Bryan Hitch

Bryan Hitch (born 22 April 1970) is a British comics artist and writer.

Hitch began his career in the United Kingdom for Marvel UK, working on titles such as Action Force and Death's Head, before gaining prominence on American titles such as Wildstorm's Stormwatch and The Authority, DC Comics' JLA, and Marvel Comics' The Ultimates.

Bryan Hitch was born 22 April 1970 in what he described as "in the far northern reaches of England."

He began reading comics at an early age, likening them to his "underage drug habit" and the newsagent in northern England where he would buy his books from his "dealer".

The newsagent was next door to a cinema, and as Hitch explains, he could go straight from enjoying Christopher Reeve Superman films and other genre films to the store to buy Superman comics drawn by artists such as Curt Swan and José Luis García-López.

Hitch spent much time as a child drawing, which included and copying the art from comics.

Although he had envisioned drawing them as a career, he would eventually find himself in seminary, studying to be a priest.

He did some work at Marvel Comics and DC Comics during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in particular his run on The Sensational She-Hulk, and continued drawing for Marvel UK.

After that imprint closed, he provided the art for an issue of Teen Titans and a couple of series at Valiant Comics before returning to Marvel where he would work with inker Paul Neary.

Marvel UK gave him his first professional commission in May or June 1987, approximately a month and a half after his 17th birthday, which was for that very title.

By the late 1990s that Hitch's pencils were inked primarily by Neary.

Hitch had resolved to leave comics in order to pursue film and commercial work, and when he accepted the assignment of drawing Stormwatch (Vol 2) for Wildstorm, he initially did so specifically to bankroll his transition to a different industry.

However, this changed when he met writer Warren Ellis, whose collaboration skills so spurred Hitch's excitement on the book that the artist would later describe his change in attitude as "like a lighting bolt."

Hitch would draw issues 3 - 8 and the final two issues, 10 and 11.

His work on Stormwatch garnered him greater visibility, and offers from other companies.

He remained with Ellis to draw the Stormwatch spinoff book, The Authority, on which Hitch's trademark high level of detail and use of "widescreen" page layouts helped make the book extremely popular, and proved to be highly influential on industry art styles.

This led to a year on JLA with Mark Waid which included the JLA: Heaven's Ladder tabloid format one-shot.

The run was marred by fill-in artists, and in Hitch's view, by the fact that he and writer Mark Waid did not enjoy the same compatibility as he and Ellis did.

Amid his disappointment with his Justice League work, Hitch was offered work by CrossGen Comics, but a phone call by Marvel Comics editor in chief Joe Quesada paved the way for his next high-profile assignment, returning to Marvel with Neary, and joining Mark Millar on The Ultimates, a 13-issue maxiseries that debuted in early 2002.

It was characterized by naturalistic visuals and a cinematic tone that greatly influenced the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and garnered critical acclaim.

By September 2003, Marvel had renewed Hitch's exclusivity contract through 2006.

Millar and Hitch continued their collaboration on the sequel series, The Ultimates 2, which premiered in December 2004, and on a 15-issue Fantastic Four run that began in 2009.

By this time Hitch had developed a reputation for slow work and lateness, which began with his work on Ultimates, and continued with his Justice League work.

He was hired by the BBC as the concept artist for the 2005 relaunch of the Doctor Who television series, providing input into the design of the TARDIS interior set.

Hitch provided cover artwork for the November 2006 issue of the British film magazine Empire, for a cover feature on comic book movies.

He was a character design artist for the Ultimate Avengers and Ultimate Avengers 2 animated films.

He was a character design artist for the video game Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.

He was brought aboard the project due to his rendition of the Hulk in The Ultimates.

When he realized he needed to leave that institution, relating during an interview at the 2008 New York Comic Con, "Apart from wanting to do comics, I also have a fundamental lack of belief in God."

Hitch entered the comics industry after submitting "Teeth Like Flint", an Action Force sample story he wrote and drew to Marvel UK, using a style that was fashionable at the time, which resembled that of another Marvel UK artist, Alan Davis.

Deriding his skills from his early career, Hitch remarked in 2008, "Why they hired me, I have no idea. I assume they were drunk."

Hitch worked with Simon Furman on Transformers and Death's Head.

Although Millar and Quesada said that the book's tardiness was due to the high level of detail in Hitch's art, Hitch, who acknowledged in a 2008 interview that he was working to repair his reputation in this regard, explained that the long delays in between issues of The Ultimates, was due to the birth of his child, two house moves, and an office move, though Hitch also conceded that the page count of his art exceeded what was indicated in Millar's scripts, saying, "Mark would write a twenty two page comic and I would take it to thirty eight pages."

So burnt out did Hitch feel after the "hard slog" of The Ultimates that it took a considerable effort on Millar's part to convince him to return for the sequel.

In the case of Heaven's Ladder, however, DC Comics, which was less supportive of his tardiness than Marvel, scheduled the book according to the day he signed the contract for it, and began advertising it when he still had four or five more issues of The Authority to do.

Hitch related:

"'I pointed this out, and they said, 'Oh, don’t worry, we'll correct it in-house and adjust the later delivery dates and the ship dates’, but they didn’t do that! So suddenly this book was five months late when I started it, and they’d already started advertising the book and soliciting it. And this was only half of the bad experience. It was 72 pages of artwork which was 50% more work than normal since you drew the pages bigger – which inevitably DC didn’t pay us for: they paid us normal rates. Paul and I lost money doing it; we practically went bankrupt, because we were trying to do this good job and use the space on the pages better since they could be done larger. Otherwise, we could have just done a normal comic book: What was the point of the extra format?'"

Hitch found his work drawing Millar's run on Fantastic Four, to be a better experience.

He made a point of drawing on illustration board roughly twice the size of the Marvel standard, which allowed him to complete the artwork faster.

Hitch's artwork and designs have appeared in direct-to-video animated films, television, and major feature films, such as the 2009 film Star Trek, for which he has been praised by director J. J. Abrams.