the company to carve out a unique niche in the marketplace. Among its most successful were adaptations of such Anne Rice novels as
Interview with the Vampire,
The Vampire Lestat, and
The Queen of the Damned.
Securing the rights to adapt Rice was a coup that put Innovation on the map.
The company also published comics based on Piers Anthony's
On a Pale Horse; the TV series
Dark Shadows,
Quantum Leap,
Beauty and the Beast and
Lost in Space, its biggest seller; and the seminal science-fiction movie classic
Forbidden Planet, all of which Campiti personally negotiated, edited, and often wrote or co-wrote.
Those were heady days for the entire industry, with an unprecedented number of publishers producing a quantity of material unmatched since the halcyon years of the Golden Age. The extreme demand for quality artists inspired
Campiti to search far from traditional sources to fill the pages of Innovation’s expanding line of titles.
He turned first to Brazil, where a thriving market for American comics existed alongside a seamy homegrown industry that paid starvation wages to artists. His attention initially drawn there by bootleg reproduction of Innovation titles, Campiti was impressed to discover an unexpected and untapped goldmine of talent.
Among his first discoveries from Brazil in late 1990 was the now-legendary Mike Deodato, Jr., whose earliest American work was published in the pages of Innovation’s full-color painted adaptation of the cult favorite TV series
Beauty and the Beast. Others, such as
Joe Bennett,
Luke Ross, and
Joe Pimentel, followed as Campiti built connections to a rising roster of international talent.
