Greg Capullo retiring from interior illustration work

Popverse says the veteran artist Greg Capullo is retiring, mostly because his art team on Batman parted ways, and if he continues, he may limit himself to covers only:

Iconic superhero comics artist Greg Capullo is mulling retiring from drawing comics. Capullo is a rare breed — having been a top monthly comic book artist in two distinctly different eras, both in the '90s with Quasar, X-Force, and Spawn, and then going on a long hiatus only to return at the top of his form (and at the top of the charts) with DC's 'New 52' relaunch of Batman. In recent years, he's been the go-to artist for DC and Marvel major titles, drawing the DC events Dark Nights: Metal and its sequel Dark Nights: Death Metal, to the DC/Image crossover series Batman/Spawn, the Marvel standalone series Wolverine: Revenge, and the recent once-in-a-generation Batman/Deadpool event from DC and Marvel.

But now, at age 64 and recent upheavals in his art team, Greg Capullo sees 2026 as possibly his last year drawing actual comics.

“I’m kind of feeling like I’m going to be done doing interiors,” Greg Capullo said recently during a MegaCon spotlight panel shared with Scott Snyder and Frank Tieri. “I have reasons for that. I can give them to you."

I vaguely recall Capullo was one of those creators who indicated he was a leftist with appalling positions in the past decade, though he did once make a valid argument about why talented scriptwriting is important, and blocked fellow leftists Kurt Busiek and Gail Simone after they disagreed. Even so, is he somebody to miss in the medium after he fully retires? Maybe not.

Another key part of Capullo's reason for stepping back from interior comics is that his primary art team for the 17 years, from his return with Image's Haunt on through to DC's Batman and everything after, has broken up.

"I recently lost my art team, my longtime art team," Capullo continues. "One guy I won’t even discuss, but Jonathan Glapion, my friend, has gone on to become his own artist. I’m very proud of him. He’s working under McFarlane. He’s got his own thing going."

While Capullo's days of drawing interiors comics are coming to a close, Capullo says he plans to continue drawing covers whenever possible.

So here we have another guy who's now limiting himself to covers only, and on pamphlets, no doubt. What good is that? There's other artists like J. Scott Campbell who long stopped drawing interiors, and IMO, unwisely. Others like Stanley Lau seem to have made covers their sole type of career. I'm sure there's other artists out there with talent, but they shouldn't be wasting them on Marvel/DC, certainly not so long as they're in an artistic shambles under a conglomerate ownership. Notice how Capullo contributed to at least 2 of DC's crossover events, one of the biggest problems that metastasized ever since Marvel's Secret Wars. If that's what he considers worth working on, that's just the problem. So if all he could think of doing was wasting his talents on meaningless crossovers, then he wasn't utilizing his skills well at all. Maybe if he stuck with Image, but even that's not an instant guarantee he'll turn out something with long lasting value.

Now, he's semi-retiring, and he'll probably never admit the Big Two did terrible things over the years and that it was a serious mistake to lend his talents to their businesses after all the harm they caused. The refusal of some veterans to publicly admit something went wrong is what makes this a very sad affair.