Mike Wieringo, 1963-2007

Mike Wieringo was a comics artist with a clean and engaging style that made you buy into the story and brought to life lots of action while maintaining a focus on minutiae and little idiosyncracies inherent in certain characters.  In short, even though his style was not super-realistic by any stretch of the imagination, he made you feel as though the people and things he illustrated were real, simply through consistency and detail.  He was a vegetarian, apparently, and all-around nice guy, born in Venice, Italy.  Unfortunately, he recently died of a heart attack at age 44.  He will be missed.  Mostly, I became interested in him through his work on the Flash, for DC, and his art on Fantastic Four, for Marvel, both with Mark Waid as scribe.  This is arguably my favorite FF run ever.  Get this if you want to see the 1st part of it.  There is more news about this here, and his blog is here.