By Richard Corben and various (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 978-0-87416-031-6
Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest living proponents of comic strip storytelling: springing, as so many have, from the tumultuous wave of independent counterculture commix of the 1960s and 1970s to become a major force in sequential narrative with an unmistakable style and vision. He is equally renowned for his mastery of the airbrush, captivatingly excessive anatomical stylisation and his delightfully wicked, darkly comedic horror, fantasy and science fiction tales.
Born in Anderson, Missouri in 1940, he graduated with a Fine Arts degree in 1965 and found work as an animator. At that time, the neutered comicbooks of the Comics-Code Authority era were just starting to lose disaffected, malcontented older fans to the hippy-trippy, freewheeling, anything goes publications of independent-minded creators across the continent who were increasingly making the kind of material Mummy and her lawyers wouldn’t approve of…
Shocking, rebellious, pharmacologically-enhanced sensibilities and unconventional lifestyles, acting on creative impulses honed by 1950s EC Comics, Carl Barks’ Duck tales and other classy early strips called out to young artists like Corben, who responded in kind, in a variety of small-press publications including Grim Wit, Slow Death, Skull, Fever Dreams and his own mag, Fantagor.
Often signing with his sardonic pseudonym “Goreâ€, Corben’s work increasingly began to appear in more professionally produced venues. As his style and skills developed he worked for Warren Publishing’s Eerie, Creepy, Vampirella, Comix International and graphically outrageous adult science fiction anthology 1984/1994. He also famously re-coloured a number of reprinted strips for the revival of Will Eisner’s the Spirit.
In 1975 Corben approached French fantasy phenomenon Métal Hurlant and became a fixture of its American iteration Heavy Metal. Soon he was producing stunning graphic escapades for a number of companies, making animated movies, painting film posters and producing record covers such as the multi-million-selling Meatloaf album Bat Out of Hell. He never stopped making comics but preferred his own independent projects with collaborators such as Harlan Ellison, Bruce Jones and Jan Strnad.
This regrettably out-of-print collection is the last of three collecting his early efforts and includes his longest and most ambitious tale of those learning years, but before that the appetite is whetted by the surreal black and white parable ‘When Dreams Collide’ (1970) wherein a repressed priest and a free-spirited flower-child share a bus ride and a daydream and ‘Bug’, a far nastier science fiction fantasy with a hidden message for anybody tempted to play house outside their species…
‘Rowlf’ was first crafted in 1971 and reworked in 1979 into the full-colour saga presented here. Ambitious and more emotionally multilayered, it follows the troubled life of Princess Maryara, whose only friend is her dog. Father wants to marry her off to a pompous royal jackass and to that end she is dragged off to the local wizard who has a fine line in transformation spells for reluctant things and people…
When technological demons invade and kidnap Maryara, faithful Rowlf defends her as best he can but is no match for their guns and tanks. However when the dog stumbles into one of the wizard’s spells the bizarre human/canine hybrid that results is a far more formidable proposition. One thing hasn’t changed though – Rowlf’s unfailing devotion to the lost princess. He will find her and face any threat to rescue her…
This impressive and touching 32 page yarn is followed by ‘Mangle, Robot Mangler’, a sexy, seditious monochrome parody of the classic comicbook hero, followed by an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s eerie suspense thriller ‘The Rats in the Walls’: a grisly psychological terror-tale of fallen castles and inherited horrors.
This volume closes with a splendidly dark and seductive pastiche of the genre in ‘A Gothic Tale’, produced in collaboration with Tom Veitch, stuffed with nuns, covens, family secrets and shocking twists…
Violent, cathartically graphic and often blackly hilarious, Corben’s infamous signature-stylisation always includes oodles of nudity, extreme violence and impossibly proportioned male and female physiques – and there’s plenty of all that in here. However this volume also shows hints of the narrative maturity which helped reshape our art-form so the fact that so much of his canon is currently unavailable in English is an unbearable calamity. Not only are these early works long overdue for a definitive re-issue but all his rude, riotous, raucously ribald revels need to be re-released now…
© 1970-1987 Richard Corben. Collection © 1987 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.