Every day this month I'm going to feature the work of a great artist, only instead of me picking the artist to feature, they will be picked by their peers, fellow professional comic book artists who are picking out artists (from the past and present) who they think deserve special attention. Do note that most artists I asked about this gave me multiple answers and I picked out one choice out of a number of suggestions, so these are not definitive answers, like "Artist X likes Artist Y and he thinks all other Artists are terrible!" Here is an archive of the artists featured so far!

Today, we begin with a pick of Mike Avon Oeming (perhaps best known for his art on Powers, and who is currently producing the series Rapture for Dark Horse Comics - check out Mike's web site here).

Mike's pick is Mike Hawthorne!

I first recall seeing Mike Hawthorne's work when he worked with Antony Johnston at Oni Press on 3 Days in Europe.

His work was extremely expressive, which worked beautifully with Johnston's character-driven writing on the book (which I just saw is in development for a film starring Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Garner! How awesome!).

He did some creator-owned stuff that helped get him noticed by other comic book companies, especially DC Comics and IDW Comics.

His creator-owned Hysteria was a lot of fun...

He did some fill-in work on The Exterminators for Vertigo...

Then an extended run on The Un-Men, where he really did some strong design work mixed in with his standard character-heavy art (the series lasted a little over a year).

More recently, for IDW, he did some Star Trek work...

But most recently, he has been drawing G.I. Joe Origins for IDW, written by Larry Hama...

See what I mean about the expressiveness? He's a great artist when you're doing character-heavy work, which Hama is doing with Origins (as it is setting up the GI Joe characters).

Now, here, for no thematic reason, just since I think it looks cool, it a pin-up he did of The Goon...

You can check out his blog here and his Deviant Art page (where I got most of these sample pages from, some of them came from his blog) here.

Thanks to Mike Avon Oeming for getting us off to a nice start!