Career
Portacio attended his first comic book convention in San Diego, where Marvel Comics editor Carl Potts, after seeing Portacio's portfolio, offered him the job inking over Frank Cirocco and Chris Warner's pencils on the 1984 series Alien Legion. The following year, he inked over Art Adams' pencils on the 1985 miniseries Longshot.
Later he was given assignments as a penciller as well. Portacio became noted for his work on such titles as The Punisher, X-Factor, and The Uncanny X-Men, for which he co-created the character Bishop with John Byrne and Jim Lee.
In 1992, Portacio left Marvel to co-found Image Comics with six other high-profile artists. He quickly withdrew from Image due to his sister's illness. He eventually published his title Wetworks through Jim Lee's Wildstorm imprint in 1994. Other notable series that Portacio worked on include Stone and Marvel's controversial Heroes Reborn storyline within Iron Man.
Stan Lee interviewed Portacio in the documentary series The Comic Book Greats.
In August 2000, Portacio fell into a diabetic coma as a result of a failing pancreas. He woke up a week later, thirty pounds lighter, and unable to walk, stand or even draw. Only six months later was he able to pick up a pencil and draw. According to his blog, "My mind could see what I wanted to draw but my hand couldn't accomplish it."
In 2006, Portacio returned to his artistic duties at Wildstorm on Wetworks vol. 2, which was being written by Mike Carey. Unfortunately, Portacio's reputation for being unable to maintain a steady work schedule caught up with him again as Wetworks vol. 2, suffered from numerous delays and Portacio ended up leaving the book with issue #6. The new Wetworks series was short-lived though, lasting only 15 issues. He also began art duties on the new monthly DC Comics series Batman Confidential.
On June 9, 2008, it was announced that Portacio would be the new artist on Spawn starting in October 2008 with issue #185, providing pencils with Spawn creator Todd McFarlane returning as co-writer with Brian Holguin as the new creative team.
Following his run on Spawn he has done more work with Marvel. He contributed pencils to Hulk #18 in 2008, and will be contributing pencils to an upcoming issue of The Uncanny X-Men.
Read more about this topic: Whilce Portacio
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