One of our favorite comic books when we were growing up in the 1980s was John Ostrander‘s Suicide Squad, and it wasn’t just that the starting premise—a top-secret government agency recruits a bunch of DC Comics supervillians and forces them into earning their freedom by becoming covert operatives—was so awesome. You also had to take into consideration that we’d been Ostrander fans for a couple years because of his work on the indie comic GrimJack, so we greeted his arrival to “mainstream” superhero titles with some enthusiasm.
It’s been more than two decades since Suicide Squad debuted, and during that entire time, Ostrander has had glaucoma. Earlier this year, he underwent a series of filtration surgeries to halt the deterioration of his optic nerves, and though he does have health insurance (unlike Aaron Allston, whose medical plight we discussed yesterday), it isn’t enough to cover all the expenses. So friends have rallied to create Comix4Sight, which will conduct a charity auction at next month’s Chicago Comic-Con, including contributions from many of the artists and writers with whom Ostrander has collaborated over the years.
(Coincidentally, like Allston, Ostrander has worked extensively on Star Wars tie-ins, including several trade paperbacks’ worth of comic books extending the storyline from the second trilogy, which as we all know is really the first trilogy.)
(via The Beat; photo: Wikipedia)