Articles with the Tag Comix

Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens died

Comix
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the rocketeer

According to Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat, Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens has died:

I’ve just received word that Dave Stevens, the artist of the Rocketeer, died yesterday at age 52. Stevens had dropped out of sight for the most part in recent years and had been battling leukemia, a fact which he kept as private as possible.

Stevens was known for his meticulous artwork, reminiscent of the greatest illustrators of the past and the whiz bang pulpishness of the 30s and 40s. He was, of course, also obsessed with model Bettie Page. These came together in The Rocketeer, which was published by Eclipse, Pacific, Comico and Dark Horse in its various incarnations. In 1991 it was turned into a Disney film starring Billy Campbell and a young Jennifer Connelly. The film underperformed at the time but has become very fondly remembered.

The Rocketeer started as a six page backup strip in Mike Grell’s Starslayer comic, back in 1982 and was an immediate hit. Dave Stevens took all his pulp, movie serial and Betty Page pinup influences and mixed them together into one gorgeously drawn, exuberant story about Cliff Secord, a smalltime stunt pilot who finds a rocket pack stolen from a certain six foot tall giant bronzed scientist, uses it to become The Rocketeer and win fame and fortune, but gets drawn into more adventure than he had hoped… The story was simple, but effective, the art was gorgeous and as Heidi says, it was made into a somewhat overlooked but effective and fun movie in 1991, even if the Betty Page aspects of Secord’s girlfriend were lost. Stevens was always a slow cartoonist and Rocketeer was his only real project, though he was much in demand in the eighties as a cover artist. But it was enough.

(Found via James Nicoll.)

Saturday comics festival

Comix
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Two interesting comix related articles for you to enjoy this Saturday morning, as a break from all that heavy political stuff. First up is Jog at Savage Critics remembering that old Elaine Lee & Michael Kaluta series Starstruck. That’s was one of those odd series that thrived in the newly unleashed freedom the direct market in the eighties offered to American comics, when creators no longer had to appeal to random buyers at newsstand, but to a well informed comic loving audience buying from shops staffed with people who work there purely out of their love for comics. A science fictional comic with strong human interests, Jog sums up the charms of the series quite well, but not before ruining everybody’s day with this little meditation on how fleeting fame can be:

I’m going to guess that a bunch of you haven’t even heard of Elaine Lee, who wrote the comic; maybe the name’s rattling around in the back of your head, but nothing of use is cohering. Hey, I don’t blame you. Just about every comic she ever wrote is out of print, after all. While I’ll take a little room there to equivocate — she does have a story floating around out there in Charles Vess’ The Book of Ballads collection — I do believe all her bigger works are pure longbox fodder. Most of the smaller ones too.

It’s something nobody likes to think about, really. Someone’s entire body of comics work sinking down, left to the funnybook subculture of bin divers, no one piece able to latch on to a famed or renowned predecessor/successor by the same person. Down, down into the bog. It’s almost as unpleasant a thought as somebody working on a comics project for over a decade, only to see it fade from view. Unlucky, without embrace, and forlorn.

But the former has apparently happened to Elaine Lee, and the latter certainly happened to Starstruck. That’s too bad, because Lee’s writing on that comic was intriguing and ambitious; Starstruck is just the type of comic that some today would possibly be considering a classic of the form, had its full, 500+ page length ever been published. But pages came out in various forms, at various times, often taking on an individual character that seemed to match their then-current environment. In other words, there was a Starstruck of 1984 that was very different from the Starstruck of 1991. Maybe inevitable, considering the long path a comic of its go-for-baroque type was bound to follow back in the day.

Too depressing that; let’s quickly take a look at something much more cheery. Shaenon K. Garrity’s explenation of the appeal of What’s Michael, perhaps the best cat based manga in existence:

What’s Michael? doesn’t have much of a continuing storyline, just a set of running gags, so you can start reading at any volume. Each chapter is a short, self-contained vignette, usually a breezy six pages long. Very roughly, it’s the story of Michael, a typical orange tabby cat, and his typical middle-class family. But Kobayashi frequently breaks from even this vague premise, giving Michael different owners, transporting the cast to more exotic settings (a cop show, a samurai drama, a running parody of “The Fugitive” featuring a veterinarian on the run), writing himself into the story (something he also does in Club 9, where he frequently pops up as a lecherous bar patron), or envisioning a world of anthropomorphic cats and dogs.

An example, taken from Shaenon’s post:

example of What's Michael

Cute, and oh so recognisable.

Eddie Campbell

Comix
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Most of you will know Eddie Campbell, if you know him at all, from his work with Alan Moore on From Hell, Moore’s magnus opus on Jack the Ripper and the birth of the 20th century, amongst other things. What you may not be awareof is that Campbell has had a much longer career than that and is not just an artist, but a talented writer in his own right.

His best know solo work is probably Bacchus, a long running series starring the Greek god of alcohol and his adventures in the twentieth century. The centuries have not been kind to Bacchus and he’s now little more than a wino, though a wino who looks uncannily like Corto Maltese. The drawing is semi-realistic, more in the style of Milton Caniff or Hugo Pratt, though with periods of Kirbyesque excess. The stories are somewhat meandering, with interchanging episodes of high voltage action and more quiet, slice of life drama. Various other surviving Greek gods show up from time to time as well. The early stories are somewhat on the rough side still, but get much better over time. The best Bacchus book you can get is probably King Bacchus, with Bacchus is king of the Castle and Frog pub, which has seceded from the United Kingdom and declared its independence. The followup volumes are also quite good. But really, no Bacchus book is a bad buy, even the early, rougher volumes are worth getting.

Next to Bacchus, there’s Alec, which is basically a slightly fictionalised autobiography. Campbell has been doing these stories for years and unlike many cartoonists he’s actually had an interesting life. Born in Scotland, quite bright, worked for years in various blue collar jobs, started cartooning, lots of drunk adventures (notice a theme), got married, moved to Australia, got kids, settled down. Alec is the longest running series Campbell has been doing, having done Alec stories since he started drawing comics. What’s impressive about them is that, again unlike other cartoonists, he knows when to move the focus from his own life to that of the people around him, without coming across as a voyeur. Much of it feels like the sort of stories you’d tell your mates in the pub, only much better.

Campbell’s artwork is excellent, at its best in black and white I find. As said he is very much in the style of Hugo Pratt or Milton Caniff, though immediately recognisable as his own. He has an eye for small details and knows when to put in details and when to leave them out. The small samples here really do not do his work justice; the best way to sample his work is to get one of his books and
just start reading. Any good comic book store or library should have at least some.

Now to do a Mike Sterling and do a half post of linky goodness: