Igor Kordey is an East European artist, who worked through Europe and is now living in Canada. Despite much acclaim for his work in both in Eastern and Western Europe, through the seventies, eighties and nineties, I only became aware of his work in comics-culturally-deprived-UK in association with Darko Macan, in a number of European anthology publication, then making the jump with Darko to the USA, with Cable.

Their run on Cable, coinciding with major changes at Marvel and Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas' inheritance of the throne, was re-launched as Soldier X, which told tales of internationalism. Carefully researched and well told stories that fulfilled the Reithian objective to inform, to educate and entertain. Kordey's work was spectacular. As Darko moved on from Marvel, Igor stayed and seemed to build himself a good reputation on a number of titles.

His work on New X-Men was not as well received by the audience. With shorter deadlines, and already working on two other books, Kordey's X-work was not as detailed or as obsessive as that of Frank Quitely or Ethan Van Sciver - but for Marvel, it was on time and schedule. The work was muddy, and dark, yet showed incredibly storytelling skills. The scenes in the Channel Tunnel and with Fantomex were perfectly suited to his style, if not the intergalactic fight with the Shi'ar (which seemed to have Quitely written all over it). The internal monologue of Xorn was incredibly well reflected and remains a high point of his run, especially given the context of a later plot twist.

 

NEW X-MEN VOL. 2: IMPERIAL TPB

Since then, Igor Kordey has been drawing X-Treme X-Men and was recently named the new artist on Excalibur, with Chris Claremont, stating this was another of the core X-books that would be formed by X-Men Reload. And then yesterday, it was announced on ComiX-Fan that Igor Kordey had been fired from the book.

ComiX-Fan reported Kordey as saying "I'm fired completely - no replacement books for me"

Later the site would update, with Kordey saying, amongst other things;

"I was officially assigned as artist for Excalibur about four months ago (and during that period of time turning down other business offers, considering that Excalibur is an ongoing project with biweekly rhythm of production). Last Monday I was informed about a cover assignment being taken away from me, as a sudden decision, and the cover for #1 that I already did was cancelled too. It was very humiliating when, two days later, I saw a new cover by Mr. Park during this 'Reload leaking' fuss."

"It takes at least a few weeks from the moment a company enlists an artist for the job to finished artwork, to supplying solicitors with that artwork. In other words, this decision was not 'sudden' and I was treated like an idiot and kept in the dark. Last Tuesday I got an e-mail telling me to stop any further work on Excalibur because 'the whole book is under a reviewing process'."

"I called Chris Claremont (to check out if they're reviewing the script as well) and after he reacted with surprise I realized they were actually reviewing my art. And then I knew that everything was going wrong for me, especially seeing other new covers for Reload. New management politics are now to obviously 'purify' the Marvel Universe and put the heroes back in diapers (my nickname for spandex costumes). After all the censoring they did with X-Treme X-Men ('Arena' and 'Intifada' arcs), and remembering that all those outstanding artists with DIFFERENT approaches (like Corben, Risso, Zezelj, etc.) are not around anymore and that I'm the last DIFFERENT one working on a 'core' books I realized there's no place for me anymore."

"So much for globalization!"

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