Tod Smith, Longtime DC and Marvel Artist, Passes Away at 72

Tod Smith, a longtime comic book artist perhaps best known for his runs on Omega Men, Vigilante, Peacemaker, and Darkhawk, passed away last month at the age of 72, following a long illness.

Smith originally set out to become a musician, attending the Berklee School of Music after graduating high school in the early 1970s. He was a rock and roll guitarist during the mid-1970s in the Rhode Island area, but he soon discovered that the area wasn't exactly ideal for a freelance guitar player, so when he was 25, some friends of his sent him clippings for the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, which had only recently launched a year earlier. He attended the school for a year and a half, and then moved over to a Dick Giordano/Frank McLaughlin workshop in Connecticut. He happened to catch the workshop during its ten-week section on inking, so Smith initially broke into comics doing inking work.

He assisted both McLaughlin and Giordano, doing backgrounds for McLaughlin for a year or so, and did some assistant work for other artists, like Gil Kane and Mike DeCarlo. It was while he was assisting DeCarlo that he got his first official comics credit on DC Comics Presents Annual #2, which introduced Superwoman...

Around that same time, he started getting regular work in DC's Special Projects division, specifically inking the Masters of the Universe mini-comics that were included with the action figures in the He-Man toyline...

That's when Smith's biggest break took place. Keith Giffen, who had launched the Omega Men ongoing series (featuring characters that Marv Wolfman and Joe Staton had created during Wolfman's Green Lantern run) with writer Roger Slifer and inker Mike DeCarlo, could no longer keep up with both Omega Men and Legion of Super-Heroes, and decided to drop Omega Men. Giordano recommended Smith, and Smith joined the book with 1983's Omega Men #7...

He worked on the book for the next year and a half, finishing out his run at the end of 1984 with Omega Men #23. He did some fill-ins for DC for the next couple of months before then joining Vigilante as the book transitioned from being written by original writer Marv Wolfman to the new writer, Paul Kupperberg....

During his run on Vigilante, the DC Universe version of Peacemaker was introduced by Kupperberg, and Smith drew the Peacemaker miniseries that spun out of Vigilante, the first DC Peacemaker series...

In 1988, Smith followed his old boss, Gil Kane, as the artist on the Green Lantern lead feature in Action Comics Weekly (Green Lantern Corps had been canceled so that Green Lantern could become the main feature in DC's short-lived weekly anthology series)...

In 1989, Smith moved over to Marvel, doing a few fill-in projects, and then began getting work in the Punisher office in 1990, including a brief stint on Punisher War Journal with writer Carl Potts. This was a period where Marvel was trying to put out a lot of original graphic novels featuring its major characters (a Tom DeFalco initiative), and Smith worked with writer Gregory Wright on Punisher: No Escape, a graphic novel featuring Punisher teaming up with USAgent (who was a fairly new character at the time)...

In 1991, Smith launched a Green Hornet series at Now Publishing with writer Chuck Dixon....

Smith left the series in 1992. He had never stopped doing short assignments for Marvel even while he was working on Green Hornet, but now he was doing more regular work at Marvel, working for backups in the Spider-Man office for Danny Fingeroth, and penciling two notable issues of What If...? written by Kurt Busiek (X-Men-themed What If...?s circa 1993 were always going to get a lot of attention)...

Smith then got his biggest assignment during this period of his career from Marvel, picking up the regular penciling duties on Darkhawk (written by Danny FIngeroth) after Mike Manley left the book to take over Batman at DC...

Smith penciled the rest of this run, which finished in 1995 with Darkhawk #50. Luckily, there was still plenty of Spider-Man work around throughout 1995, and Smith did various one-shots and backups in the Spider-Man office throughout 1995. His last regular Marvel work was drawing a Power Rangers spinoff series...

Smith drew a few stories for Claypool's Elvira comic book series in 1997 and 1998, but then he got the opportunity to succeed his old Joe Kubert School classmate Thomas Yeates as the penciler on the Zorro newspaper strip (Yeates remaining on as the inker), with writer Don McGregor...

Smith had been a longtime Zorro fan, talking about the character in interviews as early as 1984, so this was obviously a big deal for him. The strip was canceled in 2001.

Smith did some work for Archie and Claypool (more Elvira) in the early 2000s, plus some other freelance art work for less mainstream companies. In 2009, he was part of Archie's bold "New Look" series of stories, with comics drawn differently than Archie's house style...

Smith continued as a freelance artist for the rest of his life, doing commissions and various projects at different publishers, like some educational children's books for Capstone Press. He also never stopped playing guitar, and he would routinely jam with various bands over the years, including a weekly "Players Night" jam group that met for over 15 years.

Smith is survived by his wife, Candace Kearney.

Our condolences at CBR to her, and all of Smith's friends and family.