Art For Art’s Sake Special: R.I.P. Michael Zulli

by Richard Bruton

Sadly, artist Michael Zulli, of TMNT, Puma Blues, and Sandman, passed away earlier this week, 8th July 2024, aged just 71.

Dammit, another horrible loss to comics here, far too many of them already this year, as I heard on the breeze that the incredible artist Michael Zulli had passed at the far too young age of 71.

Known for his lush, incredibly detailed art, his stunning renditions of animals, and probably most well known for both his collaborations with Neil Gaiman and his quite revolutionary for the time trilogy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issues, Zulli first came to the attention of comics fans with Puma Blues with writer Stephen Murphy, a beautiful, prophetic, bleak thing, part environmental fable, part sci-fi tale, but one that stayed with everyone who read it. Over the years that followed his work, although never prolific, was always stunning, no matter what the subject.

Zulli’s death this last week is a terrible loss to comics of course, but one that we can at least celebrate in this Art For Art’s Sake.

Our thoughts are with Michael’s family and friends. Gone far too soon, far too soon.

I first discovered Zulli’s artwork, as many seem to have, with his and Murphy’s Puma Blues, first published in 1986. I was 15/16 and just immediately fell in love with Zulli’s visionary landscapes, his incredible animal art – Zulli was actually an animal and wildlife illustrator before going into comics – and a magnificent tale of the future, 2000, where a game warden oversaw a reserve of mutated animals, most strikingly the beautiful flying manta rays. It was a fabulous bit of apocalyptic environmental fantasy across 23 issues, plus a 23.5 mini-comic, all coming to an end in 1989. It was, it still is, a comic unlike anything else I’ve ever read, a stunning work of fiction, a piece of singular beauty.

Puma Blues was actually published thanks to Dave Sim, after Murphy and Zulli gave him an eight-page story that saw publication in the pages of Cerebus and was subsequently published by Aardvark One International and later Mirage.

But although few would have read Puma Blues, those who did were immediately taken with the masterful line and ink work of Zulli, and it was no surprise that his work there led to other projects once that series ended in 1989.

Between 1990 and 1991, Zulli wrote and drew three issues of Mirage Studio’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in issues #31, #35, and #36. The ‘Souls Trilogy’ was another stunning piece of comics work and a complete shock to many TMNT fans, given the realistic, hyper-detailed ink work Zulli brought to the characters.

He was also involved in several sadly unfinished works around this time. First there was 1989’s Swamp Thing #88 – the infamous end to Rick Veitch’s run on the character. Zulli drew the art for the issue, with Swamp Thing travelling through time and encountering Jesus Christ. DC balked at publishing it, Veitch quit the series, and sadly the artwork has never been properly published, although you don’t have to google too far to find it online.

For Steve Bissette’s Taboo anthology, Zulli started work with Gaiman on a series telling the tale of Sweeney Todd – again, one of those series that was left unfinished – only the introduction and first part were ever completed. Likewise, there was a plan to draw Clive Barker’s Rawhead Rex with Bissette that should have been serialised in Taboo. Another project that never came to fruition, Bissette has recently written about it here.

But onwards, onwards, despite the projects that never made it, there were plenty that did, many with Gaiman. He went on to draw seven issues of Gaiman’s Sandman, beginning with #13, ‘Men of Good Fortune‘, that introduced the immortal Hob Gadling, plus the finale to the series, ‘The Wake‘. Zulli and Gaiman would also collaborate on Alice Cooper’s The Last Temptation in 1994.

There would also be work, not plentiful perhaps but certainly regular, for DC Vertigo through the ’90s on titles including Winter’s Edge, Witchcraft: La Terreur and Sandman Presents: Love Street. Outside of Vertigo, Zulli’s art, always immediately recognisable, appeared on titles including Grendel, Creatures Of The Night, Tales Of Spider-Man, and Star Wars Tales.

Zulli rather left comics in the 2000s, with two of his last works being The Facts in the Case of the Disappearance of Miss Finch in 2007, again with Gaiman, and the semi-autobiographical The Fracture of the Universal Boy in 2011. After that, Zulli rather left comics and worked on his paintings.

However, there was one last great comics moment for Michael Zulli, something so many of his fans thought they’d never see. Because although Puma Blues ended on a moment that sort of worked as an ending, it wasn’t the ending that Murphy and Zulli had always planned. That came in 2015 when Dover Press collected the entirity of the work and then published an extra 40 page epilogue to the story by Murphy and Zulli. There’s something quite fitting that Zulli’s comics career began and ended with Puma Blues and the Dover Press book is a beloved object on the shelf here.