PAUL KUPPERBERG pays a BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE… By PAUL KUPPERBERG The most hotly anticipated comics project of 2024 wasn’t a comic book at all, but the commercial release of a 42-year-old collection of style guide art that was created for use in advertising and merchandising. And what made the 1982 DC Comics Style Guide so eagerly sought after can be summed up in four words: José Luis García-López. Or, as just about everyone in comics calls him, Maestro. The Spanish-born, Argentinian-raised artist’s early American comic book work was for Connecticut-based Charlton Comics in the late 1960s, which he worked for through an agent in South America. Jose’s work stood out from the usual mediocre Charlton fare, and he moved to New York in 1974 where he met famed artist and DC Comics editor Joe Orlando who immediately saw the potential in the young man’s amazing talent. It didn’t take readers and fans long to see what Joe had seen, and José’s work was soon gracing the gambit of DC titles, from Superman and Detective Comics to Hercules Unbound and Jonah Hex in Weird Western Tales. There didn’t seem to be a genre he couldn’t master, and as the regular artist on the Superman team-up title DC Comics Presents (1978), and thanks to projects like 1977’s Superman vs. Wonder Woman (All-New Collector’s Edition #C-54), Atari Force (1983), Cinder and Ashe (1988), and Twilight (1991), he quickly emerged as the quintessential DC Comics artist. José’s art epitomizes the essence of classic comic-book storytelling, combining precise line work with dynamic compositions and an uncanny ability to capture action and emotion to produce breathtaking pages that don’t need words to tell the story. His representations of DC’s characters were so perfectly delineated that he became almost too valuable to waste on the comics themselves — and why he would draw fewer story pages and more licensing and special projects art as time went on. Special-projects editor Orlando called José DC’s “secret weapon” and beginning in 1982, put him to work creating the hundreds of stunning images of the DCU heroes and villains that would become the classic 1982 DC Comics Style Guide. It should also be noted that José — born 77 years ago on March 26, 1948 — is one of the nicest people in comics. Modest and soft spoken, I’m sure he...