Al Rio, 1962-2012

The prolific Brazilian comics artist Al Rio committed suicide on January 30 after a long period of battling depression. He was 49 years old. Rio was best known for his "good girl" comics art and illustration, working for a variety of publishers including Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, Avatar, Angel Entertainment, WildStorm, Malibu, Vertigo, Crossgen, Trinity, Zenescope, Harris and Chaos.

Alvaro Araujo Lourencio do Rio was born in 1962 and raised in Fortaleza, the massive coastal city in northern Brazil. Rio described himself in later interviews as a consumer of animation and comics from an early age. Rio moved from Fortaleza when in his early twenties in order to increase his chances at a career in art. His first major arts assignment was a book illustration gig in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s. He became an animator, working on a cartoon for the ubiquitous Brazilian children's entertainer Xuxa and then for Disney on their 1994 television spin-off of the movie Aladdin.

Rio was a longtime client of the art agency Glass House Graphics, the source of a report that the cause of death was hanging. It was through the agency that he started to work for various mainstream publishers in the mid-1990s. He may have been best known in that period for work on later issues of the extremely popular Gen13 title, for which he provided pencils and inks. His most significant publishing partner in recent years was Zenescope, for whom he did a number of covers. He had relocated to his hometown at the time of his passing. Rio would step away from comics in 2004, plunging into the pin-up and commission business, where he remained active for the remainder of his career. He also taught a pair of art courses, an experience he said he enjoyed very much.

Rio was in the midst of a relative comics revival the last few years, even ending his course work in order to concentrate on his art assignments. The two most recent, soon-to-be-completed projects on his plate at the time of his passing were art chores on a graphic novel based on the popular urban fantasy "Fever" prose series by Karen Marie Moning (David Lawrence was working on the comics version as a writer). Rio was also serializing his Exposure comic on-line; a Kickstarter project to raise money for a print edition is ongoing, with any money over the goal going to Rio's surviving family.

The announcement of Rio's death on the Exposure site cited three books also in the works: a collection of science fiction art, a book on how to draw the good girl art for which he was best known, and a straight-up art book of the coffee table variety featuring a range of work.

Rio is survived by a wife, Zilda, and three children. He was buried on Wednesday in Fortaleza.


 
posted 7:00 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
 
Full Archives