Stuart Immonen is a Canadian comics artist and cover illustrator with a crisp, confident style. His drawings can have a loose, stylized and modern feel, but are always based on an underpinning of solid draftsmanship.
Immonen has done work for mainstream comics companies like Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image Comics and the French publisher Les Humanoides Associés. Most of his work in recent years has been for Marvel, where he has worked on high-profile titles like The Hulk, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men.
I particularly enjoyed his run on the Ultimate X-Men last year, an 11-issue arc (#54-65) inked by Wade Von Grawbadger and colored by Justin Ponsor.
For those not familiar with the process, mainstream American comics are usually created by an artistic team, the art being broken down into pencil art, final ink drawings and then color, usually applied digitally. This allows for the creation of 22 page continuing stories on a monthly basis. (Personally, I think the old practice of crediting the color artist on a level with the letterer rather than equal to the inker is way out of date. Ponsor’s nice work on this series is a case in point.)
Immonen started in comics by self-publishing a series called Playground. He moved from there to small companies and then the major publishers. In addition to his mainstream comic work, he still produces his own work in the form of webcomics. He has two titles, Never as Bad as You Think and Misery Loves running on the subscription based Webcomics Nation comics portal.
In addition to Immonen’s own site, which is somewhat disappointing in the limited amount and scope of the artwork in the galleries, I’ll suggest the unofficial galleries on Comic Art Community, as well as some interviews from Top Two Three Films (re: their Adventures into Digital Comics film), Sequential Tart, and Newsarama, in which he discusses his 50 Reasons to Stop Sketching at Conventions, a painfully humorous insight into what comic artists sometimes put up with at comic conventions.
