It's weird how the death of someone you've never met can hit you but I loved his work (see my earlier posts about favourite artists and comics for evidence of this) and I'm really gutted. As well as having one of the most attractive styles in comics and illustrations, Stevens' art also contained beautiful use of colour. Most known for his work on The Rocketeer (which saw him spearheading the revival of interest in 50s pin-up icon Bettie Page), he was also an inker on Marvel's original Star Wars movie adaptation (his pages come near the destruction of the Death Star if I'm right), he turned down the chance to storyboard Raiders of the Lost Ark and was briefly married to model/actress/softcore star Brinke Stevens.
Below are a few quick webgrabs (as all my stuff is packed away and I can't upload any of it) of Stevens' key works as mentioned above, the Rocketeer and Bettie Page.
Thanks for all the art, Dave..
3 comments:
I never got Stevens. I never really liked the airbrush cheesecake style that he seemed to be a part of, but his Rocketeer is good old fashioned fun, and if we had justice, it would have been made into a film with the young Buster Crabbe, cos it seemed to me to be a loveletter to the old RKO serials. Instead most people will know it from the drekk staring Timothy Dalton.
All the good ones are dropping like flies while shit like J Scott Campbell and Micheal Turner live on vast paycheques for shitty covers. Where's karma now Earl?
Like all art, its subjective whether one likes Stevens' work. I appreciate his style but not Kirby's for instance. I loved Stevens' smooth linework and soft colours, others may not.
While I'm far from a Turner fan myself, I give him props for the amount of work he produced while undergoing chemo. Granted, most of it was crap, but y'know, he still produced...
I can watch the Rocketeer movie, mainly for Alan Arkin's performance, but I was disappointed when I first saw it as it fell well short of the source material. The Rocketeer himself looked spot on though..
They're dropping like flies lately. Wieringo, Steve Gerber, now Stevens. Makes me feel old...
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