The Days of Dave: Testimonials from Bob Chapman, Scott Dunbier, Mark Evanier, Arnie Fenner, Jeff Gelb, Gilbert Hernandez, Mario Hernandez, Richard Hescox, Will Meugniot, Bill Morrison, Sandy Plunkett, Paul Power, Steven C. Ringgenberg, Scott Saavedra, Diana Schutz, Scott Shaw!, David Scroggy,
and Jim
INTERVIEWER’S NOTE:
This interview appears here transcribed from the original manuscript, which differs slightly from the printed version. Steven C. Ringgenberg shared, “This was published in Amazing Heroes #37 [Dec. 15, ’83]. For that issue, Dave contributed a nifty cover that looked like a page out of Cliff Secord’s family album. I was able to get such a long interview with Dave due to being friends since the mid’70s, and staying in touch after I stopped attending the San Diego Con in 1978 and moved to the East Coast. Dave was easy to talk to, funny, modest and interesting, really one of the nicest guys I ever met and we got along swell. If Dave was ever annoyed by my earnest fanboy-ness in the old days, he never showed it. Dave always seemed to be cool, calm and collected: he behaved with real class and grew increasingly suave over the years. Aside from loving his art, he was a good friend, and I miss him.” —
SCR
Conducted by STEVEN C. RINGGENBERG
[Interviewer’s original introduction: Since it first appeared as a back-up feature in Starslayer, Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer has risen rapidly to become one of Pacific Comics’ hottest properties. Both jaded old-timers and non-comics fans alike have been bowled over by Stevens’ glossy rendering, his way with the feminine anatomy, and his flare for wisecracking ’30s adventure, the likes of which comics had not seen for many a long year.
[But, amidst all the furor over his creation, Stevens himself remained an unknown quantity to most of the people who were enjoying it. Although Stevens has been a professional artist since his teens, with impressive credits working as Russ Manning’s assistant, doing adventure artwork, storyboards for both live and action animated films, and even some scattered contributions to over- and underground comics, almost nobody had ever heard of him when the Rocketeer seemed to come out of nowhere. I’m grateful to Dave for letting me conduct this interview for Amazing Heroes, not only for the chance to expose more people to The Rocketeer, but also a chance to show people the man responsible, a guy who loves Lou Fine, Bettie Page, and the Rocket Man serials. — SCR.]
Steve Ringgenberg: Let’s start at the beginning, Dave. Where were you born?
Dave Stevens: In Lynwood, California.
SCR: When?
Dave: In 1955, July.
SCR: Have you lived in California all your life?
Dave: No. I grew up in the wilds of Idaho and Oregon. Let’s see, then I lived in San Diego for a few years, and then came back to L.A. to seek my fame and fortune.
SCR: And how long have you been an artist?
Dave: All my life.
SCR: Have you been drawing since you were a little kid?
Dave: Yeah.
SCR: I meant professionally.
Dave: Oh, since about… since I got out of high school.
SCR: When you were drawing as a child, were you the one the teachers always said to you: “You’re a great artist”?
Dave: Yeah. They always used to have me do all the murals and stuff like that. It was pretty embarrassing.
SCR: Well, what was your first professional job?
Dave: Oh man, I don’t remember. I know that I was designing
This spread: Clockwise from left is detail from King of the Rocket Men [’49] poster; Dave Stevens’ self-portrait from ’75 giving a shout out to comics world colleagues; Dave’s cover art for Amazing Heroes #37 [Dec.15 ’83], where this interview first appeared; and his 1984 Rocketeer illustration.
greeting cards and stuff for people when I was about 16 or 17.
SCR: Freelance?
Dave: Yeah, when I was still in high school. I guess you could consider that professional stuff.
SCR: Well, when did you get a professional job, like working for magazine or for somebody’s studio?
Dave: In comics?
SCR: Comics, illustration, advertising…
Dave: Well, I did a lot of spot advertising all through high school and, when I got out, it was about a year after I got out, Manning hired me to help out on Tarzan.
SCR: How old were you then?
Dave: Eighteen or 19. I think about 19.
SCR: Since you started working professionally so young, was drawing always fun for you or did it start to be work early on?
Dave: Well, no, it was always fun. It started to be work when I had to do it day in and day out.
SCR: Oh, working for Manning?
Dave: Yeah, yeah. That was work. It was fun at the same time because I liked Russ a lot. I learned a lot from him. It was real hard work.
SCR: What kind of stuff were you doing for him when you assisted him on Tarzan?
Dave: Everything he didn’t want to do or didn’t have time to do.
SCR: A lot of backgrounds?
Dave: A lot of backgrounds. A lot of minor figures. He really
didn’t let me do [the character] Tarzan ’til the very end.
SCR: He didn’t trust you?
Dave: Weelll, you know, that was the fun part for him. He liked drawing Tarzan.
SCR: How long were you on Tarzan with him?
Dave: About a year, I think.
SCR: And what did you do after that?
Dave: Well, he started editing this line of European Burroughs books and I started working on those with him and then he ran out of time and couldn’t work on them anymore, and hired a bunch of other artists to do freelance stories, and he would edit them. I ended up doing a few of those after I had stopped working on the Sunday strip, because he had caught up and didn’t really need me as much, so he put me on the European books for a while. I did inking and some penciling on quite a few of them.
SCR: Was it all-Tarzan or was it Burroughs’ other characters, too?
Dave: As I recall, I think it was all-Tarzan. I mean, some of them used other characters also, like David Innes and people like that but, it was pretty dreadful-looking stuff. I mean, for my [end] of it. I was just, I didn’t know how to draw. I was an inker at that time and I just did not have the substance to take, say, a whole story and pencil and ink it. I could just finish off somebody else’s pencils or work over somebody else’s layouts and ink it, but I wasn’t strong enough to do my own storytelling then.
SCR: Was working as an inker how you got into the business, basically?
Dave: Oh, yes. And I had inked a few things for Kirby…
SCR: Oh really. What?
Dave: Just little spot illustrations, nothing important. Nothing big time.
SCR: So this brings up to about… what, in real time…?
Dave: Nineteen seventy-six, I think. I just got tired of doing the Tarzan stuff. It was just getting to be a real grind for me, to ink people when I would rather be penciling my own stuff, at that point. At this point, I felt I had learned enough that I could maybe take my chance and do a story on my own. And they didn’t have any stuff that I really wanted to illustrate, so I took my leave and did my last job for them, and then did a lot of painting and work and stuff, in San Diego. For about six months, John Pound and I were working together.
SCR: Did you do anything noteworthy? Did you work for any big companies or was it mostly local?
Dave: No, it was all local stuff. You know, we were working for the school system. We did a bunch of… Well, actually it was John’s job we were doing. I was just helping him out. It was film strips. He was doing a series of 100 paintings or so for “Rip Van Winkle” and I just would step in and help.
SCR: That sounds like a lot of work.
Dave: Yeah, [laughter] John really amazed me that he was able to do all that stuff.
SCR: Were you able to make a living at that?
Dave: Oh no, uh-uh. It was just for the fun of it. I was learning how to paint.
SCR: Oh, just working with Pound?
Dave: Yeah.
SCR: What were working with, acrylics?
Dave: Yeah, I think it was.
SCR: One time, when I was up at your place, you showed me
some paintings and stuff of King Kong and Boris Karloff. What were those for?
Dave: I was trying to break into doing magazine covers, and I thought, “Well, the easiest thing to start with would be Famous Monsters [of Filmland], because all they used were head shots, but I took them up to see Forry [Ackerman, then editor of Famous Monsters] that year, in 1976, and he loved them, but they didn’t have any Day-Glo colors in them, so obviously, they wouldn’t go for them with Warren fans. And Forry suggested that I add some flames and things like that, and I really didn’t want to add that kind of stuff, because I felt that they were good pieces as they were.
SCR: Then you paint, do you still work mostly in acrylic?
Dave: No, now I work in designer’s colors, gouache. [It’s] a little harder, more of a fugitive medium. You know, you have trouble blending it, so you have to work pretty carefully.
SCR: Just as a general question: who are your biggest artistic influences?
Dave: As far as what… comics?
SCR: As far as doing comics.
Dave: Well, Steranko, Eisner, Kirby, those guys.
SCR: What about illustrators?
Dave: I don’t really do all that much fine illustration.
SCR: Are there any illustrators who affect your comics, you know, from looking at their stuff?
Dave: Well, I look at a lot of old movie art…
SCR: What, like posters and things?
Dave: Yeah, that kind of thing.
SCR: For what? Just composition?
Dave: Treatment.
SCR: “Treatment”?
Dave: Yeah. They used to paint as though they were re-touching a photograph. The way the final artwork looked on a lot of old movie posters, it either had the Leyendecker crisp, nicely rendered faces, real stylized, or it was a real muted kind of thing that almost looked like a tinted photo with a [gauze] over it, but
it was actually a piece of painting. You know, that kind of stuff. There was a lot of that done at that time that you don’t see now, and I have always kind of gravitated toward that.
SCR: Would you like to do something like that Star Wars [“Circus”] poster that looked like an old movie poster? Do you remember the one I’m talking about?
Dave: Oh yeah, yeah. The Charlie White [and Drew Struzan]…?
SCR: Yeah.
Dave: Yeah. That was really nice. Yeah, that’s the kind of art that I prefer. I don’t like slick, high-tech… Oh, what’s the guy’s name that did the cityscape for Blade Runner…? Oh, Syd Mead.
SCR: “Syd Mead”?
Dave: That’s the kind of stuff that leaves me cold. It’s great technically, beautiful stuff, but I like the stuff that had a lot more of the personal touch to it. A lot of art today in advertising and such is just too slick for me.
SCR: Yeah, it’s too impersonal.
Dave: Well, I don’t know if it’s impersonal. They’re just doing what’s called for and what’s called for is slick and incredibly, almost photographic and that really puts me off. I would like to see some strokes and some kind of differences of color...
SCR: Some scratchy inking?
Dave: No, not scratchy inking, but real nice, bold brush strokes and things like that, that looks kind of painterly.
SCR: Who’s around now that you like, as far as comics and illustration?
Dave: Oh, uh, shoot. Since I don’t read comics, I can’t really think of anybody, off-hand.
SCR: Well, whose work has impressed you in the past?
Dave: Williamson, Steranko, Eisner. The same guys as before.
SCR: What about Kaluta?
Dave: Hell, yes. I like his stuff a lot. It’s been a real inspiration.
SCR: Yeah, because Michael seems to be working from the same kind of aesthetic as you, you know. He’s drawing on a lot of old pulps and movies and stuff.
Dave: We met once at a convention, oh quite a few years ago, in San Diego and talked for a few minutes. It was pretty funny because we were both coming up with the same things, going, “Yeah, yeah…” [laughter] as far as talking ’3Os art and stuff like that.
SCR: Have you ever gotten any offers to do a ’30s style pulp cover for a book cover or something?
Dave: Yeah, at one point, and I can’t remember what it was for. Nothing recent, though. I mean, I’ve gotten a lot of people calling and I don’t know where they’ve been getting my number, because the number’s unlisted, and they all want me to do jobs for this, that, and the other thing, and they all seem to want the same type of thing.
SCR: Are all of these offers to do comics?
Dave: Yeah. And that is like a ’30s [style].
SCR: Well, you seem to have that territory pretty well staked out, right now. Nobody else is doing anything like that in comics.
Dave: Oh, I have a feeling that there will be quite a few coming out really soon.
SCR: Yeah, they’ll probably be blatant ripoffs of “The Rocketeer.”
Dave: I don’t know about that, but probably covering territory that I haven’t gotten to yet.
SCR: Let me ask you: how much influence do your studio mates Bil Stout and Richard Hescox have on your stuff?
Dave: Well, they keep me from getting off the beaten path. You know, once I start in a direction, I have a tendency to deviate and go off into real obscure things that I like, and I’m not really keeping sight of…
SCR: What… the overall…? How the picture’s going to look?
Dave: Oh, I get off on tangents with dialogue, and stuff like that, little areas that don’t make any difference, and I have to have them come along and say, “Ahh, come on, Dave, you don’t really need all this dialogue. Cut out this and that.”
SCR: So Stout and Hescox help you keep your stuff accessible?
Dave: I guess, yeah, and they help a lot with suggestions, as far as composition and storytelling, the whole bit. They’ll just look over my shoulder and offer things that I might not have thought of and, boy, that’s certainly ten times as good as working at home alone. Because, with me, I really like input and I need input at this point, because I don’t really… this is the first comic I’ve ever done, and I still don’t know my… P’s and my Q’s. [laughter]
SCR: You don’t feel like you’re comfortable with the vocabulary of comic art?
Dave: Yeah, yeah, I guess. it’s just real tough having to digest so much, all at once. You’d think that reading them as a kid, and then assisting later, you’ll soak up a lot and, really, it doesn’t seem to be that way. I’m finding that I’m really having to work and work really hard to get the stuff come down on the paper the way it should, and be readable easily and [be] something that the audience can lay hold of and really enjoy. It’s not as effortless as it looks sometimes.
SCR: Are you going back and looking at classic strips, like Scorchy Smith and Flash Gordon?
Dave: Yeah, I look at just about everything, just to see how everybody else does it. I look at all the old stuff, and some of the new stuff, not very much of it, because I find it to be pretty bland. Yeah, overall it’s pretty much all the same.
SCR: A lot of it is a lot of technique and not much real drawing.
Dave: Yeah, well, and they’re drawing for speed, though to satisfy this weekly fix that comics fans need and they can’t really be too concerned with good drawing.
SCR: Do you find you’re taking a lot of flak from the fans about, “Gee, you’re great, but you’re so slow”?
Dave: Oh yeah, but it doesn’t bother me, because I’m not doing it to satisfy them. I mean, I’m doing it for them, in one sense, but I’m just not doing just to satisfy this monthly habit that they need to get a fix.
SCR: So what you’re saying is that you’re not going to sell out.
Dave: Hell, no! Because when it comes right down to it, I’m doing it for me and me alone.
SCR: How long does it take for you, realistically, to pencil and ink a page that you’re satisfied with?
Dave: Well, it varies. It depends on what’s on it. Some pages can take a day, up to almost a week.
SCR: Just for a single page? Give me an example.
Dave: Well, there was one in this last story, where I had a lot of action and ended up having to cram a whole lot of panels into one page, and that takes a lot longer.
SCR: Yeah, well, which page is it? I’ve got a copy of [Pacific Presents #2, Apr. ’83] right here.
Dave: Ah, shoot, it might have been the streetcar page [7].
SCR: Where Cliff leaps onto the streetcar?
Dave: Originally that was two pages, but I had to cram them onto one page in order to get that surprise page following. And I really didn’t have the room to waste on a whole page of nothing, but I felt the effect was needed. You know, because originally, Betty, exposed there in the doorway, was the bottom half of the Monk and Ham reacting shot… (and don’t call them by name in the interview; let’s just say, “The two men reacting”).
SCR: Well, I thought that that reaction shot really works, but — Dave: It works now, because I had to chop it and put it on the
opposite page so that you couldn’t see to what they’re reacting. But, if I had kept it where it was, it would have been blown, and it would have been no surprise, which is a real obvious thing.
SCR: Yeah, well I also looked at that page and saw a little bit of artistic self-indulgence, like: “Hey, I get to draw a whole page of a naked girl. Far out!”
Dave: Well, people are screaming for more Betty and I’ll give then more Betty.
SCR: Is she the most popular character in the story?
Dave: No, but she gets a lot of mail.
SCR: Really?
Dave: Yeah. I’ve got a filing cabinet full of mail.
SCR: Was that the inspiration for the Betty look-alike contest?
Dave: The fact that people are so enchanted with her?
SCR: Yeah or was that just your brainstorm?
Dave: No. That was just to have fun with. I want to do some things in the book that involve readers where they can have input, like suggestions for things that will happen in the future. This was just something fun to start it off with.
SCR: Have you had any takers yet?
Dave: Well, the book has just come out in the last few days.
Conducted by STEVEN C. RINGGENBERG
[Interviewer’s original introduction: Since it first appeared as a backup feature in Starslayer, Dave Stevens’s Rocketeer has risen rapidly to become one of Pacific Comics’ hottest properties. Both jaded old-timers and non-comics fans alike have been bowled over by Stevens’s glossy rendering his way with the feminine anatomy and his flare for wisecracking ’30s adventure, the likes of which comics had not seen for many a long year. — SCR.]
Steven C. Ringgenberg: You mentioned contemporary people who you looked at who had some kind of influence on you or at least whose work you admired.
Dave Stevens: Not much an influence, but just kind of inspiring to look at. Probably the best is Jaime Hernandez, one of the guys that does Love and Rockets. His stuff just knocks me out. I thought of that immediately afterwards, after we’d gotten off the phone the last time, and I didn’t even think to mention it. But that guy’s stuff is just great. He’s one of the best natural artists storytellers I’ve ever seen. Man, It looks so effortless with that guy. It looks like he just sits down and does it.
SCR: And it looks fun, too.
Dave: It looks like he had a ball of fun with the stuff and he tells such a great story. I don’t know if he writes it or not —
SCR: Yes, he does.
Dave: He does the actual dialogue? Boy, great characters! He’s got a real feel for characters.
SCR: I assume you’ve seen Love and Rockets #2 [Spr. ’83] then? Is that what you’re talking about, that one long “Mechanix” story, the 40-pager…?
Dave: That started out with her friends reading a letter from her…? That was just great.
SCR: And that was such a brilliant way to tell a story, as letters. Dave: That kind of thing makes me so envious, when I see somebody pull something like that off and do it so well. It just worked. And there were so many other thing little things, side things, that came into the story, little subplots that were just great. That was something that I really got a charge out of, and I don’t get that much out of a lot of comics, straight comics, but, every now and then, something like that will come out, or like that Dragon’s Teeth magazine [#1, Summer ’83]. Have you seen that?
SCR: Yes.
Dave: It’s got a Toth story in there that’s just superb called, “Oolala.” Great title. But that’s a real charmer.
SCR: Did you see Toth’s “The Fox,” in The Black Hood [#2, Aug. ’83]?
Dave: I didn’t really care for that as much, it looked too rushed. The story was good, but it wasn’t exceptional like I expect from Toth. I really appreciate what Toth does. I’m hoping now he’s going to start doing a lot more.
SCR: Is he definitely going to be doing something for The Rocketeer magazine?
Dave: Yeah, next issue. He’s going to do a story about five pages long.
SCR: Do you have any idea what he’s going to do or is it just going to be whatever he wants?
Dave: It’s going to have to do with airplanes.
SCR: That would be no hardship for him, I’m sure.
Dave: It has to kind of be in keeping with the book.
SCR: Tell me some of the things you have lined up for the last Rocketeer.
Dave: Well, Alex is going to do his strip and Kaluta is going to do a back cover of The Rocketeer.
SCR: That’ll be the first time someone else has done your character, isn’t it?
Dave: Yeah, it ought to be neat.
SCR: Did you ask Kaluta to do that?
Dave: I think [Pacific editorial director] David Scroggy approached him with the idea or something, and he leaped at it. He thought it was great.
SCR: He loves The Rocketeer. He raves over it. It’s about the only thing he does rave over lately.
Dave: Well, I’m really looking forward to seeing what he does. So he’s going to do that and I’m probably going to color it for him. Then we’re going to have a little interior portfolio of different guys, established guys, doing their version of The Rocketeer, too. Gray Morrow, that’s the only one for sure, so far. He’s always been one of my absolute favorites. He’s so good, especially his black-&-white work.
SCR: So you’re going to have Morrow, at least, doing The Rocketeer. How many illustrations are you going to have in the portfolio, four or five?
Dave: About that, and I’ll just turn each guy loose and let him do a full splash page of a poster-ish kind of thing.
SCR: Are you going to let Bill Stout do one? [Stout is currently sharing a studio with Stevens — SCR.]
Dave: I don’t know if he’s going to have time or not, but we’ve got a whole list of different people we would like to have do one.
SCR: Dave Scroggy also mentioned that you were going to do the next Rocketeer on better paper.
Dave: It’s going to be a Baxter book and it’s going to have
This page and next spread: Rocketeer artwork by Dave. “Rocketeer Responds” was created for a postcard to send to correspondents.
This second, shorter interview conducted by me and included here was what I call a functional interview. The first with Dave was more like an extended conversation with an old friend. This interview was less conversational, and more geared to providing quotes and information for an article about Dave and The Rocketeer for Amazing Heroes 1985 Preview [Summer ’85] that was a roundup of upcoming comics. Dave and I were still friends, mind you, but this interview was strictly business, and my piece on The Rocketeer was brief. — SCR.
painted color throughout. And, I’m going to do it all by hand so there’s not going to be any problems with crappy colorists.
SCR: Are you going to paint on the originals?
Dave: No, uh-uh. I’ll just do blue lines or gray lines. I don’t know which.
SCR: Are you going to print it using laser reproduction?
Dave: Yes, that way. I’ll be assured of reproduction as close to what I’ve done as possible and, if there’s any glitches that way, I’ve got nobody to blame but me, because this will be the first time I’ve actually colored like that.
SCR: Is this deluxe edition the last Pacific Presents or the first issue of The Rocketeer magazine?
Dave: No. It’ll just be the last “Rocketeer” in Pacific Presents. After that, Pacific Presents will continue as a kind of Showcase book, and the Ditko thing will be back in the following issue. Rocketeer will be in its own book after that.
SCR: Are you going to try to keep to the same format that you’re establishing with Pacific Presents #3?
Dave: Pretty close. I want to keep it a Wings-type of book…
SCR: With Toth doing a continuing back-up feature?
Dave: Boy, I’d like to. If I can talk him into it, I’d love to have him in it.
SCR: You shouldn’t have any trouble keeping him on your schedule. [laughter]
Dave: Really. Twice a year.
SCR: Is The Rocketeer going to be coming out that frequently in the future?
Dave: Twice a year?
SCR: Or are you going to try and make it a quarterly or something?
Dave: I’m going to try, but I don’t know how much luck I’m going to have. There’s an awful lot coming up that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to allot time for The Rocketeer. I mean, I want to give it more time I can, but look what happened this year…
SCR: Are you talking about comics or non-comics-type projects?
Dave: Both. Mostly non-comics things.
SCR: Getting back to The Rocketeer: in the third Pacific Presents, how long is the
story going to be where you conclude everything?
Dave: It will be about 20 pages, so it will be twice as long as usual. It will actually be two chapters in one.
SCR: But you’re definitely going to conclude that adventure?
Dave: Yes and the end of it will take off in a different direction.
SCR: Are you then going to segue into the next story from there?
Dave: Yes, with the very last panel. So, in a sense, it’s still continued, but it’s done and finished in this particular plot, this phase is over. It’s like the very first introductory thing.
SCR: Are you also going to try to make the continuity in the strip more realistic, so it’ll be less like one adventure an issue and it’ll be more like real life in the way things happen?
Dave: Everything will continue, it’ll just kind of flow along. There won’t be any gaps. Is that what you mean?
SCR: Yes.
Dave: Everything I will hook up to where I don’t know if you’ve run across any of them or not, but in The Spirit, in the late ’40s, they pretty much did that; to where he would be referring every now and then to something that had happened the week before, or two weeks before, or a month before. I think, in particular of that series, where he was hopping from island to island. I forget exactly what it was; it was some kind of sea adventure, and it just stretched over a period of weeks, but I don’t think that the adventures are going to take that long to wrap, it’s just that the characters and situations are going to kind of roll along between adventures. It’s just going to be a lot easier to follow.
SCR: Are you going to keep to the same sense of pacing?
Dave: Like, what do you mean?
SCR: Just the style in which you’re telling the story. Are you going to make it more kinetic, something like Raiders?
Dave: No. You’ve got to break that up with some rest periods, you know. You can’t constantly assault people with action, action, action or chase, chase, chase. So there’s going to be some lulls, but interesting lulls.
SCR: Are you going to work in some comedy?
Dave: Oh, yeah. Plenty. Right after this one as a matter of fact. I’ve already got a couple of things worked out and new additional, supporting players.
SCR: Is there anything else that you’re planning to do that you care to bring up?
Dave: I’m going to be doing a Rocketeer painting, a poster. I did a Betty one and that sold pretty well at the Con. So we’re going to be doing another one. Comic-wise, I don’t have much planned other than just to keep rolling along with it once we get it get it repackaged for the new title. And then I want to do one more “Aurora,” just to go back to show that I can do a lot better than I did the first one.
SCR: That’s interesting. I thought you were sick of that character.
Dave: Oh no, it’s just that I was sick of that artwork and that story because it was so old. I want to go back now and finish that bull-tail and do it right. Now I feel like I can handle it. Back then, it was obvious that I wasn’t ready to do anything like that. I mean that was the first out of the barrel and that was the only story I had done, at that point. Well, that and The Rocketeer, and that’s it. That’s all I’ve done.
SCR: I guess working for other people doesn’t count…?
Dave: No, heck no. Because all I was doing was inking over somebody else or… stepping in for an occasional panel, here or there. That doesn’t mean anything. That’s not telling stories; that’s just being diverse hands. So I feel like I ought to go back and wrap “Aurora” and then try and develop a couple of other things, just as properties.
SCR: Would you be doing that for Pacific?
Dave: Either for them or whoever. I don’t know yet. It depends on what kind of format I want to go into, if I want to put it in a comic book or a book-book, or whatever. So…
SCR: What other stuff are you doing outside of comics. Are you doing any illustration?
Dave: I can’t really say at the moment. It’s just film stuff, and it’s just, at this point, kind of up in the air as to what I’m going to be doing in the next few months or not. I could be completely submerged in comics or I could have to yank myself completely away from it.
Conducted by JON B. COOKE
[Interviewer’s intro: As mentioned in my editorial, this interview was conducted over dinner and, thereafter, in Dave’s hotel room — with my younger brother, Andy, hanging out with the two of us — during Comic-Con International: San Diego, in 2001. Plus, Dave gave an additional session by phone a month later, when we were all back in our respective homes. The overall conversation, like some other Dave Stevens Q+As in this tribute, occasionally lingers on some of the same ground as others, but each interview, soon enough, takes its own fascinating course. The transcript appeared in slightly different form in Comic Book Artist #15 [Nov. ’01], the “Love and Rocketeers” issue. My late friend Sam Gafford was transcriber of the interview.— JBC ]
Jon B. Cooke: Dave, where are you from?
Dave Stevens: Lynwood, California, which is basically, part of South-Central Los Angeles.
JBC: When did you get interested
compilations, like The Omnibus of Science-Fiction, etc. So, I started out with Bradbury, too, as a youngster, along with Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and a handful of others.
JBC: Were you into books that featured continuing characters like Sherlock Holmes?
Dave: Oh sure, Tarzan, and even Tom Swift, and The Hardy Boys for a while. And later, in high school, I got bitten by the paperback reprints of The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Conan, along with a lot of my friends.
JBC: Did you have an interest in previous eras even as a kid?
Dave: Yeah, I guess I did. But, you know, as a ‘50s kid, I grew up on a daily diet of early television, watching Our Gang, Laurel and Hardy, [Hopalong Cassidy], The Lone Ranger, Betty Boop, Popeye, and scads of old movies. Plus, radio was still pretty vital in most homes. Your Hit Parade was still on, as well as regular radio dramas, and much of the music was still predominantly swing; big bands and crooners played in every household. So, a lot of the aspects of the pre-war years were still very much a part of my daily life. Milk was still delivered door-to-door, Helms Bakery trucks had regular routes through all the neighborhoods… and WWII was still talked about by most adults, since it had only just ended ten years earlier. So I think I came by a lot of it honestly. It was just a large part of my early consciousness. And, very early on, I started collecting records and, by the time I got into high school, I was haunting the used record stores looking for old 78s — jazz and old vocalists. Who knows why? But obviously it came from early exposure to the best of it.
JBC: Were you cognizant of Hollywood being near?
Dave: Not really. It seemed like another world from where I lived, and very exotic, like journeying to Mecca. I saw evidence of it around town, public appearances by local TV celebrities: Jeepers Creepers, Chucko the Clown, Engineer Bill, and Tom Hatton. But my first real brush with the reality of it was probably when my Scout troop got to visit The Munsters set on the old Universal lot, in 1964. That was pretty amazing! I never wanted to go home again.
JBC: So was it ’30 and ’40s pop culture material?
Dave: Yeah, everyday things I’d been surrounded with. I still have specific memories, from as early as ’58, when my younger brother was born. I remember my mom dragging me to a John F. Kennedy rally which would have been… what, 1960? I remember events like that, things that left an impression. They were only worm’s eye views, but I do remember them.
JBC: Was radio an influence when you were young?
Dave: Well, that was at the very tail end of the radio era. There were still a few shows on, like Johnny Dollar and X Minus 1, but not much. But, luckily, a lot of them had already made the transition to television — Amos ‘n’ Andy, Burns and Allen — a lot of them had made the switch, so I got to see the performers behind the voices. The Great Gildersleeve and people like him were on the box all the time. It was all character-driven skits, obviously, with loads of personality and shtick. It was great material and a lot of it still holds up today. It’s
milder, of course, but still extremely funny. It’s nice to pop a tape in once in awhile and remember how well-written those shows were. And much of it was really groundbreaking.
JBC: Did you enjoy the Superman TV show?
Dave: Oh, sure. We all watched it and Zorro, and tied towels around our necks and jumped off the roof! [laughs]
JBC: Did you follow the TV anthology shows? The Twilight Zone, Playhouse 90?
Dave: The Twilight Zone, sure, but I preferred The Outer Limits because it seemed more visual, more creature-filled. It appealed to kids, more than adults, I think.
JBC: Did films like King Kong have any effect on you?
Dave: Oh, tremendously! When I was five, my folks let me stay up and watch Kong because I just lived for dinosaurs. And it was just magical. I was transported. I believed every second of it! That big ape charmed me and terrified me. And the theme of the film, the tortured monster and the beautiful girl… hey, it still works for me!
So I got to experience that one very early, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, War of the Worlds, Day the Earth Stood Still, and a few other genre films that they thought I could handle. But the really scary bogey-men, like Frankenstein, Dracula, etc., that were a bit more horrific, visually, I wasn’t allowed to see for another couple of years.
JBC: Who was your local horror host?
Dave: Jeepers Creepers, at the time. Vampira had only on for a short time in ’55, so I missed her show, but Jeepers Creepers was her successor. And then, much later, in the early 1970s, there was Seymour. But the one I was always enthralled by was Zacherley, the Cool Ghoul. He was the East Coast’s horror icon. Unfortunately, we never got his show out here (but I could read about him in Famous Monsters of Filmland!). He looked like sort of an undead foreign dignitary, who probably liked to dig up bodies at night.
JBC: When did you first pick up Famous Monsters?
Dave: When I was about seven. My folks wouldn’t have let me buy it, but… there was always grandma! We’d go to her house and pretty much anything went. They spoil you rotten — anything you want, as long as it’s cheap! She was a short bus ride away and, in those days, parents would put their kids on a bus and just send them off! [laughs] I remember my mom walking us up to Gage Avenue one morning, my little brother and I (he was maybe three!) standing at the bus stop, waiting for it to pick us up and take us to our grandma’s. And she told me which stop to get off on, to sit near the front and what to tell the driver. Ahh, young parents!
JBC: How many brothers and sisters did you have?
Dave: One brother. Two sisters. My brother builds kit planes for a company in Idaho. He’s like their engineer, the man in charge of prototypes. My sisters are homemakers. My dad was really the only family member who was artistic. He was a doodler, a cartoonist, though he never did it professionally. I think he would have loved working as an animator. I didn’t really know the extent of his interest until a few years ago at my grandmother’s. She pulled out an old sketchbook of his from when he was about eight or nine years old, and it was just filled with cartoon characters. Every page of it!
JBC: Was he any good?
Dave: He was terrific and totally self-taught! He could do Popeye with his eyes closed and that’s a tough character to just pull from your head. He taught me to draw my first cartoon characters when I was about four (and I would draw them all over everything). I remember him sculpting Br’er Rabbit one day, at the breakfast table. He was an oil painter, as well. Very, very imaginative, talented guy.
JBC: Did you ever know him to approach a studio for work?
Dave: No, he only took one semester out of high school, at a local art college, and that was it. Then he joined the Air Force. Basically, my mom kept after him until he married her. Then I guess he figured that he had to get a real job and cartooning just didn’t seem possible to him. So, instead, he got involved in the early days of computers, back when one computer took up an entire room.
JBC: Was he successful?
Dave: Yeah. He became a systems analyst and he did that for a number of years.
JBC: Is he still alive?
Dave: Oh, yeah. He was just here a few weeks ago.
JBC: Are you close?
Dave: Very. He still has the soul of an artist. I just wish he’d do something with it. But he abruptly gave it up, 40 years ago! Just stopped drawing. I still find that incredibly sad. Occasionally, I could nudge him to draw something and it was always brilliant!
JBC: Does he follow what you do?
Dave: I keep him up to date. I guess he just figured
and that was good enough for him; vicariously, I suppose.
JBC: So he was always supportive of you?
Dave: Oh, yeah. But my parents really didn’t know what to do with me, vocationally! I remember religiously, watching John Nagy on TV. And doing the old Famous Artists tryout, you know? “Draw the Lumberjack.” I sent it in, filled out the evaluation test they sent me, then the school’s salesmen started calling our house! [laughs] They wanted to sell me the full course! I remember picking up the phone and this guy was just talking a blue streak about test results and could he speak to my father? So I handed my dad the phone and stood by, watching him trying to get a word in. He finally said, “Well, yes — but, you see, he’s only 11.” And that was the end of that conversation! [laughs] No sale! I wish, though, that my dad had subscribed to the courses. Boy, I could have gone nuts with those books.
JBC: You told me you’re currently going to art school fulltime; do you think you’re making up for that missed opportunity now?
Dave: Well, that is the hope. I never really got an art education after high school. Most people go on to an art college of some kind, but I just went straight into the job market.
JBC: How do you look back at that now?
Dave: I did what I did out of blind ignorance and I struggled for several years. I did what I could, but still feel that if I’d had an education and learned how to better use my tools… paint and mixed media, I’d have been much better equipped and ultimately more employable. I could’ve done a lot more than just storyboards or character designs. I could have done finished illustrations. So, in my early days in Hollywood, I just hired out mostly as a sketch artist.
JBC: Did you always look to your childhood for inspiration?
Dave: I suppose we all do, to some degree: mining our personal experiences and the other art forms we’ve enjoyed
over the years — films, books, music…
JBC: Did you collect comics when you were young?
Dave: Not originally. I had that stack of my dad’s and read those, until they fell apart.
JBC: Were they Carl Barks?
Dave: Some were and a mixture of other funny animal books.
JBC: Did you recognize Carl Barks at all then?
Dave: I could recognize “styles.” There were certain artists I liked because they were more expressive or more animated.
JBC: Did you like Floyd Gottfredson?
Dave: Yes, very much. I didn’t know him by name, but knew his style. I’d say he was my favorite of the Disney stable.
JBC: Did you get any exposure to Floyd’s ’30s Mickey Mouse newspaper strip work?
Dave: Only in reprints because, at the time, Disney still repackaged the stuff in odd formats, like kids’ primer comics.
JBC: Did you see that stuff as being better than his ’60s stuff?
Dave: Yeah, but only because the current material seemed tamer by comparison, you know? Mickey was pretty homogenized by then. The ’30s strips were a lot zanier and the characters were more distinctively animals
JBC: Do you remember seeing any glamour or cheesecake material at that time?
Dave: My first exposure would have been the old Esquire foldouts by Vargas and Petty. I don’t remember who I saw first, but I do recall that I liked Petty girls better, probably because they were more “cartooned” and more accessible to a young boy. Vargas’s work was much more realistic and softer, not quite so carved out or geometrically shaped. It wasn’t as lively to me.
JBC: How old were you?
Dave: Probably 10 or 11.
JBC: You didn’t see Playboy?
Dave: I did, but only at other people’s homes, my dad wasn’t a “Playboy Man”!
JBC: You read them in the woods! [laughter]
Dave: Yeah, or the cemetery! I’d occasionally find men’s mags in vacant lots, on my way to school, but they were always in tatters! We had a neighborhood deli where a friend of mine and I — we were about seven or eight — would sneak behind the counter when the cashier would go to the back and we’d quickly thumb through the nudist magazines. “Ooh! So that’s what that looks like!”
JBC: [Laughs] Did you gain any kind of fascination for that kind of material?
Dave: Not at all. I was just too young to care! It was furtive and naughty, but that was the only thrill to it — that we were doing something we shouldn’t have. I just wasn’t interested yet. Not until I hit high school and, even then, there wasn’t much available if you were underage. We couldn’t buy that stuff! So most of what I saw was, you know, movie magazines and occasional calendar girls, and that was it. You know, we’re talking about the ’60s here.
JBC: Did you draw girls?
Dave: I tried but I wasn’t any good at it, so I stuck with heroes and monsters for a long time. I remember I drew my first nude (at the request of a friend) when I was 13 and my dad walked by while I was doing it. He just said, “You know… you’re a little short in the pants to be drawing that kind of stuff yet.” [laughter] So I learned right away that, if I were going to draw women, I’d have to be discreet about it. My mom soon after, found my Vampirellas and some underground comix in my room. I guess it was pretty shocking for her; the undergrounds in particular! My dad very calmly said, “Look, you’ve got little brothers and sisters around and they cannot see this stuff. Don’t
Above: Page of Will Meugniot pencils and Dave’s inks for a story in the British series, Tarzan Weekly [#8, July 30 ’77] Inset right: Original art for the cover of Tarzan Weekly #4 [July 2 ’77], with Meugniot pencils and Dave inks. Below: Printed cover of that same issue.
JBC: Did you enjoy it when it went over into the fantastic?
Dave: Dinosaurs and giant bugs… what’s not to like?
JBC: Did Russ bring you over to Star Wars with him?
Dave: Nope, I really had no involvement on that one. Rick Hoberg was assisting him by that time.
JBC: Well, because I saw some inking…
Dave: That was later, when his health started to fail in 1980. He just wasn’t able to do the work, so Rick and I were asked to ghost about four weeks of dailies and two Sundays, midsummer, and it was pretty apparent, by that fall, that Russ was in a bad way.
JBC: So you were troubleshooting for him?
Dave: He requested us. And, of course, we both wanted to help out.
JBC: When did he pass away?
Dave: Nineteen eighty-one or ’82. Stomach cancer, I think. It was very sad, because he’d always been so robust and vital, and was a great guy.
JBC: Was he happy for your success?
Dave: Oh, sure. He kept in touch and knew I’d been working in film and animation. I’m sure he took a certain pride in knowing that he’d broken me of some bad habits, early on! He was a good teacher and a good man.
JBC: His work really gets getter as time goes on. It’s so solid.
Dave: Yeah, and he was really helpful in getting quite a few of us started. Mike Royer, Bill Stout, myself, Hoberg. He was good at spotting potential.
JBC: Was Mike Royer his first assistant?
Dave: I think so. He went to work for Russ in ’68, I think.
JBC: There was another older person in the early part of your career, Doug Wildey. When did you first meet him?
Dave: Probably 1976, at the first CAPS — Comic Artists Professional Society — meeting in L.A. John Pound and I had driven up from San Diego to attend, and it was a Who’s Who of comic artists on the West Coast. It was impressive. Alex Toth was there, Russell Myers, Sergio, a lot of animators. Everyone who was anyone was there. It was a big boy’s club. They would have talks on the state of comics and tips on this or that, and they had monthly meetings, and a newsletter. You paid dues and had a membership card. I think it still exists today. Anyway, I met Doug there, but I didn’t have much interaction with him. I remembered his signature from the old Jonny Quest show in 1963, because I watched every week. It was very realistically done for those days, like illustrations that moved. Lots of mood and beautifully designed. The characters were drawn as real kids, not cartoon kids. It was like a live action adventure show.
Very ambitious.
JBC: Except for that damn dog!
Dave: Yeah, well, Doug didn’t like the dog either. Doug had designed an ocelot instead, but Joe Barbera said, “No, no, it’s got to be a dog, a funny little dog, like this.” [laughs] Doug hated drawing Bandit. Anyway, I remembered him as the guy responsible for that show and I was so impressed that he was there for that meeting. I was a bit intimidated too, because he could be a very loud, crusty, salty guy.
JBC: Barking?
Dave: Well, yeah, but it was all bark/no bite, really. He was really a gentle guy once you got to know him, but he liked using that bluster. He liked to put you on with it, but he often would rub people the wrong way. He and Toth were always circling
each other. [chuckles] There was a grudging admiration, of course. Doug thought the world of Alex and I think Alex mostly just tolerated Doug’s mouthy persona.
JBC: Was Doug very opinionated?
Dave: Oh, yeah. He wasn’t afraid to mix it up with people. He was a fun guy to have in the room because you never knew what would come out of his mouth next! He was a character, but I didn’t get to know him, like I said, until I went to work for him. This was in the spring of 1978. He was putting together a crew for a new show at Hanna-Barbera and I thought, “Great! Another Jonny Quest!” I don’t remember my interview at all, but he hired me on the spot. I think I was the first of the younger guys that he hired. The rest of the team had been there for years. Guys like Mo Gollub, Jack Manning, Owen Fitzgerald, Dan Noonan. Guys who really knew their stuff and had worked with him on Quest. The rest of the studio referred to us as Wildey’s Commandos or the Dirty Dozen.
JBC: But the show wasn’t another Quest?
Dave: No, it was an awful Godzilla kiddie project! Doug did what little he could with it, but the networks were killing him with censorship and wanting to sweeten it up. Godzilla ended up looking like a big dog — not anything like a prehistoric monster.
JBC: What was your opinion of all that Action for Children’s Television stuff?
Dave: Oh, I hated it. We grew up with extremely violent, silly cartoons and nothing snapped in us. We didn’t turn into axe murderers.
JBC: Not yet!
Dave: [Laughs] Yeah… but what really got to me was the way they daily nitpicked him to death! Every little thing. You couldn’t even have a gun out of a holster on a security guard. It had to stay in the holster. He couldn’t draw his gun. No punches could connect, no violence, period. And no “bodily fluids,” not even tears!
JBC: No body fluids? Not even a tear?
Dave: Nothing. If somebody got cut, it was cut out, so you had to get really creative and Doug just hated the restrictions.
JBC: Is there anything you can look back at in the Godzilla series as a good experience?
Dave: I learned a lot about the process of animation and storyboarding, layout, and character design. Doug really just turned me loose. He would give me boards to take home at night to do. He’d give me character models to design. He let me design Godzilla because they rejected his and he just said, “Here, you try it.” We ended up with a very watered down version of what I gave them as a character, but none of us liked it.
JBC: Was Mike Sekowsky around?
Dave: He came in about a year later, in 1979. He and I really took the piss out of each other, daily. It was deadly.
JBC: He busted your balls?
Dave: Yeah, but only because he loved me! [laughs] Sekowsky was this great, hulking golem; grumbling, depressed, and always kvetching, but he’d do it in such a hysterical way that he’d have everybody in stitches. This guy had a razor-sharp tongue, and wit to match, but he was so quiet that you’d barely hear it. Some exec would come by and pontificate or pop off and Sekowsky, under his breath, would just lay the guy to waste, and no one would hear it but you. He would do daily cartoons of a lot of us and post them in the hallways. He loved zeroing in on me. And they were filthy! He’d go to great lengths to Xerox and post them everywhere, before I got in each morning. I’ve still got a big stack of them, inches thick. They were just the rudest things. Anything that I liked, he would seize on it and turn it
around into some sick, grotesque cartoon! [laughs] So every morning, I’d be running through the building, tearing these things off the walls before anybody got there. Mike would stand by, chuckling… I’d open the Xerox machine later in the day and he’d have them taped to the lid! He was relentless!
JBC: [Laughs] Why did he tease you so?
Dave: I think because I rose to the bait so well. He couldn’t tease anybody else the same way. I think it gave him great pleasure, having a daily target! I know it did.
JBC: And you were just this punk kid?
Dave: Yeah, it was because I was the youngest guy there. And then when Heath came in, he started doing the same thing! Only Russ was brutal. His stuff wasn’t even funny! It was just crude! [laughs] I still have some of those, too.
JBC: Were they penciled?
Dave: Mostly. Mike’d start drawing and never draw a false line until he was done. Same with Russ. They never erased. Word balloons, foul dialogue, and everything.
JBC: Did you like Mike?
Dave: Of course. We worked in the same cubicle together. They moved us around like pegs because they didn’t like the fact that we got so clannish and comfortable. They were always
Above: Original art of page in What If? #16 [Aug. ’79] featuring recognizable inks by Dave. The issue’s other inker over the Rick Hoberg pencils was William Wray.
This page: When he was Dave’s studio-mate in the ’80s, Richard Hescox fished this sketch (above) out of the trash. The rough depicts Unk and Aurora intended as page filler for the comic-book size formatting of the “Aurora” story in Alien Worlds #2 [May ’83] (spread below). That 15-page yarn was originally intended for an ultimately unpublished magazine-sized comics publication being developed in the ’70s by Sanrio (of Hello Kitty fame), conceived as a Japanese version of the recently launched Heavy Metal.
trying to break up Wildey’s team and other producers on other shows were always trying to steal us away.
JBC: That’s anti-creative, isn’t it?
Dave: Yeah, but that’s the politics of studios. Doug always had the best team. He knew to hire the best guys.
JBC: Who else was on the team?
Dave: Tony Sgroi, Mo Gollub, Dave Hanan, Don Morgan, Don Rico, Russ, Mike, Rick Hoberg. A bunch of guys you wouldn’t know, who had worked for Western and Dell. And then we had the voice actors: guys like Ted Cassidy were walking through the halls. I remember shaking hands with him and my hand just disappeared up to my arm in his. He provided Godzilla’s roar. We also had the guy who originally did the voice of Popeye, Jack Mercer, and he’d do it for you. And Tex Avery came in and did some work for awhile and I just loved him. Great, sweet
little guy, though not in the best of health by then. But, boy, what a wit. And he’d do Droopy. He’d just drop into it. “Hello, Dave.” [in Droopy voice] It would just tear you up! [laughs] That was what we came to work for — every day. It was a joy to be there, working with talents like those, in spite of the higher-ups and the junk we were working on.
JBC: Did it feel like an enormous waste of talent?
Dave: Incredibly so, because there were guys there from the old Terrytoons studios and the Fleischer studio. There were some Disney artists there as well. Some amazingly talented people and they were working on absolute crap.
JBC: Were you learning presentation in animation?
Dave: Yeah, and the mechanics of storyboarding, camera moves, cutting, and such. That was where Doug really sat me down and gave me some great, invaluable instruction.
JBC: Except for some of the fan drawings you had done in the ’70s, you were not really known at the time?
Dave: No, not at all. I was just an anonymous wrist.
JBC: Yet, Pacific Comics, when they got together, lined up some dynamite talent. Jack Kirby, the King of Comics, was there at the beginning.
Dave: That was primarily because they gave him total carté blanche, to do exactly what he wanted, with no interference. That was the deal.
JBC: Yeah, but you — a virtual unknown in the field — were there, too!
Dave: I came into Pacific after Jack had done his first [Captain
Victory] issue and Grell had done his first [Starslayer] issue . The only reason I was even approached was because Grell’s second issue was shy a few pages. [Publishers Bill and Steve Schanes] were concerned. They knew they had to fill these with something and they knew that I drew and…
JBC: Did you frequent their [Pacific Comics] store?
Dave: Yeah, I was a customer when I lived in San Diego, but I had moved out and hadn’t been living there in years. I don’t remember when we had the conversation, but I think it was at the San Diego Con, in 1981, and they said, “Do whatever you want, but we need two installments of six pages.” So I said that I’d see what I could come up with and went home and started fooling around with it. I don’t remember when it was due, maybe in about a few months or two.
JBC: Did anyone seek you out or what is just a casual conversation?
Dave: Just a casual conversation. I think they were trying to decide how best to fill that spot and I was around and Steve or Bill [Schanes] mentioned it to me. I really didn’t give it a whole lot of weight. “Ehh, filler material.”
JBC: Was this your first solo comics work?
Dave: No, I had done “Aurora” in about ’78 or ’77. That was the first thing I had done by myself. But that was for Sanrio Publishing. Nobody was supposed to see it [in the U.S.]. They had specifically asked us to do Heavy Metal styling. They wanted it to look like Moebius had done it, which was why it was so over rendered. Yeah, they just told me to bring them something and I don’t think we even talked about what I was going to do. I just came up with the drawing [of Rocketeer] which was the first back cover [Starslayer #2], standing there with the gangsters and stuff. I based it on that drawing.
JBC: Did you come up with the name from the old serial?
Dave: It wasn’t from the serial.
JBC: Oh, that was Rocket Man.
Dave: Yeah, that was Commando Cody. I just always a huge fan of serials. I loved all that stuff.
JBC: Specifically the Republic stuff?
Dave: No, all of it. Captain Marvel
JBC: Even the Columbia stuff?
Dave: Yeah, not all of it, but some of it. And I just liked the idea of a guy flying with just a contraption strapped to him. But I didn’t want to be stuck doing the serials again because that wasn’t the approach I wanted to take. I wanted to do like an aviation thing. So I just came up with the outfit and came up with the name. You know, a funny take on the rocket name, the Rocketeer. I thought it sounded good. The drawing seemed to work. I showed it to a couple of people and they liked it so I just went with that. I thumbnailed around a bit and came up with a kind of a story that didn’t have a whole lot to it, but it was only supposed to be filler material, so I just had fun with it and did the first installment. They liked it. Nobody made a big deal about it but, by the time the second installment came out, it was, like, a big deal. They’d gotten a flood of mail.
JBC: I remember the first time I picked up Starslayer #2 and going, “What is this?”
Dave: I think, in the first issue, they actually ran the full-page as a “coming next issue” ad. So, by the time the second installment came out, it had already gotten some buzz and people liked it. By the time the second issue [Starslayer #3] came out, they were getting lots of calls and there was the thought that maybe they had a cash cow here.
JBC: Did you do your own lettering?
Dave: Yeah, I did everything. I enjoyed doing everything. It was a challenge.
JBC: Did you read a lot of the Doc Savages and Shadows?
Dave: Ah, I read a lot of them. Not every single one, but a lot of them.
JBC: Did you enjoy them?
Dave: Oh, yeah.
JBC: Continuously? I mean, after I read [Doc Savage volume] four or five, I thought to myself, “Oh, these are all the same.”
Dave: Sure, sure. I enjoyed The Shadow more and I like Doc Savage for Monk and Ham and the character interaction. I thought that was funny. And I like some of the bizarre situations that they found themselves in. But I liked The Shadow more because it was more realistic, more crime story stuff.
JBC: The Shadow had more atmosphere.
Dave: Yeah. It was a crime story, plus it seemed better written. It seemed to have more to it.
JBC: Do you think that if they had attached more importance to this that you would have come up with something different?
Dave: I don’t know. I kind of doubt it. I probably would have come up with the same thing. Because I had already done the full cover for Bettie Page Comics the year before. You know? The “Jungle Girl” thing. I did it just as a portfolio piece for myself. Just for fun with no intention to ever do anything with it.
JBC: And this was what?
Dave: Bettie Page Comics? The cover? The… “Jungle Girl” thing.
Top: The 1977 San Diego Comic-Con souvenir book featured an “Aurora” promo piece. Right: Art detail, “Aurora.”
JBC: When did the idea of The Rocketeer as a motion picture begin to gel?
Dave: Well, believe it or not, when I first started drawing character sketches and, the first ad, I always saw it in my mind’s eye as a movie. I never really looked at it as words and pictures on paper. I saw it and I heard it, scene by scene, in my head. So, for me, it was always film. There was never really any jump there.
JBC: Is there any connection with… you know, Raiders was a really retro-type film, really recapturing that old Republic serial feeling and doing them in a high-budget kind of way. Was there any connection in your mind there that if Raiders is a retro project, why not The Rocketeer?
Dave: People have made that connection and, while it may sound a little contrived for me to say this now, but at the time, this was in ’81, when I started drawing the first installment, I had had the idea for it bubbling in my mind for years. I think the first drawings for a Rocketeer-type character that I had done were about 1979. Just for fun. I didn’t really have any incentive to do anything with it at that time because there were no publishers out West.
JBC: Did you in an earlier career, pitch Marvel or DC in an attempt to get work?
Dave: Oh, yeah. I had tried to get work through Roy Thomas or Mike Friedrich and, in fact, Neal Adams had met me in San Diego in the 1973 summer show and suggested that I would make a great inker and gave my name and tried to get me in. I remember that, at the time, Marvel was having a kind of a work stoppage and couldn’t give their own guys enough work, so there was just no way that they were going to send anything out West to some punk kid who didn’t know anything. In fact, I’d had a couple of conversations with Romita, who was Marvel art director at the time, and he was very nice, but he said essentially that they had to feed their own employees first. He was going to try and send me a Western cover to do or something insignificant but it never worked out.
JBC: So, besides the work you did with Russ Manning, you didn’t have any of your work appear in comic books in the States during the ’70s?
Dave: No, no. I worked with other people on other jobs to sort of help out in an emergency, like if someone was up against a deadline and needed a hand. I’d sit in and help ink something to get it done in time. I helped out on the first issue of Star Wars before the movie came out.
JBC: For Chaykin?
Dave: I think Chaykin did the layouts and I think the finishes were Hoberg and someone else. I inked odd pages here and there. Just real fast work.
JBC: Huh. Why were the pages out West?
Dave: I don’t really remember. I think…
JBC: Probably Roy?
Dave: Probably. I know that Chaykin was doing the first one and Steve Leialoha was doing inking over him. So the whole thing was being done out here and it might have been for expediency in getting approvals from Lucas. I don’t know.
JBC: Did you get to see an early cut of Star Wars?
Dave: Interestingly enough, I was on the set when they were filming the Death Star stuff at Industrial Light & Magic when they were just a little tiny warehouse in Van Nuys and that was, what, ’76? I had gone up there to audition for advertising art with Charlie Lippincott and showed Lucas my stuff and he enjoyed what I had, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. He was looking for Drew Struzan, whom he hadn’t found yet. He had a really specific thing in mind, but he hadn’t been able to lock into it yet. So they kind of gave me the 50¢ tour and I looked
around and that was where I met Joe Johnston. He was doing boards for the final inserts they were filming. I watched them do some shots and then they took me up to the loft and put on a reel and showed me a trailer. It was one of the first trailers and it was a long one, probably about 10 minutes, and it was just amazing. I remember my jaw being slack. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing and I was just, “You guys have got to let me work on this!” [laughs]
JBC: Did you see Jurassic Park III?
Dave: Not yet. But I was on set the night that they wrapped and Joe looked over at me and he just looked so beat and so exhausted and he just said to me, “I am never directing again.” [laughter]
JBC: That was a rough shoot!
Dave: The problem was that the studio sent him to Hawaii for two months to shoot with no script! The poor guy was locked in. There was nothing they could do!
JBC: I thought it was a good movie!
Dave: Joe’s a very resourceful
Above: Dave was enlisted to submit costume concepts for The Flash 1990–91 TV series. This design made the final cut. Below: Famously, Dave was the storyboard artist for blockbuster music video Thriller (That odd experience, confabbing with Michael Jackson in a bathroom, was shared by John Koukoutsakis in the Drawn to Perfection documentary.)
Conducted by JON B. COOKE
[Editor’s Note: This is the first interview I conducted with Dave Stevens, on assignment for The Jack Kirby Collector, though only a portion would appear in TJKC #20 [June ’98], so much of the talk here is previously unpublished. And, while it was ostensibly done to discuss the artist’s connection with the King, I shamelessly covered a lot of ground in anticipation of using much for my then brand-new mag, Comic Book Artist, which had debuted a few weeks prior to our phone chat on May 10, 1998. I reckon it was because we had gotten along seamlessly that Dave called me days later to ask my help in an art book he was making, but more on that in the next interview… — JBC ]
Jon B. Cooke: Dave, where are you from?
Dave Stevens: I was born in ’55, here in the L.A. basin, and the first Kirby stuff that I can remember seeing was probably the old Iron Man in the gold suit, and the first Marvel that I bought was the two-part story that Jack did of the Sub-Mariner/ Iron Man fight [Tales to Astonish #82, Aug. ’66]. That was the first one that I bought and was just knocked on my butt. It was dramatic stuff that I had never seen before. Because, before that, I read the stuff what most kids read: a smattering of Gold Key and Disney, Superman, that kind of stuff. But it was all pretty lightweight fare until I got a hold of the first Kirby comic I’d ever seen and I was immediately aware of style, a total difference in approach to the dramatics of storytelling.
JBC: Did you follow other specific artists beforehand?
Dave: Never. I didn’t pick up on looks or approaches by different people. I went through the titles and the characters as a kid and the first time I had seen Jack’s, that was really the first time I was aware of an artistic style.
JBC: Would you say that you were influenced at all by him?
Dave: Yeah, completely. I’d say Jack and Steve Ditko and probably John Buscema were my first real role models stylistically for just really good storytelling and imaginative, really superlative work.
JBC: What got you into comic books? Were you an active kid?
Dave: Yeah, I was your typical kid. I did have a bent toward fantasy cinema, that kind of stuff — monster movies, I liked — I was a huge cartoon nut because I grew up on the Fleischer cartoons, the Boops and the Popeyes, and I think any old cartoons I was glued to the TV for.
Dave: And I mean, everybody was home in time for Jonny Quest. I remember all my little friends had the same goal in mind on that night, not to miss the new episode. But Doug… I didn’t realize at that age, I had no idea that he’d done comicbook work, as well. I figured he was just an animation guy, when, in fact, he had never animated in his life. They brought him in to style a show in an illustrative book that copied comic books.
JBC: Were you also aware of Toth’s stuff?
Dave: Only because I had seen Space Angel.
JBC: Space Ghost?
Dave: No, I think it was called Space Angel. It was an early animated series. It was sort of in the Jonny Quest/Clutch Cargo mold.
JBC: I think that was the first thing Toth did in animation, right?
Dave: It could have been, yeah. And Doug brought him in to work on a few episodes of Quest
JBC: Right, you can see it there.
Dave: But other than that, I had no idea who Alex was. I do think I had a couple of his early Zorro comics, because I was a big Zorro nut when I was a kid.
JBC: So did you collect and save comic books?
Dave: I didn’t save ’em. We had sort of a community comics box that my dad had given us when we were probably about six or seven, and it was a lot of stuff that he’d had when he was a kid, so there was a lot of Golden Age in there, just a smattering of whatever we could pick up for a dime or 12¢ back then. So it was kind of a hodgepodge of a little bit of everything, and I’d say it was mostly pretty juvenile stuff.
JBC: When did you start drawing
Dave: On the walls of the womb? [laughter] The earliest that I remember was drawing on my building blocks and then putting them together and making a complete choo-choo train, drawing a different car on each block and mixing them up and that kind of stuff.
JBC: Did your parents encourage you?
Dave: Oh, yeah. My dad was a frustrated cartoonist himself. He wanted badly to work for Disney when he was younger and somewhere there are sketchbooks of his filled with Disney characters. And he really had a lot of range. He could do Illustrative magazine-style, like technical and product illustrations, and he could also do really whimsical Popeye style stuff.
JBC: What was his career?
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Portions of this interview appeared in heavily excised form in The Jack Kirby Collector #20 [June, ’98], and it appears here for the first time transcribed in full from the original audio cassette tape recorded by phone on May 10, 1998.
JBC: Were you into Tex Avery stuff?
Dave: Yeah, all that stuff, everything. At that point, I still think, at that age — we’re talking from probably age eight to, say, 11 — I was into that stuff. Obviously, Jonny Quest was the dramatic animated project at the time, so everybody watched that.
JBC: So you were aware of Wildey’s work?
Dave: Oh, yeah, from the get go. Jonny, I think, aired in ’64, at nighttime. It was like on Thursday or Friday night in prime time.
JBC: At 7:30, right.
Dave: He ended up going into computers because he got married and had a couple of kids, and he just… I think, postwar, there wasn’t a lot for him to try. His options were pretty limited because he didn’t have any formal schooling in art, and he only ended up affording one semester at Frank Wiggins, which is now L.A. Trade Tech. It was an art school at the time.
JBC: So he got into aerospace?
Dave: Not aerospace, although he was in the Air Force. He ended up just going into data processing for a local firm called Certified Grocers, and then he ended up working for Albertsons, years later.
JBC: How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Dave: Originally, it was just me and my little brother, and then two sisters when we were about 11 or 12.
JBC: Were you close with those sisters?
Dave: Yeah, uh-huh.
JBC: So when did you see drawing actually could be a vocation? I mean, where you could actually make a living from it?
Dave: Yeah, when I was probably about seven, I think, when…
JBC: Wow!
Dave: I consciously started honing my skills because I wanted to draw Goofy for Mr. Disney. [laughs] Oh, yeah. That was my goal!
JBC: Just Goofy!
Dave: I was really hip to Goofy. [laughter]
JBC: How did you follow that up? Did you take classes?
Dave: Well, all I knew at the time was to copy from the old Walter Foster how-to-draw big, oversized [publications] that you could get for a dollar. Dad had one of the Preston Blair ones, and there were a couple other cartooning books, as well as a couple of straight how-to-draw [books]. And then I also had my little John Nagy drawing kit from his TV show, and that was kind of interesting, but I also, my best tool for cartooning was I had this little box instructional set done by an artist named Jack Cole. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him…
JBC: The Plastic Man artist? Well, yeah!
Dave: It was done, I guess, in the late ’30s, somewhere around then and he drew the whole thing.
JBC: What was it?
Dave: It was a little how-to-draw kit, but it was cartooning only, and it was several little booklets in a little blue box with an illustrated cover, and it was just the most delightful trainer that I’ve ever seen for kids on how to cartoon, and it was in that really great squash and stretch style of the ’30s. That thing, I lugged around with me for probably 10 years.
JBC: Is it still in existence?
Dave: No, I lost it somewhere around the early teens.
JBC: Oh, that’s too bad. I never heard of that. That would be great to reprint.
Dave: Yeah. We moved around a lot and, every time we moved, I would lose more of my gear, so that was the one thing that I clutched for as long as possible [chuckles] because it’s such a great little tool. And I started making flip books for myself of characters running and doing stuff.
JBC: So animation was your goal?
Dave: Well, I don’t know about animation, but I wanted somehow to get involved in cinema as a kid, because movies, as far as I was concerned, was just the be all and end all of existence for me.
JBC: When you were reaching adolescence, were you hanging around with other collectors? Did you find people of like mind?
Dave: No. I tried, but I never did. We lived for about four or five years in Idaho from, I think, age 11 to about 14 and, I mean, it was so rural, it was all farms and not at all like it is today, and there was just nothing out there. The closest to a newsstand was a little Flying A gas station about three, four miles down the road that I would bike to and try to pick up consecutive issues of anything. It was just impossible. They would just get a smattering of titles every month or so. And you never knew what you were going to find.
JBC: After you discovered Kirby, did you become a bona fide Marvel fan?
Dave: Oh, absolutely, and I refused to read DC at all. Oh, yeah, really narrow! But I mean, Stan Lee, in those days, indoctrinated readers to be very faithful and, at a young age, DC just wasn’t giving me what I was getting at Marvel, which was this really kind of over the top, melodramatic people stuff. A lot of angst and you know how kids nearing their teens love angst.
JBC: Were you drawing all the time?
Dave: Yeah.
JBC: It’s obviously a solitary act. And when you went through adolescence, did you continue to draw or did you discover girls? Were you able to do both?
Dave: I was trying to do both, yeah. I tried to incorporate drawing into my whole seductive routine. “Can I draw you?” That kind of thing…
JBC: Oh, yeah, right. The artiste! [laughter]
Dave: And it worked, to a certain degree. I think I probably did as best as best I could socially, dragging drawings around with me or doodling on the spot or caricaturing people when I would go out, but I didn’t shove it in people’s faces and make them relate to me through that only. Because I was always involved with the drama department and had other stuff, too.
JBC: Were you actually trying to do comics, sequential stories?
Dave: Not right away. Mostly I was just trying to learn how to draw. I didn’t start doing comic proposal-type work until I was probably about 15 or
Above: Looks to be the 1984 San Diego Comic-Con where Dave posed with Jack and Roz Kirby. By that time, Dave had already received the Russ Manning Memorial Award for “Most Promising Newcomer,” the very first recipient of that honor and, by ’84, he had already become a guest of the convention. Below: The King reviews Dave’s portfolio, probably in 1974, who said his slick work was too good fo comics. The young man was crestfallen.
16, and that was purely because of the circle that I’d fallen into. By that time, we’d moved to Portland and I’d fallen in step with guys like Chris Warner, Randy Emberlin, and a bunch of guys that are now working at Dark Horse. We knew each other in high school and we had a little clique of maybe a dozen people. Some of us wrote, some of us drew, and we would get together at random times during the week.
JBC: Was it a formal club…?
Above: Starting in 1975, Jack selected Dave to be his inker of his San Diego Comic-Con work. Here’s the ’76 offering, notably promoting his new Marvel series that year, The Eternals, with the title’s star, Ikaris.
Dave: It wasn’t at first, but a local store owner up there, who owned an antique bookshop, sort of formed a little group, and I think it was called the Portland Alliance of Fans (or something like that). This was like 1970, and the rest of us sort of straggled in and we would come to meetings, but that really wasn’t our thing. We would just get together and do these all-night marathons of drawing in a room together, and we would spend weekends like that.
JBC: Were they straight adventure or were they pseudounderground stuff?
Dave: Everything. The whole gamut. I think really just trying to challenge each other to rise to whatever the subject was. It was always something different.
JBC: By 1970, what other influences did you have? Were you exposed to Frank Frazetta?
Dave: Yeah. I think the first Frazetta thing I ever saw was the first Conan cover he painted and that was a knockout. I believe it was the one of Conan straddling the gorilla with the red cape flowing. So I immediately started seeking out Frazetta imagery wherever I would find paperbacks.
JBC: Did you gravitate towards the Warren stuff?
Dave: Absolutely, yeah. The early Creepy, I got all those.
JBC: From the mid-’60s to the early ’70s, there was a wave of nostalgia when a lot of stuff got into reprint. Do you expose yourself, for instance, to Roy Crane and much older stuff?
Hal Foster…?
Dave: Unfortunately, I didn’t find any of Crane until I was out of high school, but I did clip Hal Fosters from probably age nine on.
JBC: Straight from the Sunday paper?
Dave: Yeah, because I was a total Prince Valiant nut. That was a biggie.
JBC: What’s the greatest strength of how Foster’s work?
Dave: Just the fact that it’s so rooted in what I perceive to be reality. A reality style… a reality basis style. Obviously, he was using models, he was draping people in costumes that were similar to help him, and there was just this… it was permeated with a feeling of “you are there.” It had the feel of, “This is a real scene,” even though it was totally fanciful.
JBC: Documentary.
Dave: Yeah. It was romanticized, as well. It wasn’t just black-&white high contrast.
JBC: I’m almost 40, and it’s taken me this long to really start recognizing the strength of Hal Foster stuff, because I was almost pushed it in with Alex Raymond, and that’s rather unfair until I really started sitting down and looking at it and going, no, this really is documentary. Because I’ve spoken to so many old timers who consistently… from Carmine Infantino… from a lot of these old timers that I’ve been talking to, and they always bring up Hal Foster, and I’ve been sitting down looking at him more and more, and I can see that documentary kind of thing, and it’s extraordinary.
Dave: And plus there was a lushness to it too that added to the charm and the mystique of the world that he was concocting.
JBC: When you were in Oregon, were you focusing on what to do for a living?
Dave: I think, at that point, I was leaning toward doing comics, but I was… because I didn’t really have a natural affinity for panel-to-panel sequential layout.
JBC: More of an illustrator?
Dave: I was still more of a single illustration guy. The sequential stuff kind of bogged me down. Although I love to tell stories, I found that I had a lot of problems laying it out on the page.
JBC: Was that a concern for you having a career?
Dave: Oh yeah, absolutely. I had places to go and people to see…
JBC: And from Oregon, where’d you move?
Dave: San Diego. Almost coming back to L.A., but not quite.
JBC: What year?
Dave: Let’s see… We moved back down to California, Spring of ’72. That was the first year I was able to get my blamed rear end to the San Diego show. That was a huge revelation. I mean, I had known, in Portland, that there were conventions in other cities and in other states, because of Rocket’s Blast Comicollector and several other fanzines that were out there that covered these conventions regularly. The Seuling shows in New York,
Above: Dave recreated Jack Kirby’s apparel illustration of Ol’ Greenskin. Inset right: Very early effort by Dave depicting a Kirby creation. This illo appeared in Bill Wilson’s fanzine, The Collector #23 [’71].
Below: For a celebratory 16-page booklet put together to commemorate Jack’s 75th birthday surpise party on August 8, 1987, Dave contributed this witty piece, featuring Brooklyn from The Boy Commandos.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. Really [chuckles] kind of a crummy show, but Doug gave it as much as he could. It was just sort of locked into that Filly [Filmation] house style and the networks really just beat him up over all the dos and don’t of Saturday morning. Back then, it was really, really rigid.
JBC: What was Doug like?
Dave: He’s a really salty, lovable cuss, kind of an [My Three ] Uncle Charley-type
JBC: Is Peevy him?
Dave: Oh, totally. Yeah. Right down to the dialogue.
JBC: Were you still visiting Jack at this time…?
Dave: Yeah, but not as frequently because I was putting in huge amounts of time at Hanna-Barbera and doing freelance on the outside and doing storyboards at night. So I was just cooking. I was burning it at both ends… When I would see Jack and Roz, either in tandem with running out to Wildey’s house, because they were really within close proximity of each other. And I don’t know if it was through me or through [Comic Art Professional Society] that Doug and Jack became friends and they actually started hanging out.
JBC: Oh, yeah?
Dave: So that Doug and his wife and Jack and Roz, we would occasionally find ourselves as sort of a group, and that was a lot of fun.
JBC: Cool. If I remember correctly, it was kind of a swap that Doug went to Hanna-Barbera and Jack went to Depatie Freleng, right? Oh, no, Ruby Spears…No, no… Depatie Freleng for the Fantastic Four cartoon. Wasn’t Doug originally working on the Fantastic Four cartoon?
Dave: No, he did Planet of the Apes over there.
JBC: I thought he was… I remember talking to John Dorman or somebody about… I thought that that was the situation in that… Depatie Freleng was going to be… Marvel was very involved with them.
Dave: I was at the Depatie in ’79, when they were trying out Spider-Man on the heels of Spider Woman, and I don’t know if the Fantastic Four had come out yet… Had it, in ’79?
JBC: It came out in ’78.
Dave: Okay, alright.
JBC: That was Jack’s first foray into animation… Well, after Popeye [in the ’30s], obviously…
Dave: Doug has never mentioned that. I don’t know that he ever had anything to do the Fantastic Four.
JBC: Whether one would know or whether either of them knew it or something… I dunno whether it’s true or not…
Dave: But I think, in Doug’s case, he hated super-hero stuff and he may have been approached with the Fantastic Four and probably turned it down flat. He really detested
that stuff. He just felt like he had no affinity for it and wasn’t interested, so why bother? He wanted more dramatic realism. He wanted stuff that he sort of was familiar with, either a monster piece or a frontiers piece, something that was a little more accessible to adults.
JBC: During this time, on his own, was he working at night on Rio?
Dave: Yeah, I think so. The first drawing of Rio that he showed me was back as far as probably ’75. He originally was trying to get it off the ground as a film and did a bunch of production art for it and had a nice presentation, but he just never made the right connection to get the thing realized, so he made the graphic novel.
JBC: I remember recently seeing some of Doug’s stuff. Did he do a lot of Hollywood stuff in the ’60s?
Dave: Yeah, he did a lot of production art, a lot of boards for presentation, for nighttime television stuff…
JBC: Did he do much comics? I do recall The Outlaw Kid…
Dave: Yeah, he did a good amount. I mean, there is a good output out there. He did a number of issues of Tarzan for Gold Key, I think, in the early ’60s.
JBC: He did? I remember the reprints in The Outlaw Kid, and me going, “Wow! Who is this guy?”
Dave: He did a lot of cowboy stuff and then he continued to do that stuff. Even at DC, he did some Jonah Hexs and some other things.
JBC: That’s right! Yeah, he did some Sgt. Rocks and a couple of things like that…
Dave: There was always sort of a double-output from him. When you thought that he was devoting all his time to one thing, you found that, well, at night he was actually doing this as well.
JBC: Holy moly.
Dave: Yeah, I don’t know how he did it. I’m still amazed by his output… I nudged him into sitting down and doing a chronological index, sort of a compilation of what he had done in his career, and he didn’t understand why I was even bothering. I just wanted to know for myself, for my own information, what the checklist would comprise. And it was huge.
JBC: Do you still have that?
Dave: I think I might’ve given it to Diana Schutz years ago, and I think she might’ve used it at Comico, when he was reviving Jonny Quest. Yeah, I think they did run some kind of a checklist somewhere that was based on that one.
JBC: That’s cool. That needs to be seeing print, that’s for sure.
Dave: But he even did his own Sunday page in the mid-’70s called Ambler for a number of years.
JBC: Oh really?
Dave: Yeah. It just wasn’t carried in very many papers and it was brilliant. It was kind of like a Route 66-type feel.
JBC: Wow. Did he color it himself?
Dave: Yep.
JBC: Wow!
Dave: Yeah. Pretty amazing.
JBC: Were you working side by side with him? Were you his assistant? Were you…?
Dave: No, he brought me in, I think, to do layouts at first, and then he immediately put me on storyboards and character models, and he kind of trained me to do storyboards for animation, because I had no clue, because they were so different from live action. And then he also was basically just trying to spread me to as many different departments as possible to… He felt like he had to sort of get a foothold with guys who could draw realistic figures. Whereas, at Hanna-Barbera, there was maybe two or three people in the whole place who could do that, and they were being tapped for other projects. So, over a period of several months, he put together a crew of guys like me and brought in Russ Heath and Mike Sekowsky eventually. And there was a good dozen of us, and they called us, “The Dirty Dozen,” because we were Wildey’s Commandos and we kind of had our own way of doing things, and Wildey was always ruffling feathers over there. He was the Lee Marvin type.
JBC: [Laughs] Were you the quiet one?
Dave: No, no. Actually I was the boisterous idiot. Everybody had…
JBC: That’s one tough crew! Russ Heath and Mike Sekowsky…!
Dave: And these guys were all kind of grizzled veterans, and it was really a hoot to be a part of that.
JBC: With hearts of gold…!
Dave: Yeah! And everybody there was there to have a good time, basically. They understood what Doug needed from ’em, and everybody really delivered for Doug because they could see that he had a standard that he insisted on meeting, and it had nothing to do with the quality control or lack thereof at Hanna-Barbera. It was just his own standards that he didn’t want to drop below because he had his name on it. And so we did our best to give him our “all” for as long as possible, as long as the show lasted.
JBC: Was working with Russ Heath, did you badger him with questions?
Dave: No, actually, Russ… [laughs] Russ was like a big 14-year-old, so it was more just camaraderie and kid stuff. We were like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, that kind of situation.
JBC: You admired his work?
Dave: Oh, absolutely! Yeah! But it was… With Russ, it wasn’t so much about talking about it. It was just being in the same room and trying to work while you were doubled over with laughter. [JBC laughs] Because Russ is a practical joker and, I mean, we would be dodging sheets of flaming toilet paper sailing over the tops of the cubicles…
JBC: [Laughs] So that’s why he was always late with his deadlines!
Dave: Well… but, again, he was working full-time in animation and doing comics on the side, like everybody else. He
was doing The Lone Ranger [strip] while he was working at one of the other animation studios… Marvel, I think. JBC: What was Mike Sekowsky like?
Dave: Great guy. I really loved him. He was this big guy. He was really tall and large, and you could see him coming, his head just crested the tops of all the cubicles. [laughs] Even when you’re sitting down, you could see him all the way down the hall coming up the hall. And he was very sort of a taciturn… I don’t know if that’s the word… He was kind of a quiet, very sarcastic, dry-humored guy. And he would just devastate you. He would lay you low with one line. He’d sit there and sit there and you’d think, “Oh, I’m getting away with this!” And, all of a sudden, he’d come up with a zinger that would just lay you out flat. Sekowsky really took the piss out of me, in particular, because I was sort of the golden boy there for a couple of years. And I was this sort of skinny kid with an Errol Flynn beard, and I was dancing around, chasing women, and it was just kind of a big joke to Sekowsky. And he took it upon himself to do daily caricatures of me and post them all over the studio. And the subject of the stuff got so raw sometimes. I mean, I’m surprised none of us were fired over those cartoons. And, as soon as I’d get there in the mornings, I would be running down the halls, pulling these things off the walls, trying to hide them before anybody else came in, but I gotta say, I’ve got a huge stack of ‘em. I kept them. He would caricature me and Russ and several of the other guys. It was really hilarious.
JBC: Oh, wow. I just did an issue devoted to DC Comics between ’67 and ’74, the first issue of Comic Book Artist, which I’m mailing you a copy.
Dave: Fantastic!
JBC: And I included some essays. I had them written and sent out some people to ask around about Sekowsky, because I knew very little about him, but I just adore his work. I just think he’s extraordinary. He was extraordinary designer.
Dave: And the bad thing about Sekowsky, the tragedy about him, is that nobody was ever able to ink him properly. They never gave him an inker that did anything but diminish his pencils. And it’s
Above: In the foreground is Jack with Cat Yronwode, Eclipse co-publisher, and Dave and Alan Moore in back. This was taken at the Kirby Awards presentation in 1985, where Dave was recognized as “Best Artist.”
Below: For Mike Thibodeaux’s Genesis West title, Last of the Viking Heroes #5 [June ’88], Dave inked over Jack’s pencils.
Conducted by JON B. COOKE
[Editor’s Note: The following conversation occurred less than three weeks after I interviewed Dave Stevens for The Jack Kirby Collector (which is presented in the previous pages), when he asked if I would help with an introduction for an art book he was producing, Vamps & Vixens: The Seductive Art of Dave Stevens [1998], to be published by Verotik. Jim Silke ended up writing “Casting Vamps & Vixens,” the intro used instead of my piece, which I had so cleverly titled, “The Bare Essentials,” though chunks of the following Q+A were incorporated by Jim.
[In my copy of Vamps & Vixens, Dave expressed to me his thanks and appreciation, though one senses an apologetic tone in his inscription, maybe because I had been enlisted to be sole writer. But, if that’s the case, I can’t recall any personal disappointment. Hell, I got to spend another hour-and-a-half with a candid, friendly pal, who happened also to be among my favorite artists, and that was more than enough!
[What did survive of my efforts is an audio tape of our convivial conversation, which took place on May 26, 1998. The subject was intended to be how he chose and directed his models and approach to creating pin-up art. A bit of that does come through but, frankly, it’s mostly me wanting to get to know Dave better. To this writer, he was one of the friendliest and most open people I knew, inside and outside comics. I miss him. I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation. — JBC.]
Jon B. Cooke: Well, you just were mentioning just a few minutes ago about whether the model strikes you in a certain way or a certain pose strikes you. Is it just… I mean…it’s whatever hits you, whatever the muse moves you or… ?
Dave Stevens: Well, if you’re talking about the very beginnings of a piece, it’ll either come from one of two things. It’ll either come from something I’ve seen — a bit of movement I’ve seen either on television or in a magazine or something, or someone that I see on the street, or it’ll come as a thought, in my mind’s eye, that I’ll jot down as just a quick sketch of a pose or a face, and I’ll try to pare it down into something that actually works as a composition. And then, from there, I’ll generally figure out what the character’s going
to be, whether it’s going to be an identifiable property or just something in a particular genre… What genre’s it going to be…? What kind of a character…?
JBC: Do you imagine situations of the characters…?
Dave: Yeah, yeah. I think generally everything that I’ve done has been sort of, a little bit, a moment in a scene, so there is something that the character’s relating to or playing off of in some way.
JBC: Right. Do you ever consider what happened before and what happened after? Or are you just seizing that moment?
Dave: Usually it’s just the moment. I zero in on whatever it is that struck me about this idea.
JBC: Well, for instance, Aurora…
Dave: Oh, well, that was totally a story that I wrote first.
JBC: Oh, you didn’t do the cover first?
Dave: No, no, no. The cover, in fact, was the very last thing that I did, and I did the cover probably eight years later, after the story was done.
JBC: Well, the Valkyrie then. For instance, were you basing that on a story or were you characterizing her in the best way you knew how?
Dave: Yeah. You talking about the Airboy cover?
JBC: Yeah.
Dave: That one was just something that I wanted very badly to do as a character. I thought it did make a really nice showcase piece because it was a very well-known character, and she had a really specific look and an outfit that I could really play up.
Above: Original art for the Airboy #5 cover. Note that the artist integrated the logo into the art itself.
Below: A newly colored version (hues by Glenn Whitmore) of the piece is appearing as the cover of Alter Ego #197 [Jan. ’26]
your work. There’s a passion about it because, I would think, that possibly it’s the humanity within it that you’re not… like you said, you’re picking a vignette. There’s a story behind it. And do you see something in your work that provokes an inordinate, maybe, reaction from people in a positive sense?
Dave: No! [laughs] I’m happy when somebody…
JBC: It’s wholesome…
Dave: Yeah. I feel like I succeeded if somebody reacts in a positive way. I don’t think I’ve, out and out, offended anybody, at any point. Overall, this stuff is fairly inoffensive. I mean, every now and then I’ll push it a little further than I probably ought to. That’s kind of what art is for. But, yeah, I mean, the devotion and the slavishness of some of the collectors of my work, I don’t really understand it myself unless I put myself in their shoes and think about when I used to be that devoted to artist’s work and then I understand it.
JBC: Who, for instance, would you say that you were slavishly devoted to?
Dave: It would be probably only two artists, Jim Steranko and Frank Frazetta, and those two guys, I literally, at one point, bought anything and everything that I could get my hands of their work because it was so special.
JBC: What was it that you derived, for instance, from Steranko’s work, overall? I mean, would you call them influences?
Dave: Oh, absolutely. I’m still tremendously influenced by Steranko’s stuff, even today, even though stylistically my stuff is a lot more literal than his. He just had a really graceful style to it that I was drawn to as a teen, and I caught a sophistication from his work that I didn’t from a lot of other practitioners in comics. Again, he was an experimenter, stylistically.
JBC: Was it the testosterone in the work that…
Dave: Oh, probably, yeah, probably some of that. But more than that, with his work, it was really just a feeling that I got, looking at the way that he handled the figure, the way he placed the ink with the brush, the way he rendered detail. There were just specific things that he did, specific choices he made in his art that I really was drawn to. And it spoke to me in ways that, to this day, I’m still not all that aware of exactly what it was, but it was tremendously appealing.
JBC: He brought a real consciousness to storytelling. He was able to… you could excise a panel of his work, and it’s very obvious that there’s tension before and tension after when you look at the picture that there’s something going on. And that’s not true for a lot of artists where things are standing still in a lot of ways.
Dave: Well, he was one of those guys that really thought about the process, thought about every shot and how it was composed and how it played in the next shot.
JBC: There’s no compromising in the storytelling.
Dave: No, apparently not.
JBC: And your work also, again, returning to that word vignette, you take a slice of time. Is that something that you took from Steranko, getting that moment of tension, getting that moment of whatever it was? That je nais se quois…?
Dave: I would hope, I don’t know. I’ve never considered that.
JBC: Do you feel sometimes maybe you’ve told a story with that one picture and that… I mean, you obviously said you don’t really want to do that much comic work anymore.
Dave: And, in fact, when I did that Valkyrie cover, that was basically my complete and total statement about that character. I felt like that was enough story. And the same with Vampirella, every time I do the character. Even though I don’t feel like I’ve ever nailed the look quite completely, I always feel like that’s as much as I ever want to do, regarding continuity — just a single image that says something specific about that character.
JBC: Right. It’s a silly fanboy kind of question, but of all the characters that you haven’t done, who would you most like to do?
Dave: Still? Phew, boy, I don’t know how to answer that…
JBC: Are you interested in archetypes? You interested in the subtlety that it doesn’t necessarily… it’s not the character per se, but it’s the moment in time. I mean, would it be Wonder Woman or…?
Dave: No. At one time, I was going to do a series of covers for Wonder Woman, but that was maybe 15 years ago and it never happened. I did have a specific look in mind that I was going to give the character, but since it never happened… I think, overall, the subtlety, for me, is where it’s always been. That’s the attraction for me. It’s little specific things about each figure that I am really sort of a slave to.
JBC: Subtleties. What exactly is the process of any given image that you’re striving to achieve? Is it always a different idiosyncratic process, or is it you pretty much are disciplined down to… I mean, you worked in studios a lot in your life. You worked under art directors, whatever… major accomplished artists. Do you carry a discipline with you to this day that you have to perform your task in a certain order?
JBC: What’s the process, I guess?
Dave: The majority of the images in this book are comic book covers. At least, that’s what they were originally done as.
JBC: The Eclipse covers.
Dave: Yeah. Some of them were painted, some of them were drawn and colored, and the drawn and colored ones were done in black-&-white, and then later colored on stats or blue line. And the painted ones were done generally with gouache or oil, or whatever the medium was. A completely different set of rules and different disciplines come into play.
JBC: Do you usually do your own press checks?
Dave: I try to, whenever. If I can possibly be there, I will.
JBC: Right, but sometimes you’re not. Have you been generally unsatisfied…?
Dave: Whenever I haven’t been able to be at a press check, I’ve always been disappointed.
JBC: Did you learn the process of knowing how to play up colors on a four-color press, for instance, and did you learn that from doing the posters or did you have a previous experience? How did you gain that experience?
Dave: I think just from doing it, just from having to be there with printing my own stuff, because I do my own small prints and posters.
JBC: Did you quiz other artists [about press checks] or other print men?
Dave: Yes, I would talk to the press guys.
JBC: Would you generally say, “I want more yellow in this area”?
Dave: Yeah, and I’ll also talk to the separator ahead of time, because, depending on what type of paper, what kind of stock you’re printing on, whether it’s coated or uncoated, the separation has to be key to that texture because… certain inks will lay on top of a glossy surface and a non-glossy surface is going to soak it up. Also, you got to watch the size of the dot screen because, if it’s too fine, it’ll get muddy… if it’s too coarse, it’ll look like pop art…
JBC: How would you suggest that anyone would to learn that? To learn the mechanics…?
Dave: To go to work at an offset place or at a printing press, printing company. That’s the quickest way to learn all that stuff.
JBC: And you learned about [paper] stocks from doing your own posters?
Dave: And also in talking with printers and looking at samples of previous product that they’ve done or that other people have done, seeing what looks better.
JBC: Have all your poster projects been successes?
Dave: Much, yeah. Overall, I’d say probably 90% of them have.
JBC: What did you walk away from the 10%? What kind of lessons did you come away?
Dave: Generally it was that I was trying to sell images that people who either weren’t at all familiar with or they weren’t my best efforts.
JBC: Can you give a for-instance?
Dave: I’m trying to think…
JBC: Images that people wouldn’t want?
Dave: It’s not that people didn’t want them, it’s just that I missed on the pricing of them. One of them was a Bettie Page image. That was her in a bikini, kind of a George Petty style, and I think, that was…
JBC: Was that used for that little catalog with her looking at you?
Dave: Oh, no, no, no, not that one. No, this was a painting. And
San Diego Comic-Con, Dave Stevens, & Graphitti Designs
My initial awareness of Dave Stevens can be directly attributed to the San Diego Comic-Con.
After almost 45 years, let the truth can be told: Graphitti Designs would likely not exist was it not for Dave Stevens and the San Diego Comic-Con!
Allow me to quickly digress. My brother John and I began buying and collecting comics in 1962. For a variety of reasons, we became disenchanted with comics in the late 1970s and decided to sell all of the books we had gathered over the years. We offered our comics to a handful of dealers and stores in the area. Reality check #1: we quickly realized that the offers they were giving us were incredibly weak. Our expectations were low. We were not looking for the big-bucks and likely would have taken anything in the vicinity of cumulative cover price. If I remember correctly, the offers we were given were somewhere in the $350 range… for everything.
Having only a marginal awareness of “comics fandom” and never having attended a comic book convention in our lives, we contacted and were able to purchase a dealer’s table at the 1980 San Diego Comic-Con. The rest is history. Something never-imagined happened there that would change everything.
Upon arriving at Comic-Con, we had only an eight-foot table, our boxes of comics… and were located on the floor, right next to Wally Wood. Reality check #2: yes, I was capable of being starstruck! Realizing that we’re not sophisticated sellers of comics, we were quickly identified once the show opened and became suspiciously popular with some of the dealers and attendees at the show. We were pleasantly surprised and though we sold only 10% or so of the books we brought… we walked away with over $3,000 in cash. Our collection had been cherry-picked, but we were more than happy knowing that we would have gladly sold our entire collection for far less than the amount we reaped.
Besides meeting Wally Wood (who was and is on top of my list), I also was fortunate to see and meet people like Jim Steranko, John Byrne, Frank Brunner, and many others whose work I was familiar with and admired. The entire convention experience was overwhelming (in a positive way), but now I needed to process the entire experience. I had never before been in a comic-centric environment quite like this. I enjoyed it… and wanted more. We walked away with a few bucks, the remains of our collection… and, for me, a life-altering experience.
Flashing-back a few years prior, back in 1978, I opened a small screen printing business. Our clients were basically schools, small businesses, and youth sport teams. Occasionally, I would step out of my traditional channels and hustle-up jobs where I was able to produced shirts for automobile-related (Volkswagen, primarily) events and businesses. I eventually got involved with and was able to produce shirts for the prestigious Monterey Vintage Car races. Established in 1974, the races are still held every August, in Monterey, California, and is part of the Monterey
Car Week, which includes the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Reality check #3: I was introduced to mixing business with personal interests… and I liked it!
Returning to 1980, and feeling confident that I had fully processed my initial Comic-Con experience, I eventually contacted the San Diego folks, in early 1981, about producing an event shirts for their 1981 convention. The use of vibrant, exciting comic book art on T-shirts seemed like a natural to me. I didn’t have a clue what I was walking into, but I was excited about the idea… I wanted to produce cool shirts that represented the creativity and attitude seen in comics. Con founder Shel Dorf, president Richard Butner, and the entire group at Comic-Con made me feel comfortable and encouraged my idea. I was in!
I had it all mapped-out in my mind and I was blinded by the prospect of where this was all going. I had lofty ambitions to produce an event shirt for San Diego Comic-Con that featured Batman or Superman by Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, or some other famous, top-tier artist. When the time came to discuss the design the San Diego folks wanted me to use for the shirts, they handed me a stat of this jungle girl and her monkey by Dave Stevens…? Not only was the character not my first choice, but who the hell was this artist and why was he ruining my fantasy? My short-lived career in the comic-biz did not look bright at that moment. After my initial disappointment and after looking objectively at the illustration provided, it was apparent that Dave’s talents were obviously top-notch. I proceeded to make plans to meet face-to-face the destroyer of my dreams.
I made arrangements to visit Dave at his studio. Not knowing what to expect, I walked in through the unassuming front door on La Brea Boulevard, in Los Angles, and noticed my Spidey-sense starting to tingle. I met Dave and his studiomates Bill Stout and Richard Hescox. Dave and Richard had areas towards the front
Above: For the 1979 “newspaper tabloid” edition of the San Diego Comic-Con souvenir offering, Dave produced this outstanding “Sunday” strip featuring himself, Richard Butner, and Unk/Wee Willie mascot enjoying the physical charms of future wife Charlene Brinkman.
door and Bill had a full-size room in the back. Cool stuff was everywhere! Having absorbed The Studio book [Dragon’s Dream, ’78] that focused on the art of Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Jeffrey Jones (which also contained a handful of pictures of the studio environment they created), I instantly realized that Dave, Bil, and Richard’s studio had the same feel. Sign me up! I was definitely on board for whatever was going to happen next.
Though Dave was slightly younger than me, we chatted comfortably and connected. I quickly realized that Dave was the whole picture. He wrote, he drew, he created logos, he composed at a level I had never seen or experienced first-hand before. He had an eye. He was the real deal.
Below: In its early years, work by Dave Stevens featuring The Rocketeer and Bettie Page were a huge aspect of the Graphitti Designs catalog. Here’s proof in the form of an ’80s era merchandise sell sheet.
Upon gathering my wits, we began (among other topics) talking about how to tweak Dave’s composition for use on a shirt and how to color the piece for the best presentation. Though my graphics vocabulary was limited, I was engaged as I listened and learned. During the months that followed, we met numerous times to work out all of the details. I also used this time to do my due diligence and to discover exactly who this Dave Stevens character was and where the hell he came from. I was suspicious. He was waaay too young to be producing this level of work. Digging around, I became aware of the prior work Dave did for San Diego Comic-Con, along with his exploits with Russ Manning and Hanna-Barbera.
Dave was San Diego-based as a teenager and was part of the city’s comics scene. Besides being a regular contributor to the SDCC Program Book, Dave often did artwork for the name badges worn by guests and attendees. He was part of the Comic-Con group that, under Shel Dorf and Richard Butner, included Jackie Estrada, Fae Desmond, Dave Scroggy, and others, who shortly became friends and associates.
Comic-Con was a focal point that attracted a group of young artists. John Pound, Scott Shaw!, Jim Valentino, Rick Geary,
as well as people like the Schanes brothers, Bill and Steve, were all part of this informal, like-minded community that surrounded the San Diego Comic-Con. This was a community of passionate comic book fans that was very influential to Dave’s creative journey.
Uncovering Dave’s fan art and early professional work was interesting. Dave’s youthful obsessions with Captain America, Chuck Norris, Johnny Weissmuller, Phantom of the Paradise, Doc Savage, comics, and pop culture in general, were part of the foundation that inspired him. Being involved with Comic-Con gave Dave the opportunity to meet with the artists. What an incredible opportunity it was to connect with people like Jack Kirby, be able to access his pencil art which he then inked for his own edification… and sometimes even for fan publications. Over the years, Dave’s line art, his compositions, his attention to detail, and his ability to capture the female form developed and became second to none.
Of all of the Dave’s work that I discovered from this time, a five-panel strip Dave did for the 1979 SDCC Program Book (which was produced in tabloid format), titled, “Masquerade,” is one of my all-time favorites. Dave tells the story of him attending one of the early Comic-Con cosplay events with his buddy Richard Butner. At the event, Dave first laid his eyes on Charlene… who was a masquerade participant… and his future wife. This is classic Dave in so many ways.
Dave was a regular attendee and exhibitor at SDCC. His would bring his Bulldog Studios signage and display and set up next to Bill Stout. Besides meeting and greeting his fans, the people associated with Comic-Con would always drop by and say hi to Dave. He was the local boy who made it big. He represented what Comic-Con was all about. Comic-Con was proud of Dave.
Dave was an incredible artist, a business associate, and a friend. We also both enjoyed and appreciated our relationship with the San Diego Comic-Con. It was a moment is time where creativity, innocence and youthful ambitions were the norm and were part of the foundation of the comic industry in the ’70s and ’80s. Like-minded people working together doing something they enjoyed all sounds kinda silly, looking back. Through a somewhat brief Camelot moment, we all had the opportunity and were fortunate to be part of this incredible time. The like-minded attitude, camaraderie… and fun provided by the Comic-Con environment was unique. Comic-Con is special – it’s family, friends and fans.
[BOB CHAPMAN is founder of Graphitti Designs, one of the first companies of its kind focused on producing comic-centric merchandise. From its humble beginning as a producer of cool, comic-related shirts, Graphitti Designs evolved into producing everything from limited edition hardcover books, to action figures and statues, to large-format gallery editions… and everything else in-between. Bob and his wife, Gina, live in San Clemente, California, where they are completely pet-less.]
Nineteen eighty-two was a great time to be a comics fan. So many exciting things came out that were new and, to a comics nerd like me, thrilling. Warrior magazine hit the stands, introducing me to Alan Moore and Garry Leach’s “Marvelman,” as well as Moore and David Lloyd’s “V for Vendetta.” Matt Wagner’s Grendel. The Hernandez Brothers, Jaime, Gilbert and Mario, debuted Love and Rockets. Frank Miller was killing it on Daredevil
What more could a comics fan want?
That same year saw the release of a new series from Pacific Comics called Starslayer. And, buried in that first issue, all the way at the end, was a single advertisement for a new back-up feature that would start in the second issue. It was called “The Rocketeer” and was by some guy I had never heard of named Dave Stevens. But that solitary image had me hooked. It was like I had discovered the second coming of Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson. I was stunned. And I did something I had never done before or since; I bought that comic purely on the strength of a single page advert. That’s how powerful an impression it made on me.
I wasn’t alone.
Over the next few years, like so many others, I eagerly awaited the infrequent releases of each new chapter. Occasionally we would be treated with a lovely cover by Dave, each one showing his growth as an artist. Every cover was beautiful, but made us miss “The Rocketeer” even more. In those days, I was an art dealer, and I got to know Dave a bit. In the ‘80s, I lived on the upper West Side of Manhattan, close to Mike Kaluta. One night, very late, I stopped in with my girlfriend at the local Chinese restaurant on 97th and Broadway. Mike was sitting there with Dave and they invited us to join them. Leslie knew Mike from the neighborhood and said hi. I introduced her, saying, “This is Dave.” To which she kiddingly said, “Oh, Stevens?” Dave looked at her and said, “Yes.” She wasn’t a comics fan, but she read and loved my Rocketeer album and loved Dave’s stuff in general. She was visibly taken aback and loudly exclaimed, “Get the F–– out of here!” Mike laughed and Dave looked uncomfortable.
Years later, after my art dealing career was over, I moved to California and became an editor at WildStorm Productions, Jim Lee’s company. At one point — I think in the early 1990s — I ran into Dave at Comic-Con and he told me that a Superman/ Rocketeer cross-over he really wanted to do had stalled. A few years before, Jim had sold WildStorm to DC Comics and I was the executive editor. I tried unsuccessfully to intervene on Dave’s behalf. Even though I failed, Dave appreciated that I made the effort. God, what might have been.
In 2008, I left DC and moved over to IDW. Just before I started at IDW, my friends Kelvin Mao and David Mandel, who were close friends with Dave and helping him put his affairs in order, reached out to me to see if I would be interested in putting together a complete Rocketeer collection, with all the art rescanned from the originals, and brand-new coloring. A definitive collection. It was like a Ferris Bueller moment, where I turn to the camera with a look that says, “Are you kidding me?” Dave had his heart set on Laura Martin to recolor, after she colored several illustrations for him as tryouts, which got her the gig. Laura is one of the finest colorists in the industry and someone I worked with frequently for years. Dave, at that point, was very sick, having suffered for years from hairy cell leukemia. Sadly, he never saw the final, published book. It turned out great, won several awards, and is still one of the highpoints of my editing career.
A short time later, I had an idea for something called an Artist’s Edition, a book of comic pages all scanned in color from the original art, and printed same size as drawn. I had no idea if it would be successful or not; it would be big and expensive, and nothing quite like it had had ever been done before. But I knew the perfect candidate for such a book. In 2010, IDW Publishing released the first one of these oversized behemoths, Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer Artist’s Edition. That initial book was successful beyond all our expectations. And, while I feel the concept of Artist’s Editions was (and is) a good one, all credit lies justly at the feet of Dave Stevens. Yes, the printed comics are glorious, but seeing his art in the Artist’s Edition format showed Dave’s artistry in a whole new light. Next level stuff.
Oddly, because of his innate perfectionism, I’m not sure he would have actually liked to see his art in this format, “warts and all.” But he would have been wrong, I think. Dave’s art was the stuff of dreams. That may sound corny, but I believe it, and I did from the first moment I saw it as a kid of 19.
[As he reveals above, SCOTT DUNBIER had careers as art dealer, comics editor, and special projects head, and today his time is devoted to the appropriately titled Act 4 Publishing, which he launched with his wife, Amanda. Act 4’s releases include Artist and Connoisseur editions for top artists (including Wallace Wood and Darwyn Cooke), and the soonto-be reprinted Dave Stevens’ Covers and Stories.]
Inset left: The first edition of Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer Artist’s Edition [2010], was one of many “special projects” helmed by Scott Dunbier during his tenure at IDW. This gargantuan book measures 12” by 17” and contains the original art of Dave’s “Rocketeer” pages reproduced at actual size. Below: Cropped from photo that included Trina Robbins, Sergio Aragonés, and William Stout (among others) is Dave and Mark Evanier. Bottom: Outstanding Crossfire #12 [June ’85] cover original art by Dave.
N.Y.C.’s Michael W. Kaluta shares about the good times with his fellow artist and L.A. pal
Conducted by JON B. COOKE
[Interviewer’s Note: An early artifact of the “forever friendship”
Michael W. Kaluta established with Dave Stevens was MWK’s fan letter of Sept. 28, 1982, which was treasured by Dave and reproduced almost to a full page in Brush with Passion. Compelled to write after seeing the first Rocketeer installment in Starslayer #2, MWK exclaimed, “Damn! Don’t stop, whatever happens.
Above: Already a fan favorite with his delightfully retro artistry, Michael Wm. Kaluta truly came into his own
Your Rocketeer stories are, for me, the most fulfilling experience in years, and the only comic-book experience I can remember being so heart-warmed over since I was just a reader without any aspirations toward the craft.” Of course, by then, MWK was already a top artist in the field, particularly since his comics version of pulp and radio icon The Shadow had roared, .45s blasting, into the scene back in ’73. The two artists had, in fact, met a few years before the Rocketeer’s debut, at San Diego Comic-Con, but that missive ushered in a close, enduring friendship that lasted until Dave’s passing. “When I got that letter,” Dave would write, “it was like he was saying, ‘Welcome to the club!’” — JBC ]
Jon B. Cooke: Michael, you and Dave seem to have been two birds of a feather.
Michael W. Kaluta: [Chuckles] Yeah, well, to a point. At first, maybe at first glance, but he was much more structured, I would say. I would just kind of slum along, like the way I draw scribble-scribble-scribble when something funny comes out, and he would be very, very precise. Very precise.
JBC: I guess the story is that you picked up a copy of Starslayer #2, and you looked in the back pages and you immediately (or pretty soon thereafter) wrote him a letter.
Michael: Yes, I did. So I said I wanted stacks of that stuff, and he, of course, was all… he was full of denigrating himself. “Oh no, that stuff and this is just, blah, blah, blah. I just put pictures
but, like you said, he was meticulous, right?
Michael: Yes, and he was way too judgmental. He would stop on things that really should have just been finished… “Just put your pencil on the thing and draw it!” He was aware of that but, at the same time, it had to feel right to him.
JBC: You’re known for The Shadow, maybe singularly known in certain ways for that character… Certainly in the pulp world… Michael: Oh yes, definitely. Nobody knew me for Superman. Oh, there were my Batman covers… people paid attention to that, but it wasn’t… there would be no awards. I didn’t do enough work on any of those things.
JBC: But still you found your own niche, and so what did you think of the Rocketeer as a character? As someone from a lost era?
Michael: Oh, it was so well thought out and so well resolved. The character’s personality was so formed that I didn’t have to read a whole lot of things to find out who it was. It was just immediately accessible, my kind of stuff. So the reason I wanted stacks of it is there wasn’t enough yet.
JBC: There never was, was there?
Michael: No. But then there were a number of stories. He had a couple that he’d written or worked on ideas that never developed into the drawings. My friend Joel Goss and myself wrote up a continuation of that took place right after Cliff’s New York Adventure. We were trying to use all the tropes that were available and made popular — robot planes and cowgirls. It was going to be fun, but it never went anywhere.
JBC: What was the general plot?
Michael: Cliff might have the rocket pack and somehow end up burning out of fuel or whatever. (I’m sure it was more involved than this.) But he wakes up in this big comfy bed in the farmhouse. He had crashed or runs, maybe, into a windmill or some damn thing, something like that, and the girl of the house took care of him, and she was like a little Annie Oakley, blue jeans and a cowboy hat, a little scarf under her neck, and adorable. Of course, her father was making some kind of a machine to remotely pilot planes, doing it for the government eventually, and he’d fallen afoul of somebody wanting this stuff, or he got in trouble because the thing crashed, but it wasn’t his fault, and there was a mystery involved. So Cliff and Peevy tried to figure out what it was all about. I have it somewhere, though I wouldn’t know where, and it’s a proto-script — it wasn’t completely done — but the idea was there’s going to be another girl in his life that would take the place of the one that ran off to Europe with the photographer (or whatever). Something to keep him busy for a while, until he came back to his senses about Betty.
JBC: Did you pitch it to Dave?
Michael: No, no, no, he asked for us to do it. He had a number of people working on things just to try to get… what he said he needed was something that was already started, so he could just come into it. For example, I guess, somewhere in the New York Adventure, he wanted me to pencil some pages. I said, “Dave, I can’t pencil this stuff! What are you talking about? I haven’t got your sensibility. I like this stuff, but it would look really different.”
But he was talking me into it. So I tried it and it wouldn’t work. I did a bunch of scribbled pages and I said, “Look, this isn’t happening,” and I sent him the pages. He said, “This is great! This is fine. This is all I need.” I went, “Well, okay.” So I did however many other pages that were needed and just didn’t try to draw like him. If I did, it just didn’t work. What was a miraculous thing to watch was, later on, I came to L.A., on the way coming back from San Diego, and he was working on the New York Adventure, and I was able to watch him take a rough page of mine and turn into a Dave Stevens page. It was astounding! I still couldn’t tell how he was doing it because it was just pure talent. He just knew what he was going to do and that was wonderful.
JBC: Kind of like what Wally Wood would do, take a breakdown by somebody else, like Ric Estrada, and make it all-Woody?
Michael: Yes, exactly. One wanted it to look like Dave, so it didn’t matter who drew it. A number of other people worked on it. I think Sandy Plunkett did a couple of pages, and several other guys… Oh, and Adam Hughes, the other girl guy. He was working at his Gaijin Studios at the time. He didn’t do much. Dave was saying, “Look, take your time to do it all.” And, just like my pages, it would become Dave’s thing, so it was tough to get over that hump of trying to “out-Dave” Dave, which is impossible.
JBC: So when you would go to San Diego Comic-Con, you would hang with Dave?
Michael: Oh, yeah! I’d come in early, spend a couple of days, going to the bookstores and toy stores, and DVD stores, and all that kind of stuff, and eating food, great restaurants, and then we drove down together and, at the convention, if I saw him, it was in passing, making eye contact because, at the convention, everyone was so damn busy. I was at my table all the time except to go to the bathroom, but then, come the last day, I’d find him and I’d help break down his stuff. We put it in his car. We’d drive back to L.A.. So we never spent much time at the convention together.
JBC:
Edited by JON B. COOKE
Behind a previously unpublished cover, CBC #40 celebrates the life and art of the great DAVE STEVENS in a special DOUBLE-SIZED BOOK completely devoted to the late artist! For this deluxe issue, friends, fans, and family share testimonials, photos, and fascinating artifacts, plus a gallery of amazing artwork by the Rocketeer creator, some never before seen. There’s also three interviews with Dave conducted by CBC editor JON B. COOKE, two Q+A’s with Dave by guest associate editor STEVEN C. RINGGENBERG, and JEFF GELB’s conversation with the artist recorded during the making of The Rocketeer motion picture. Dave’s sister JENNIFER BAWCUM shares about her brother in an exclusive chat, and we also interview some of Dave’s closest friends, including MICHAEL W. KALUTA, about their memories of the man. Plus: a conversation with KELVIN MAO, the director of the 2022 film documentary, DAVE STEVENS: DRAWN TO PERFECTION, about making the movie and its success on streaming services, which has resulted in an entirely new generation of Dave Stevens fans!
Michael: Yes. He had a room full of magazines and full of books and this really old, giant air conditioner that didn’t really work though it was hotter than fuck. This is in the Valley and it was just hotter than hell. I said, “Dave, you know, you’re wealthy enough. You knew you’ve got to stay here as long as you’re going to, and you want to work, just sell some work and take that money and put in central air conditioning, for Christ’s sake! It’s dead easy. They love doing it, and it’s a small place. Don’t worry about it.” But he never got around to it. [laughter] I don’t even know if I ever stayed as long as two weeks but, after the convention, we’d drive around, hang out with friends, and go here, go there all during the day, and then get back to the house at about 10 or nearly 11 o’clock when things had cooled off and start to work.
(160-page FULL-COLOR SOFTCOVER) $24.95 • (Digital Edition) $9.99 ISBN: 978-1-60549-131-8
https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_132&products_id=1848
JBC: So you would work there in the house?
Michael: Yeah, I just had a lap board in the room that I was in. Dave had his old studio right within a stone’s throw.
JBC: Did you see yourself as a person out of time or were you very much a modern guy?
Michael: Well, not a modern guy. Living in New York, I didn’t see the new buildings. I just walked through and, to me, it would be New York of the 1930s and ’40s, and, of course, I did a lot of studying up on that stuff, too, so I could fill in the blanks. But, as I walked through the city, the streetlights would light up the street and I wouldn’t be thinking that it was 1995 or 2025; I’d be thinking that it was sometime in the ’40s, just because I felt that way and thought that way. But I didn’t feel like I was adrift, a stranger and strange land in the modern world. Such as I really enjoyed the computer and the internet when they arrived.
JBC: Did you see Dave as a guy who was out of his time?
Michael: He pretty much had done what I did with New York,
but on steroids, because he’d take me all these places that had been there, and still were, if you looked at them through his eyes. For an example, going to Fry’s [Electronics store], or going here, going there, blah, blah, blah, some other place, or “We can get really good something-something here in Burbank,” or whatever, and we drive all over the place. But, at some point, we were just driving around one of the main drags going into town from Hollywood, and he turns off and says, “Bear with me for a minute.” It was a kind of warehouse-y area and this is the middle of the day and it’s very sunny, sun-drenched, and these are like block buildings … and we were kind of in the middle of all these warehouse buildings, and he stopped the car and he pointed, and I’m looking around, and he says, “Lean out of the car and look up.” I’m looking up and going, “What am I looking at?” And I realize it’s the tower that they used in Casablanca! It’s still there! It was so incredible. My God, look at that and imagine the airplane flying by and the music and everything else like that, because it was really there! That was great.
JBC: So, do you think ,growing up, Dave had the benefit of being in L.A., which always influenced him?
Michael: Oh, yeah! I could tell that he knew of what he spoke. [laughs] It wasn’t like he read it in a book. He’d been there doing things and going around these places when it was still viable fun.
JBC: And you definitely were
Below: It was many years into their friendship, when Dave finally revealed to Michael that MWK’s Time Warp #5 [July ’80] cover detail inspired Dave’s Rocketeer rocket pack design! Look closely…!
