Moments with John Paul Leon – Last | ZAPstract

Moments with John Paul Leon – Last

27 June 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The last time I talked to JP, it was probably August of 2020. I had heard him interviewed in a video about the greatness of Alex Toth. I had heard his voice, and it sounded terrible. I immediately thought it was related to the cancer. I sent him a message, telling him I had heard his interview about Toth. We set up to talk that weekend. He was explaining why his voice had changed so much. It had to do with an error in a throat surgery he had a couple of years back. It might stay like that for a long time. I asked him to let me know when he wanted to stop talking, but we talked for two hours and then made it a point to talk the next day. On Sunday, we talked for three more hours. I felt like I spent the whole weekend with JP.

We did talk about Toth, but we also talked about the lack we saw in current movies and TV shows, and the end of Game of Thrones. JP was critical about such things, as I was (because this is what happens when you go to art school). I think he had read some of the novels from A Song of Ice and Fire, and in there, travel across Westeros or other parts sometimes took years. It was a small detail, but he felt that with every new season of Game of Thrones, travel became easier, allowing great distances to be covered in one-day journeys. It cheapened it, somehow. He asked me what I thought, because he was not too convinced about the show anymore. I remember telling him Game of Thrones was not perfect, but now that it was gone, we had nothing.

We would return to the topic of comics, always comics. JP talked about page design and how the most important element of drawing was line. I agreed on some of these points, because they paralleled my own views about drawing. We didn’t agree about everything because we liked different types of comics. He didn’t like some of the work I admired in the alternative scene, and I was no longer into mainstream comics. But we had much in common, especially in thoughts about the old comics masters.

Before we hung up on the second day, I asked him about his dad, and he informed me that his dad had passed away a few years back. I told him I was sorry, and then I made some reference to the passing of my dad. He had remembered. But as we talked about it, I noticed we were not talking about the same thing. I was talking about my father, but he was talking about my step-father.

And that was when it dawned on me. I told him I had no idea my step-dad had died. He said he was sorry, and we both were at a loss for words. I told JP I had always thought I would talk to him again. I should have tried to reach out to him. And now it was all too late. It put a real damper on the last minutes of the conversation. JP felt bad to have brought me the news, and I kept telling him he had nothing to feel bad about.

A month or two later, I was looking at JP’s art online, and I got it in my head I wanted to catch up with the newest work. I read Batman: Creature of the Night, along with some of his shorter work, and then I read Winter Men once again. I was sending him messages, giving him my thoughts on his work, on how toward the end of Creature of the Night, his line got thinner. “Perceptive eye,” he shot back. He said he was getting into drawing what they call a dead line, which was the opposite of the full-bodied line he was known for. He explained that he had been looking closely at Al Williamson. I said I had just been looking at his Empire Strikes Back work.

I was trying to ask him when we would talk again. I really wanted to talk about his work. Not just Creature of the Night, but Winter Men, which I had always felt was JP’s masterpiece.

Back in the days when I first read it, I remember the delays and how those hiccups almost ruined the pacing of the Winter Men story. He and the writer had to make changes because they were getting less and less of a page count by the publisher. In those days, JP expressed his regrets, especially about the ending. When I read the ending the first time, I think I allowed for his feelings about it to color my own experience with it. I agreed that the ending was a bit thin and that the work was a flawed gem.

But my recent reading gave me a very different perspective of the book. Bret Lewis, the writer, was extremely talented. The two worked well together, and I recognized that from the start. But this time around, I found no flaw in that gem. It felt more like a story cycle than one epic story. One big story is what I assumed it was, but a story cycle might have been their intention all along when the series was supposed to be twelve issues. I wanted to ask him about that. I wanted to say a lot in our next conversation. But in those days, JP wasn’t up for talks on the phone. I waited, and in the meantime, I was sending him messages about how the Winter Men read so differently to me now, and about how it was a crime that that masterful work had not been made into a nice hardcover! There was so much I wanted to tell him.

I had also wanted to ask him what happened to my stepdad. I told my side of the family, and my brother and mom were shocked that he had passed away. It affected us, and it came with that finality that all future intentions have been swept away. And that is how it is with JP now that he’s gone.

In our last conversation, I did tell JP about how proud I was of him. He was the one that made it! Every semester, I would tell my art students about my cousin that worked for comics professionally. I always had at least one student interested in doing comics, and I would point them to JP’s direction. As I would tell my student, JP was not exactly famous in the comics industry, but he was a highly-respected creator, often lauded by his peers. I told him I was proud of him because he was doing such a stellar job of keeping the flame of artistic integrity. JP never settled for cheating the backgrounds or allowing a bad day to affect his work. “Once it’s in print,” he would say, “it’s there forever.”

And here we are. It was inevitable that I would get to the point where I cannot locate anymore memories. It is natural. Some of the memories are gone. I believe many of them are not. They are just mixed up with other memories. Memories seem to conflate, so that every time we played a role-playing game, the multiple instances come together. Yes, there was that time we brought the Platoon board game to JP and Alex’s house, and we played it. I can still see the scenario we played and how it was going. I think that game only happened once. Conquest of the Empire was another of those one-time playing sessions, and I have a strong recollection of how JP and Alex had painted the game’s ships with Jolly Rogers to include pirate vessels as an optional rule. Like I said, they were the most creative kids I knew — altering board game pieces and making their own rules. But how many times did we actually play D&D? How many times did the three of us sit down to draw characters or watch a movie on TV?

The moments that come out at you are the ones that stay because of something said or because of something that happened. I wish there were more. I will have to hold the ones that I have and keep them till the end. John Paul was a singular person that had touched my life and the lives of many, many others. My great friend and kindred spirit — you will be sorely missed.