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Volume 1009

Greg Hildebrandt said in an Knight Ridder interview this week that he and his brother, who were born in Detroit, shared "an obsession with colour" so intense that it led them at age two to eat a box of crayons. He said he liked the taste. Newspaper comic strips introduced the brothers to art, he said. At 19 they worked on animations for Navy training films. In the 1950s, they did documentary film work on world hunger for Bishop J. Sheen.

In the late 1960s, they began illustrating children's books. Then, in 1976, came the first Lord of the Rings calendar. The calendar was Tim Hildebrandt's idea, his brother remembered. "I ante to pursue gallery art at that point, but Tim was pushing and pushing" on the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy," and then I read it and said 'OK.'" The Hildebrandt's agent, Jean Scrocco, recalled their extraordinary method for the 6-foot-wide paintings: One brother started at one end, and the other at the other end and they met in the middle. The calendar project was their studio's second best-known, after their poster for the 1977 movie Star Wars. "It's almost become iconic: Luke Skywalker with his light sabre thrust in the sky, Darth Vader's helmet in the background, Princess Leia at his feet," said Mike Chen, the director of the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, N.J., where Tim Hildebrandt taught for three years.

The brothers broke up in 1981 to go their own ways and didn't speak for several years, Greg Hildebrandt said. In 1993, they reunited and began doing art for comic-book publishers Marvel (Spider-Man, X-Men) and DC (Superman) and, in 1995, a daily comic strip, an updated version of Milt Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, which ran for only a year. Greg Hildebrandt said of his brother: "He's in my hand, eyes, mind, art, soul. He always has been from birth, and he still is."

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