Maybe you’ve seen his stuff on HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. Or maybe in the recent WARCRAFT BONDS OF BROTHERHOOD. But chances are you’re missing out on the wealth of awesome work by MICHAEL O’HARE, who splits his time between concept and toy design and comics. Let’s solve that!

Michael O’hare has been drawing for as long as he can remember. But he started to get serious about it when his cousin moved in while he was in Junior High. He was an artist and older by twelve years, so Michael immediately looked up to him. He had a classic John Byrne style and had created his own intensely detailed comic universe, with sketchbooks filled to the brim with characters; we’re talking hundreds of pages, just insane; it blew Michael away. At that point it became his mission in life to reach his cousin’s level.

His first real art gig was as an in-house artist for a studio called Hyperwerks. He was put on a book called Q-UNIT, but he had absolutely no clue what he was doing.  It was trial by fire and he learned so much in such a short period of time. Unfortunately the book hit legal snags and was never released.

After about a year with Hyperwerks, he took an offer to join a new entertainment division within Hasbro as a concept artist. During his time there, he worked on a bunch of fun stuff like GI Joe and Transformers.  He eventually left Hasbro to join Vivendi games as a concept artist, but the itch to draw comics was still there.  So he took on freelance work at night, drawing issues of Peter Parker Spider-Man for Marvel and Birds of Prey for DC (not that he would recommend burning the candle at both ends like that… he’d say the work suffered and wouldn’t have done it in hindsight — lesson learned!)

After Vivendi he found himself over at Mattel Toys designing action figures for Batman, WWE, and Max Steel. Currently he’s a creative director at Spin Masters developing properties for animation.

Michael definitely hit a home run with his work on issue #2 of HAWKEN: MELEE, based on the fast-paced online mech shooter (now available on XBox One and PS4!) —