Mike Wieringo was born in Italy and raised in Lynchburg, Virginia. He attended
Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, USA, graduating with
a degree in Fashion Illustration, and broke into comics as a penciler with the
Millennium Publications series Pat Savage and Doc Savage: Doom Dynasty in
1991. Two years later, he penciled the cover of the anthology comic book
Negative Burn #1 (1993), from Caliber Press.


Wieringo broke into mainstream publisher DC Comics penciling the cover and
co-penciling (with Lee Moder) the 30-page Justice League International lead
story in Justice League Quarterly #11 (Summer 1993). Wieringo then penciled a
13-page backup feature starring the superheroines Doctor Light and Ice in
Justice League Quarterly #12 (Autumn 1993). In a late 1990s interview,
Wieringo recalled that “Brian Stelfreeze and Karl Story, the guys at Gaijin
Studios lined the [Millennium] job up for me, because I had met them at comics
conventions over the years and showed them my work. They got some of my
samples and sent them to the guy and he liked them and gave me the job.


From there, it was dry for a while, and I did some more samples and took them
to [Comic-Con International in] San Diego in 1992, and about October that year,
I got a call from Ruben Diaz, who was an assistant editor at DC at the time,
[who] asked me to do a Justice League Quarterly story. When I started doing
that, they asked me to do another one, and while I was in the process of finish
ing the second one, they asked me if I'd be interested in taking over The Flash
because the artist had just left.