Rest in Peace, Marc Johnson

Whether it was theorising about “why style matters” for On Video, or explaining his belief that skateboarding was simply ideas put into motion, the intellectual side was never far from the surface. Sadly, too, as is so often the case with supremely intelligent but troubled souls, neither was an inherent streak of self-destruction.
His battles with booze throughout the 00s have already been covered at length, and whilst the resultant footage in Fully Flared is - alongside his Pretty Sweet section - arguably the best part ever made, the toll it took on his mental health seems to have been something he struggled to recover from.
In announcing his death on Thrasher’s Instagram, Louie Barletta noted that he’d been clean for quite some time and was even looking positively towards the future, which in many ways makes his passing all the more tragic. Marc Johnson laid his very soul on the line for skateboarding, and it may just be that skateboarding was never quite grateful enough to him in life. Hopefully there is more to our existence than this mortal plane, and the outpouring of grief we’ve seen over the past 36 hours shows him just how grateful we all are for him now.