ELFSAR BLOG

Mark Bagley, whose current exclusive contract with the publisher reportedly expires at the end of this year, will move to DC Comics to take on an undisclosed high-profile project likely sometime in 2008.

I’m guessing a team book or even possibly the 3rd weekly series.  Bagley can draw and by “draw” I mean draw fast.  All DC would have to do is give him 3 or 4 inkers and surely he could get them done on time.

Did you know that Marc had finished his entire six issue arc on Mighty Avengers between the time Frank cho did #4 & #5 of Mighty Avengers?  This was from the mouth of Bendis!

 Below is from Newsarama: http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/Bagley/moves.html

Bagley’s name has been synonymous with Marvel Comics since the literal start of his career, going back to 1986. At the time, the then aspiring 27-year old artist submitted an entry to Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter’s Marvel Try-Out Book, winning the penciling entry, which led to his first professional assignments with the publisher.

The artist first began to achieve his “fan-favorite” status as the original penciler on writer Fabian Nicieza’s original 1990′s New Warriors series, and has since enjoyed long regular runs on Marvel titles like Amazing Spider-Man (five years) and Kurt Busiek’s original Thunderbolts series (four years).

However, it was his teaming with writer Brian Bendis as the original and long-time creative team of Ultimate Spider-Man that Bagley is now best known for.

The pairing, which ended just this past summer, lasted seven years and 111 consecutive issues and is considered an all-time industry record (besting Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original Fantastic Four run) by Marvel.

That record is even more notable considering the duo averaged nearly 15 issues a year during their run, with Bagley penciling up to 18 issues a year at its peek, and that all of this was accomplished in this era.

One of, if not the most prolific and ‘steady’ artists in today’s industry, although thoroughly contemporary in style, Bagley’s status as a “regular monthly” artist is almost a ‘throwback’ in a time when long consecutive runs by artists continue to become more and more rare.

Whatever DC project Bagley will pencil, the publisher will apparently gain an asset they can count on indefinitely for even more than the standard 22 pages month-in and month-out, which is a dynamic worth watching as DC is expected to continue publishing weekly-shipping series following the conclusion of the current Countdown to Final Crisis.

Both Mark Bagley and officials for DC Comics declined to comment on this story.