Remembering Greg Theakston

Just got word earlier today that Greg Theakston has died at the age of 65. (I didn't realize it until I saw the announcement of his death, but Greg and I were within a couple of months of being the same age.) I've known Greg for a couple of decades, and while I knew that he wasn't in the best of health, I was startled to hear that he had passed away (don't know what the cause of his death was).

Greg will always be remembered in comics history for his work in making so many 1980s and 1990s reprint volumes feasible, thanks to a process that Greg developed--a process that eventually became known as "Theakstonizing." In the days before Photoshop, removing the color from old comics so that they could be recolored was a difficult process. Greg made it easier by coming up with a method to bleach the color off old comics pages while leaving the black and white art. The upside: we got wonderful collections of great Golden Age and early Silver Age material, meticulously restored and updated with improved color. The downside: the physical copy of the book had to be destroyed to make that happen. Remember, though, that there were really few other options at the time other than simply reproducing the original book, color and all--and the results weren't always the best.

Greg loved comics, and he loved Jack Kirby's work in particular. I had dozens of conversations about old comics and various artists, from Toth to Adams to Wolverton to Wood to Frazetta to Infantino to Ditko--but no matter who we were talking about, our conversations eventually came back to Kirby. Greg always had great Kirby stories to share. He shared his love of Kirby's early works in the pages of  number of publications from his company, Pure Imagination Press, where he produced tributes to Kirby as well as reprints of  out of print public-domain Kirby work.

Greg was also a very talented artist; he could pencil, ink, and paint, and he spent a number of years working with Neal Adams, Jack Kirby and others. He also produced some outstanding work on his own. Greg rarely talked about his work, though; he  loved talking about the work of the people whose art he loved.

The last time I talked with Greg, he had come up with several boxes of stuff he was hoping I would buy. It was time to leave Atlanta, he said. His career had reached a dead end here, and he wanted to move to New York, and if that didn't work, then to Los Angeles. Greg could be impulsive, but this seemed to be a decision he had thought about for a while. I bought a number of things from him--not because we really needed it at the store, but because I thought our store benefited from having his publications on the shelf. We ended up talking for a couple of hours.

That was the last time we spoke. I presumed he had made his move and was doing what he loved. I hope so.