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Kevin Maguire came out of nowhere in the mid-80s with his first major project being drawing the relaunch of DC's Justice League series that included the creation of the comics-turned-movie character Maxwell Lord. In the years since, he has bounced back and forth between DC and Marvel with all-too-brief forays into creator-owned work, but now, at the age of 65, Maguire seems fed up with drawing other people's characters and would rather draw his own. It doesn't help that he feels he hasn't gotten a raise in 20 years.

"This could be my last cover for DC so having it be Godzilla walking off into the sunset with Guy Gardner stuck to the bottom of his foot, I couldn't ask for a better adios," Maguire writes on Threads. "I've been sitting on a number of creator-owned ideas. I need to stop procrastinating. I ain't gettin' younger. That, and my page rate at DC has been the same for 20 years and to do the kind of work I WANT to do, I just can't afford to work for them anymore."

Maguire doesn't say what that DC page rate he says he's had for the past 20 years, but it would seem to align with his return to DC in 2005 for JLA Classified. Popverse has not been able to independently confirm his claim.

Part of Maguire's displeasure, which has made its way public, seems to be that he infers that he's been pigeon-holed into doing variant covers and pin-ups, and not draw actual comic pages - at least for the page rate he has with DC. This comes despite Maguire being one of the creators DC flew out to the set of James Gunn's Superman in 2024 for a rare set visit.

"For those asking why, I want to spend the remainder of my career drawing what I want to, not what others want me to draw," Maguire continues. "I want to do storytelling, create and develop characters, not just do variant covers and pin-ups."

While Maguire is best known for his work on DC's Justice League and Marvel's Defenders, Maguire has intermitently tested the waters with creator-owned work, such as Strikeback! and Trinity Angels in the '90s, and then Tanga in the early '00s - actually for DC. Originally published at DC as part of its anthology series Weird World and My Greatest Adventure, Kevin Maguire retained ownership of Tanga and a decade later the artist/writer successfully regained the rights to the franchise from DC. In 2025, Maguire partnered with the Kickstarter-centric comic publisher Rocketship Entertainment to collect that serialized Tanga story in one collection called Tanga vs. the Kaiju of Cammera.

Maguire has openly been talking for over a decade about quitting DC and Marvel work in favor of creator-owned books, and these recent social media postings seem to signal that the 65-year-old is going to now make the leap. 

Get ready for what's next with our guide to upcoming comics, how to buy comics at a comic shop, and our guide to Free Comic Book Day 2025.