Remembering Barry Blair
Jan 08
Barry Blair was born in Ottawa Canada circa 1959. He spent most of his young life in China. He filled his school notebooks with sketches of comic book characters and at a very young age, he created the character of Elflord Hawk Ericksson. Barry started doing animation at the age of thirteen for the Canadian television show “You Can’t Do That on Television” A few years later, while working for a heating/cooling company called Aircel, when the owner decided to close up shop, Barry convinced him to invest in starting a comic book publishing company, and Aircel Comics was born. Barry published a plethora of comics under Aircel, including Elflord, Samurai, and Leather and Lace. Barry has worked with many other artists and writers in the comic industry, and has often teamed up with one or two people for an extended time. He has published work with many comic companies, among them: Malibu, Mad Monkey, Peregrine Entertainment, Davdez, NBM Publishing and Warp Graphics. An early sketch of Hawk appeared as fanart in an issue of Elfquest in the 1980′s, bringing Barry to the attention of the Pini’s. By the early 1990′s he was on the staff at Warp where he created art for several titles, among them “New Blood”, “Fire Eye” and “Blood of Ten Chiefs”. Shortly after the turn of the century, Barry became immersed in the online gaming community and began doing commissioned sketches of characters for players. He is a prolific artist who will leave behind a huge catalog of work. Blair died on January 3, 2010 of a brain aneurysm which had been misdiagnosed as an ear infection.
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