Barry Windsor-Smith


Barry Windsor-Smith is a British comic book illustrator and painter whose best known work has been produced in the United States. He is known for his work on Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian from 1970 to 1973, and for his work on Wolverine – particularly the original Weapon X story arc.

Early life

Barry Windsor-Smith was born Barry Smith on 25 May 1949 in Forest Gate, a working class area in the East End of London. He displayed artistic abilities at an early age, and his parents supported in pursuing an education in the arts.
He attended East Ham Technical College for three years, earning degrees in Industrial Design and Illustration.

Career

Windsor-Smith produced his first published work in 1967 and 1968 – single page "Powerhouse Pinups" of Marvel Comics characters for Terrific and Fantastic comics, titles published by Odhams Press that included licensed Marvel Comics reprints for the UK market. Following this, he flew to the U.S. in summer 1968 with fellow artist Steve Parkhouse for meetings at Marvel in New York. "I sent material first, and based solely upon a pleasant return note from Stan Lee|Stan 's assistant Linda Fite, my pal and me were at Marvel's doorstep in the blink of an eye." Largely due to his Jack Kirbyesque style, Marvel Comics Editor Stan Lee gave him the job of drawing both the cover and story of X-Men No. 53, credited to Barry Smith as he was then known. He drew Marvel's Daredevil #50–52, a Western short story, "Half Breed", and issue #12 of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., both scripted by Parkhouse. Windsor-Smith later called his early art "amateur and klutzy" and a "less than skillful" Kirby imitation, but Stan Lee liked it enough to give him more work.
Despite this, Roy Thomas assigned him issues No. 66 and No. 67 of The Avengers after he had returned to the UK. These stories introduced the fictitious indestructible metal alloy adamantium. He continued to work at a distance for Marvel, providing the art for a number of stories in the horror anthology titles Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness. Thomas, a long-time fan of Robert E. Howard's 1930 pulp-fiction character Conan the Barbarian, had Windsor-Smith provide art for a sword and sorcery story, "Starr the Slayer", in Chamber of Darkness No. 4. Soon afterwards, Thomas offered Windsor-Smith the job as penciller for Marvel's adaptation of Conan, starting with Conan the Barbarian No. 1. In 1971, Windsor-Smith moved to the United States, having been granted a work permit. Comics historian Les Daniels noted that Windsor-Smith's "initial efforts were slightly sketchy, but his technique progressed by leaps and bounds. Within a few months he had achieved a style never seen in comics before."
During his run on Conan the Barbarian, Windsor-Smith was involved in the writing as well. He and writer Roy Thomas adapted a number of R.E. Howard short stories, the aforementioned "The Frost-Giant's Daughter", "Tower of the Elephant", "Rogues in the House", and "Red Nails". As well as the art and story contributions, Windsor-Smith provided the covers for most issues. They worked on original adventures and characters based on R.E. Howard's characters – most notably the flame-haired warrior-woman, Red Sonja – loosely based on a character from one of Howard's non-Conan stories, who has now become a major comics character in her own right – in "The Song of Red Sonja" in Conan the Barbarian No. 24, Windsor-Smith's last issue of the title. By then he had worked on 21 of the first 24 issues of the series, missing only issues No. 17 and No. 18, and No. 22, and both he and the title had won a number of awards. Windsor-Smith would later say that the reason he missed those issues was because he had quit the series a number of times as he was dissatisfied with the work and how the comics business worked, rather than the deadline problems Marvel quoted. In 2010, Comics Bulletin ranked Thomas and Windsor-Smith's work on Conan the Barbarian seventh on its list of the "Top 10 1970s Marvels".
Windsor-Smith provided the art for a number of other Marvel Comics titles, including the Ka-Zar stories in Astonishing Tales #3–6 and No. 10, three further issues of The Avengers – about which he would later remember the nightmare of drawing "all those bloody characters that I didn't give tuppence about", Iron Man No. 47, and Marvel Premiere #3–4, which featured Doctor Strange, both of which were apparently re-scripted by Stan Lee after being drawn to Lee's original scripts. Windsor-Smith was by now becoming disillusioned with the comics industry and the way in which in his opinion the writers and artists were being exploited: "I needed to be free of constraints and policies that were imposed by the dictates of creating entertainment for children" Shortly thereafter, Windsor-Smith left comics for the first time, leaving only a couple of inventory items in the Marvel Comics vaults, both stories of R.E. Howard characters: Kull in "Exile of Atlantis", and Bran Mak Morn in "Worms of the Earth". Other than ten pages of inking of Jack Kirby pencil work for Captain America's Bicentennial Battles, a one-off oversize Marvel Treasury Edition, he produced no more comics work until 1983.
At this point he changed his professional surname to Windsor-Smith, adding his mother's surname to his own, and began to pursue a career in fine art. Granted residential status in the United States in 1974, Windsor-Smith, along with his partner Linda Lessman, set up Gorblimey Press, through which he released a small number of limited-edition prints of fantasy-based subjects that proved popular. In 1976 Windsor-Smith published The Gorblimey Press Catalogue, a high quality index to the work published by Gorblimey Press, with full-page reproductions of each piece. Prior to that, in 1975, together with Jeff Jones, Michael Kaluta, and Bernie Wrightson, he was one of four comic book artists-turned-fine-illustrator/painters who formed a small artist's loft commune in Manhattan known as The Studio, with the aim of pursuing creative products outside the constraints of comic book commercialism. By 1979 they had produced enough material to issue an art book under the name The Studio, which was published by Dragon's Dream.

1980s

Smith designed and drew the fictitious comic strip "Mandro" for the 1981 Oliver Stone horror film The Hand. In the film, the artwork is used as that of character Jon Lansdale, a comic book illustrator played by Michael Caine. Stone explains the hiring of Smith thus:
I'd always been a fan of his. I think I fell in love with his version of Conan before I had even read the Howard books. He did more for that comic than anyone…Since the cartoonist was drawing a Conan-type character, Barry was the logical choice. Oddly enough, Barry was English, as was Michael, and they both have sandy blond hair. When they first met, they discovered that they're both about 6' 2", and that they both have the same sort of East End wit. The similarity was quite amazing.

Windsor-Smith returned to mainstream comics work for Marvel in 1983 with two pieces, a short mystical tale of love, "The Beguiling", and a dark, humorous two-page black-and-white story, "A Path of Stars", both in Epic Illustrated No. 16, which featured a page-and-a-half Windsor-Smith spread accompanying an Archie Goodwin text story called "The Horde". Later the same year he produced a short piece in Dave Sim's Swords of Cerebus, followed in 1984 by several Marvel superhero stories: an untitled story, though usually referred to as "that night...", and an April Fool's story of The Thing in Marvel Fanfare No. 15, which he wrote and drew. He illustrated "Lifedeath" a double-sized Storm story in The Uncanny X-Men No. 186, and a four-issue Machine Man limited series, for which Windsor-Smith was artist and colourist over Herb Trimpe layouts for the first three issues, and drew and coloured alone for the fourth. Although he would return to the X-Men once a year for the next three years,, his mainstream comics output remained limited throughout the rest of the 1980s, amounting to just one issue each of Fantastic Four and Daredevil, two issues of Iron Man, two pages for DC Comics' Heroes Against Hunger benefit project, and two small pieces for the Harvey Award-winning comics anthology A1 published by Atomeka Press. In 1987 he returned to his first major success and provided new painted covers for nine issues of Marvel's Conan reprint title The Conan Saga, all issues which contained black-and-white reprints of his original 1970s stories.

1990s

Together with the X-Men spinoff Excalibur, Windsor-Smith's last work for Marvel Comics came with the serialised Weapon X feature in Marvel Comics Presents #72–84, his telling of the origin of the X-Men character Wolverine which he wrote, drew, inked, coloured, and co-lettered. In late 1991, he was approached by Valiant Comics, a new comics publisher founded by former Marvel Comics writer and editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, and asked to act as their creative director and lead artist. Valiant had obtained the licenses for a number of characters originally published in the 1960s and 1970s by Gold Key Comics: Magnus Robot Fighter, Doctor Solar and Turok Dinosaur Hunter, and added their own original titles to the roster, including Harbinger, X-O Manowar, Shadowman, Archer and Armstrong, Eternal Warrior, Bloodshot, Ninjak, and Rai.
Windsor-Smith was the chief designer of the "Unity" crossover storyline for Valiant Comics, and writer and artist for most of the first dozen issues of the title Archer and Armstrong. By focusing on storytelling and innovative marketing practices such as a tightly knit continuity, crossovers and send away issues Valiant quickly became a considerable success story, selling nearly two million copies of premiere issues and rapidly becoming the third largest comics publisher in the US, behind the long-time industry leaders Marvel and DC Comics. However, in 1993 Windsor-Smith once again found himself in opposition to company employment policies when Valiant decided to adopt the same work for hire practices that he had disliked in Marvel Comics, and became dissatisfied with his position in the company: "They needed me as a figurehead just as much as a creator." He left Valiant soon after Jim Shooter's departure from the company. Smith has called work-for-hire contracts "a legal but unethical instrument designed to rape and plunder young talents of every possible prerogative they would otherwise possess if they had the fortune to work for more scrupulous, morally invested, publishers."
Of his work for Valiant, and the problems he encountered there over legal ownership of titles and characters, Windsor-Smith said in 2008, "In the 1970s I was constantly asked when I would 'do Conan again'. In these latter years I receive e-mails imploring me to return to Archer and Armstrong. My short reply is, 'When pigs fly to the Moon and return home safely.
Since leaving Valiant, Windsor-Smith has worked for a number of companies. For Malibu's Ultraverse line he co-created Rune with Chris Ulm, including a crossover one-shot comic titled Conan vs. Rune published by Marvel Comics in 1994 after they took over Malibu. As a result he once again came up against legal ownership problems, and the Rune stories have remained un-reprinted as a result. For Image Comics he worked on the crossover storyline "Wildstorm Rising", drawing and colouring Wildstorm Rising No. 1, and all eleven of the covers for the interlinked series. Windsor-Smith later said that he was talked into illustrating Wildstorm Rising, and regretted participating in it, stating that in reading the story and illustrating it, he could not understand the motivations of any of the characters, even when he read earlier Wildstorm books featuring the characters. He says he altered the plot in an attempt to improve it and his enthusiasm for it, later learning that writer James Robinson was not pleased with his doing so.
In 1995 Windsor-Smith created an oversized anthology series, Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller for Dark Horse Comics that contained three ongoing features: "The Paradoxman", a dark science-fiction tale, "Young GODS", a homage to Jack Kirby's Thor and New Gods series, and "The Freebooters", a lighthearted action series about an ageing Conan-like character grown older and heavier and now running a tavern. He cancelled Storyteller after nine issues, even though a tenth issue had been completed; since then Fantagraphics Books has issued hardcover collections of "Young GODS" and "The Freebooters". Each of these hardcover volumes includes supplemental features, essays and previously unseen art. Fantagraphics has published Windsor-Smith's Adastra in Africa, a hardcover starring a character from "Young GODS" in a story originally intended to be published as "Lifedeath III" for Marvel's X-Men, with the character Storm. In 1999 Fantagraphics published two volumes of BWS – Opus, a hardcover art books featuring Windsor-Smith's work from throughout his career, including an autobiographical story, "Time Rise", which features details of his experiences with seemingly paranormal phenomena.

2000s

Windsor-Smith created a story called "UFO POV," an 11-page story in Streetwise, a trade paperback anthology published by TwoMorrows Publishing. In 2000 and 2001 he also produced cover art for a number of Marvel titles including Grant Morrison's New X-Men, and drew five pages of Wolverine #166, a "Weapon X" tie-in written by Frank Tieri. In January 2004, Fantagraphics Books published Windsor-Smith's Young Gods and Friends, a hardcover collecting material from BWS Storyteller along with new material. November 2005 saw a follow-up hardcover titled The Freebooters, again collecting material from BWS Storyteller with new material. A planned third and final volume, collecting "The Paradoxman" serial, has not yet been released. In January 2006, Windsor-Smith announced on the website Comic Book Galaxy that he was in negotiations to publish a graphic novel for Marvel Comics starring The Thing. He was working on a Superman story in 1999 that has not yet seen print. He has produced no further work in mainstream comics since that announcement, and nothing has been produced by Gorblimey Press since the print "Liberomano" in 1993.Monsters, a graphic novel which "explores the life and times of two disparate American families fatefully connected by an abandoned Nazi project in genetic engineering that has been covertly revived by the US government" has been in the works since the 1980s and is slated for release in 2021 by Fantagraphics.

Awards