Phillips’ first published comics work appeared in 1980, when he was just 15 years old and still in high school through a connection with artist Ken Houghton, who worked on girls’ comic titles for British publishers IPC and DC Thompson - and who’d taught Phillips in an art class a couple of years earlier - Phillips started working on titles such as Bunty and Nikki before taking a break to attend art school and get a degree in graphic design.Īs soon as he graduated, however, he returned for what many consider the “start” of his career: working on 2000 AD and its related titles, starting with the short-lived “political” title Crisis it was there when he first worked with writer John Smith, forming a partnership that would last through series including New Statesmen, Straitgate, Danzig’s Inferno, and their crowning achievement together: the creation of Devlin Waugh, the dandy exorcist of the Judge Dredd universe.Įven as Phillips was appearing in British titles, he was making a name for himself in the U.S., courtesy of a number of appearances in multiple “mature readers” comics from DC: he worked on Hellblazer, Kid Eternity and Wildcats before partnering with Brubaker for the first time as full artist - he’d inked an earlier series by the writer, 1999’s Scene of the Crime - for 2003’s Sleeper.
The secret to his career longevity is arguably, in part, that he started early.
It says something about Sean Phillips career when you realize that, even though he’s been working with writer Ed Brubaker for more than two decades at this point - together, the two have co-created DC’s Sleeper, as well as the creator owned Criminal, Incognito, Fatale, The Fade Out, Reckless and a host of other projects published through Image Comics - he had been working for more than a decade prior to their collaboration, creating a catalog of work that other artists would kill for.
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