Tony Kuroizumi-Luke Passes

♦Back in Tripwire Volume 1#5 we ran a cover featuring a character called Dominator, created by Alan Grant and artist Tony Luke.

The sad news has reached us that the artist, Tony Kuroizumi-Luke, a British artist and the first to ever work in Japan, has just passed away. Our friend over at downthetubes have more information on his passing so we thought we would share this with everyone here…

I’m very sad to report the passing of comic creator, animator and illustrator Tony Kuroizumi–Luke, who has died after a long battle with cancer – but who, despite often being in pain in recent years, battled it with every fibre of his being and continued to create stunning art and develop new projects.

His sister Fran Harris announced the sad news on Facebook yesterday, and reports he had a very peaceful end despite the dreadful cancer pain he had been in.

Tony is best known for his work on Dominator, Hellkatt and 2000AD, working on Nemesis the Warlock and creating Necrophim with Lee Carter in 2009 for the British SF weekly. But I first met him back in the early 1990s, as, among many other things, an enthusiastic pitcher of ideas for comic strips for Doctor Who Magazine, which I was then editing. One, involving a creepy graveyard of spaceships in a lost dimension, almost made it to commission, but as was the way of many such ideas from many comic creators, for some reason we never got to do it. Other projects – and for Tony, there were many – no doubt distracted him.

It was only recently that we finally managed to start work on a small, fun Doctor Who-inspired project together at last – an animated encounter between the Daleks and the Martian Rock Snakes from Thunderbirds Are Go inspired by one of his many paintings – but for now, there are only small snippets of Work in Progress. Although he threw himself into the work, like other plans, including a revival of Dominator, his battle with his illness sabotaged its ongoing development.

Animation, was, of course, one of his great loves. Back in 1987, he developed a 12-minute stop-motion pilot for  “Nemesis the Warlock” series, which never made it to final release, but which Tony told me only recently had caught the attention of 2000AD owner Jason Kingsley, with a view to reviving the idea.

For the full article, please visit Downthetubes Tony Luke in Memoriam

Here is the cover with the image he did for us back in 1993