Barbaric Beauty: The Art of Barry Windsor-Smith
Born on May 25, 1949, Barry Windsor-Smith brought a delicate beauty to even the most violent comics, and visually defined Conan the Barbarian for a generation. A Londoner by birth, Windsor-Smith got his start drawing pin-ups for British reprints of Marvel Comics. In 1968, at the age of 19, he flew to New York to meet with Stan Lee about getting real work for Marvel. At the time, he was drawing in a faux-Jack Kirby style, which was exactly what Marvel was looking for in a fill-in artist. This led to issues here and there of Avengers, Daredevil, and X-Men, among other books.
