RIP: Jason Pearson
I'm late in posting this: former Legion artist Jason Pearson passed away in December 2022, though his family withheld the information until January.
Perhaps best known for his work on the Dark Horse series "Body Bags", Pearson started his art career on the Legion.
Pearson's first regular assignment in comic books was working on Legion of Super-Heroes in the final year of Keith Giffen's epic run on the series, along with scripters Tom and Mary Bierbaum, and inker Al Gordon. The fascinating thing about this early work, though, is that Giffen famously used a nine-panel grid on Legion of Super-Heroes, and so in retrospect it is amazing seeing an artist like Pearson, whose work seemed built for splash pages, working in a nine-panel grid in each issue. He made it work, though, but I imagine that Pearson's splash page abilities played at least a small role in Giffen's final issue of his run (which features the destruction of Earth) being depicted in illustrated text pages...The run finished in late-1992, which was a heady time for the comic book industry, especially for young hot talent like Pearson, only 22 years old at the time. There was DC, of course, but there was also Marvel calling...
In his blog, "It's OK, I'm a Senator", Tom Bierbaum mentioned Pearson a number of times:
- Catspaw was actually created by Jason Pearson during a Legion summit, and the visual was so nice there was no reason not to use her, though, admittedly, we never had a lot in mind to do with her. ... At one point he and we were trying to work out a "Legionnaires" fill-in that would have given more of her background, but we didn't start thinking about that possibility until our time there was almost up. Basically, Catspaw was just a woman on Earth when the Dominators were secretly nabbing people and experimenting on them.
- Someone asked "Did you change the storyline mid-stream in regards to Bounty? Her character seemed to change quite drastically from Giffen to Pearson." Tom replied: In fact, when Jason Pearson was pencilling the book, Keith was still plotting, so changes in the character were probably largely coincidental when pencillers changed. As with Kent and Celeste, Al Gordon is your best source for info on Bounty, since he was the one supplying most of the ideas (he was, in fact, the creator of Kent and Celeste). But I don't recall that there was any really changes in the plans for Bounty. Probably what we ended up revealing in the Pearson-pencilled issues was different than what many readers were anticipating. And I don't think we ever took time to really explore the ideas and implications of the Bounty entity. I remember Mary and I kicking around ideas for a story that explored the Bounty entity and showed it possessing people besides Dawnstar, but we never got the chance to pursue it.
- LSH 21: Starting with our back pages in #21, Jason Pearson began his stint penciling the Legion based on Keith’s layouts. I don’t recall for sure, but I’m guessing these back pages during the “Quiet Darkness” were Jason’s tryout and he came through impressively. While it was an adjustment to switch from Keith’s very distinctive style to Jason’s, I think the switch was worthwhile. While Jason probably didn’t capture quite the grittiness and mundane detail that really set the tone for Keith’s Legion, Jason’s cleaner style probably made the storytelling clearer. And most importantly, the arrangement kept the book a lot closer to a regular schedule, with much less interruption for fill-in issues. That allowed us to tell the upcoming “Terra Mosaic” storyline in a much more consistent, uninterrupted manner than had been the case for our earlier arcs (which I guess were formally titled “Five Years Later” and “The Legion of Super-Heroes”).
- LSH 29: [Sade is] a character Jason Pearson created, but I don’t quite remember how exactly her ability was supposed to work. She could essentially disappear and blink back in somewhere else.
- LSH 32: I should mention that I really like the Jason Pearson cover of this issue. It shows a group of five Legionnaires being blinded by a flash of light (the explosion of the chambers), with the shadow of the five characters filling most of the cover. Most effectively, the shadow of Devlin O’Ryan’s hand is cast across his face. Really a nice imaginative piece by Jason.
- LSH 35: This is the issue where young SW6 Sun Boy confronts what’s left of the original Sun Boy, whose powers are burning him alive. It’s an impactful scene that’s depicted on this issue’s cover, probably one of Jason Pearson’s best.
- LSH 38: The Sandman character Death makes a cameo when the destruction comes, as the planet is lost in a blinding flash. Jason Pearson does powerful work in this issue and the two-page spread that shows the actual destruction really has a lot of impact.
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