The illustrator and comic book artist Dave Stevens died earlier this week at the age of 52 after a long struggle with leukemia. Stevens was best known as the creator of the Rocketeer, an adventure character that first appeared in various titles published by Pacific, a short-lived independent comics company in the early 1980s. (After Pacific went out of business, he jumped to other now-defunct "independent" comics publishers--Eclipse, Comico--before winding up at Dark Horse.) Set in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, the comics centered on Cliff Secord, a scrappy young stunt pilot who battles Nazis and performs other acts of derring-do after stumbling across a portable jet pack that turns him into a two-fisted flying fool. The comics inspired a 1991 movie, directed by Joe Johnston, that worked hard to capture the look of Stevens's comics, and with a cast that included Bill Campbell in the lead, Jennifer Connelly as his girl Betty, and Alan Arkin, Timothy Dalton (in a role modeled on Errol Flynn), and Terry O'Quinn, of Lost, as Howard Hughes.
The movie was okay, but Stevens had essentially already made his own Rocketeer movie; he just did it on paper. He didn't turn out many pages of Cliff Secord's adventures, because he put so much painstaking work into them that there were long, long lulls between the appearance of each new short chapter, an effect that was amplified by the fact that his publishing companies kept dying on him. It was worth the effort he put into them. (The film critic Charles Taylor described them as "little pieces of kitsch heaven.") Stevens was really crazy about the pop culture of a certain place and time, and part of what set his work apart was that he was driven to lavish his loving eye and craftsmanship on some very tacky, and even sleazy, love objects. Secord was a carny hanger-on making a buck any way he could, and his beloved Betty was explicitly modeled on the pin-up icon Bettie Page, whose image Stevens did a hell of a lot to resurrect and immortalize. (He also rediscovered, and befriended, the actual Ms. Page, who probably never expected to outlive him.) The "Rocketeer" comics also incorporated a lot of period Hollywood lore, as well as nods to such iconic ephemera as the masked image of the Saturday-matinee hero Commander Cody, Rondo Hatton, and the Doc Savage sidekick Monk Mayfair. Stevens earned his right to slap all this stuff together by giving it a unifying visual dazzle and afectionate spirit. His masterwork is probably one of the best marriages of movies and comics ever brought off.
