Dave Cockrum


 


Dave Cockrum is why comics will never die.

When I was a fierce collector and budding letterhack, Dave Cockrum illustrations were in every fanzine in print. The Comics Journal, CPL, the Buyer's Guide--everywhere. Every character the big guys put out, every fan creation, and all sorts of cool characters that had to be his. All attractive and polisged, so much so it was almost tedious.

And then, to the distress of the Marvelite circuits in my brain, he broke into the pros, and turned the Legion of Superheroes from the stiff joke it had been into a must-buy. Suddenly everything looked great: the future turned from a featureless nothing (In the future, it will be as exciting as Iowa, except everybody will wear little epaulets on their shoulders and headbands!) into a dramatic, hypertechnological place, and even characters with cringeworthy names like Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl suddenly looked like characters to fire the imagination.

If you want to know what kind of a mad genius Dave Cockrum was, this was a man who designed new costumes for every single one of the twenty-odd members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, utterly transforming all of them. Not a mediocre design in the bunch. And then, after he had moved from DC to Marvel and the (at-the-time cancelled) X-Men, he did it again. Every single friggin' member, repurposed as the Shi'ar imperial guard.

Dave knew exactly how all this stuff was supposed to look. From the irresistible gloss he put on others' pencils by inking them, to the bright dramatic heroic characters, to the leaping crowded bursting-at-the seams storytelling of his continuity work, all the love of this magnificent greater reality was sucked in voraciously by this man, compressed and set afire by talent, and spread out over the night sky for the delight of the rest of us.

He was funny as hell, too. His assistant art director's office (in the old 625 Madison Avenue offices) had its internal windows completely papered over by cartoons.

In a better world, Dave, once he was in the place where the universe had intended he should be, should have just continued to do whatever he wanted, because whatever he wanted was just so right. But that's not the way the Comics Industry works.

Go ahead. Ask anybody. Ask me.

I knew Dave pretty well for a while. I had become, as a fan, close friends with Paty Greer, who would later marry him. I fell into a circle of comics people that included Chris and Bonnie Claremont, John David Warner, and others, and was privy to a lot of those second-Legion character designs while Chris and Dave were struggling to get the X-Men monthly. If I hadn't been so desperate to build my own nascent career, they would have been the happiest times of my life.

Later, when I was trying to start New Media comics, one of my projects was to help Marv Wolfman pry loose this delightful strip that he and Dave had done--a Marvel version of the Blackhawks, called Sky-Wolf. It was languishing in a Marvel inventory drawer with no prospect of it ever being published, and both Marv and I were naïve enough to think that we could buy it back from Marvel. It didn't happen, and it appeared much, much later in issues of Marvel Fanfare .

And much. much later than that, when I was (as it turned out) on my way out the comics door and Dave hadn't done much in a while, we united in a little Starfox strip that found its way into the Marvel Comics Presents weekly. I had done the plot as an inventory piece, and was flabbergasted when I found out that Dave was going to draw it. As it turned out, it was perfect: just the right combination of slightly over-the-top fantasy and affectionate silliness. Although I was in Chicago at the time, it got back to me that doing the strip 'made him feel good about doing comics again.' I couldn't have been more pleased.

The core of Dave Cockrum's magical present to the rest of us was that he was so completely in tune with that secret American myth, that grand cavalry charge across infinity, led by John Carter, Warlord of Mars, Kimball Kinnison L2, the Justice Society of America and Captain Midnight's Secret Squadron--and joined by all the rest of us who wore our Power Rings proudly and shouted Avengers Assemble in our unembarrassed heart of hearts--Dave drew it. He drew it with a trembling soul but a sure hand. And if his later years were filled with disappointment and illness, it's a sucky world. Somebody like Dave should have worked in joy forever, his pen dipped in the CMYK blood of exploding galaxies.

That's not what we get, though. At least we get a turn at the inkwell.

Rest in peace, my friend.

Posted: Thursday - November 30, 2006 at 12:39 PM        

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