Mike Okamoto
Encyclopedia
Mike Okamoto is an American comic book
artist
and commercial illustrator
best known for co-creating Marvel Comics
' Atomic Age; as a "good girl art
" cartoonist
; and as the five-time International Network of Golf Illustrator of the Year.
Born and raised in Detroit Michigan
, Mike Okamoto attended the Parsons School of Design, in New York City
, on a full scholarship from 1971-1975. Influenced by the work of such fine art
ists and comics artists as N.C. Wyeth, Carl Barks
, Mort Drucker, Frank Frazetta
, and Al Williamson
, he began doing spot illustrations and other commercial art for magazines, developing a style of "realistic caricature
". In 1990, Okamoto met graphic designer
and writer-editor Diana Light. He moved to West Virginia
, where they wed the following year. There he become an illustrator for golfing magazines.
Mike Barr
's The Maze Agency #15 (Aug. 1990) and Hero Alliance
#11-12 (Nov.-Dec. 1990) for Innovation Comics, where he later did painted covers for the licensed series Lost in Space
and the painted series Piers Anthony
's Incarnations of Immortality
: On a Pale Horse.
For Marvel's Epic Comics
imprint in 1990, he and writer Frank Lovece
created the four-issue miniseries
Atomic Age
, a 1950s-style science fiction
story reimagined from a contemporary perspective. The journal Nuclear Texts & Contexts said of the "series dealing with alien invaders set during the Sputnik era" that "[a]lthough no nuclear war
is featured, there is plenty of wry satire
on Cold War
paranoia, and on racism
". Inker
Al Williamson, one of Okamoto's role models, won the 1991 Eisner Award
for Best Inker for his work here and elsewhere the preceding year.
His other comics art includes the story "Nursery Crime" in Epic's Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Dark Holiday Special; and the painted covers and stories for the Chaos Comics miniseries Suspira: The Great Working #1 and #4 (April & Aug. 1997). Of that last, a critic at the New Age
magazine The Monthly Aspectarian
, wrote, "[T]his mini-series is worth a look-see for two reasons: the engaging story, and lavish airbrushed painted art which is gorgeous. Artist Mike Okamoto visualizes demons that are truly creepy". Okamoto is among the artists whose work appears in poet Hart D. Fisher's 1998 book Still Dead.
commissioned Okamoto for the painted portrait of her as Lost in Space character Maureen Robinson, which she sells as autographed posters.
With his Light, Okamoto co-created the science fiction/fantasy project Zone21, which they show as a work-in-progress at comic book conventions
.
, given annually at the San Diego Comic Con.
From 1999 to 2004, and then again in 2006, Okamoto won the International Network of Golf Illustrator of the Year Award, for his work in Golf Illustrated magazine. He additionally won four Outstanding Achievement in Illustration in 2004.
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
and commercial illustrator
Commercial art
Commercial art is historically a subsector of creative services, referring to art created for commercial purposes, primarily advertising. The term has become increasingly anachronistic in favor of more contemporary terms such as graphic design and advertising art.Commercial art traditionally...
best known for co-creating Marvel Comics
Marvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...
' Atomic Age; as a "good girl art
Good girl art
Good girl art is found in drawings or paintings which feature a strong emphasis on attractive women no matter what the subject or situation. GGA was most commonly featured in comic books, pulp magazines and crime fiction...
" cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
; and as the five-time International Network of Golf Illustrator of the Year.
Early life and career
Michigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
, Mike Okamoto attended the Parsons School of Design, in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, on a full scholarship from 1971-1975. Influenced by the work of such fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
ists and comics artists as N.C. Wyeth, Carl Barks
Carl Barks
Carl Barks was an American Disney Studio illustrator and comic book creator, who invented Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck , Gladstone Gander , the Beagle Boys , The Junior Woodchucks , Gyro Gearloose , Cornelius Coot , Flintheart Glomgold , John D...
, Mort Drucker, Frank Frazetta
Frank Frazetta
Frank Frazetta was an American fantasy and science fiction artist, noted for work in comic books, paperback book covers, paintings, posters, LP record album covers and other media...
, and Al Williamson
Al Williamson
Alfonso "Al" Williamson was an American cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator specializing in adventure, Western and science-fiction/fantasy...
, he began doing spot illustrations and other commercial art for magazines, developing a style of "realistic caricature
Caricature
A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...
". In 1990, Okamoto met graphic designer
Graphic designer
A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...
and writer-editor Diana Light. He moved to West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...
, where they wed the following year. There he become an illustrator for golfing magazines.
Comic books
By then he had broken into comic books, illustrating writerWriter
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
Mike Barr
Mike W. Barr
Mike W. Barr is an American writer of comic books, and mystery, and science fiction novels.-Biography:Barr's debut as a comics professional came in DC Comics' Detective Comics #444 , for which he wrote an 8-page back-up mystery feature starring the Elongated Man...
's The Maze Agency #15 (Aug. 1990) and Hero Alliance
Hero Alliance
The Hero Alliance is a fictional American team of comic book superheroes in an eponymous series published by different companies. It was created by writer Kevin Juaire.-Publication history:...
#11-12 (Nov.-Dec. 1990) for Innovation Comics, where he later did painted covers for the licensed series Lost in Space
Lost in Space
Lost in Space is a science fiction TV series created and produced by Irwin Allen, filmed by 20th Century Fox Television, and broadcast on CBS. The show ran for three seasons, with 83 episodes airing between September 15, 1965, and March 6, 1968...
and the painted series Piers Anthony
Piers Anthony
Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob is an English American writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is most famous for his long-running novel series set in the fictional realm of Xanth.Many of his books have appeared on the New York Times Best...
's Incarnations of Immortality
Incarnations of Immortality
Incarnations of Immortality is the name of an eight-book fantasy series by Piers Anthony. The first seven books each focus on one of seven supernatural "offices" in a fictional reality and history parallel to ours, with the exception that society has advanced both magic and modern technology...
: On a Pale Horse.
Epic Comics
Epic Comics was a creator-owned imprint of Marvel Comics started in 1982, lasting through the mid-1990s, and being briefly revived on a small scale in the mid-2000s.- Origins :...
imprint in 1990, he and writer Frank Lovece
Frank Lovece
Frank Lovece is an American journalist, author, comedy performer and comic book writer. He was additionally one of the first professional Web journalists, becoming an editor of a Silicon Alley start-up in 1996....
created the four-issue miniseries
Miniseries
A miniseries , in a serial storytelling medium, is a television show production which tells a story in a limited number of episodes. The exact number is open to interpretation; however, they are usually limited to fewer than a whole season. The term "miniseries" is generally a North American term...
Atomic Age
Atomic Age (comics)
Atomic Age is a four-issue comic-book mini-series, cover-dated November 1990 to February 1991, published by the Marvel Comics creator-owned imprint Epic Comics...
, a 1950s-style science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
story reimagined from a contemporary perspective. The journal Nuclear Texts & Contexts said of the "series dealing with alien invaders set during the Sputnik era" that "[a]lthough no nuclear war
Nuclear warfare
Nuclear warfare, or atomic warfare, is a military conflict or political strategy in which nuclear weaponry is detonated on an opponent. Compared to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can be vastly more destructive in range and extent of damage...
is featured, there is plenty of wry satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
on Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
paranoia, and on racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
". Inker
Inker
The inker is one of the two line artists in a traditional comic book or graphic novel. After a pencilled drawing is given to the inker, the inker uses black ink to produce refined outlines over the pencil lines...
Al Williamson, one of Okamoto's role models, won the 1991 Eisner Award
Eisner Award
The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, commonly shortened to the Eisner Awards, and sometimes referred to as the Oscar Awards of the Comics Industry, are prizes given for creative achievement in American comic books. The Eisner Awards were first conferred in 1988, created in response to the...
for Best Inker for his work here and elsewhere the preceding year.
His other comics art includes the story "Nursery Crime" in Epic's Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Dark Holiday Special; and the painted covers and stories for the Chaos Comics miniseries Suspira: The Great Working #1 and #4 (April & Aug. 1997). Of that last, a critic at the New Age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
magazine The Monthly Aspectarian
The Monthly Aspectarian
Published since 1979, The Monthly Aspectarian is a free print and online magazine in the Chicago and Milwaukee region of the American Midwest.It describes itself as "dedicated to awakening consciousness, with the focus of our efforts being in the areas of personal growth, healthy and holistic...
, wrote, "[T]his mini-series is worth a look-see for two reasons: the engaging story, and lavish airbrushed painted art which is gorgeous. Artist Mike Okamoto visualizes demons that are truly creepy". Okamoto is among the artists whose work appears in poet Hart D. Fisher's 1998 book Still Dead.
Later career
The actress June LockhartJune Lockhart
June Lockhart is an American actress, primarily in 1950s and 1960s television, but with memorable performances on stage and in film too. She is remembered as the mother in two TV series, Lassie and Lost in Space. She also portrayed Dr...
commissioned Okamoto for the painted portrait of her as Lost in Space character Maureen Robinson, which she sells as autographed posters.
With his Light, Okamoto co-created the science fiction/fantasy project Zone21, which they show as a work-in-progress at comic book conventions
Fan convention
A fan convention, or con , is an event in which fans of a particular film, television series, comic book, actor, or an entire genre of entertainment such as science fiction or anime and manga, gather to participate and hold programs and other events, and to meet experts, famous personalities, and...
.
Awards
For Atomic Age and for his painted work on Innovation's five-issue adaptation of the Piers Anthony novel On a Pale Horse in 1991, Okamoto won the Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer AwardRuss Manning Award
The Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award is an American award presented to a comic book artist whose first professional work appeared within the previous two years. It was named after comic book artist Russ Manning...
, given annually at the San Diego Comic Con.
From 1999 to 2004, and then again in 2006, Okamoto won the International Network of Golf Illustrator of the Year Award, for his work in Golf Illustrated magazine. He additionally won four Outstanding Achievement in Illustration in 2004.
External links
- Okamoto Studios (official site). WebCitation archive.
- The Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators
Further reading
- Lisfan #7 (1992), pp. 29–30: "Interview: Mike Okamoto"
- Thompson, Maggie, "'Atomic Age' Features '50s SF". Comics Buyer's GuideComics Buyer's GuideComics Buyer's Guide , established in 1971, is the longest-running English-language periodical reporting on the American comic book industry...
#885 (Nov. 2, 1990)