By Richard Corben & friends (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 0-87416-007-3Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Del Rey edition ISBN: 978-0-34548-311-9
Richard Corben is one of America’s greatest living proponents of comic strip storytelling: an animator, illustrator, publisher and cartoonist 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.
Until relatively recently Corben steered clear of the Fights ‘n’ Tights comicbook mainstream. He hasn’t sold out – it’s simply that American funnybooks have grown mature enough to accommodate him, due in no small part to his pervasive influence…
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…
Creative impulses honed by ultra-graphic and explicitly mature 1950s EC Comics, Carl Barks’ perfectly crafted Duck tales and other classy early strips, a plethora of young artists like Corben all responded with a variety of small-press publications – including Grim Wit, Slow Death, Skull, Fever Dreams and his own Fantagor – that featured shocking, rebellious, sexed-up, raw, brutal, psychedelically-inspired and enhanced cartoons and strips that mixed the new wave of artists’ unconventional lifestyles with their earliest childhood influences… making the kind of stories that they would like to read…
Corben’s work 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 coloured some 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.
Always garnering huge support and acclaim in Europe his short pieces were regularly collected in albums such as this moody and manic midnight melange that gathered his assorted dabblings with the iconic global curse of lycanthropy into one masterful edition, before selling it back to the Yanks…
I’m reviewing my beloved and spiffy Catalan Communications hardback edition, complete with affectionate introductory tribute from fellow artistic superstar Gaetano Liberatore, but if you can’t find that or the subsequent softcover, as they are both regrettably out-of-print and tricky to find, there was a soft-cover re-release from Del Rey in 2005 that is a bit more accessible and just as good.
Corben regularly revisited old works, adding colour to black and white tales or refining rough edges, but this collection opens with an early strip that is deliciously raw and edgy in blocky monochrome…
‘Dead Hill’ is a dark and punchy taster to set the ball rolling: a saga of vulpine cross-and-double-cross, before the airbrush colour of ‘The Beast of Wolfton’ regales us with the hilariously sardonic and nihilistic tale of a beast that haunts a medieval manor seeking vengeance for the extermination of his kind and the deeply put-upon Lady who finds little to differentiate between the hairy slavering brute and her husband who hunts it with such passion…
Corben returned to that milieu for the nominal sequel ‘Spirit of the Beast’ as the tortured spawn of the werewolf sought penance and forgiveness for his family’s curse, but reckoned without the seductive power of true Evil…
Corben’s infamous signature-stylisation includes acres of male and female nudity, excessive, balletic violence and nigh-grotesquely proportioned male and female physiques, and these are all readily in your face in a full-frontal, chilling and clever interpretation of Red Riding Hood re-imagined here as ‘Roda and the Wolf’.
A brace of wolf-manly sagas first crafted in 1973 for Warren’s horror anthology Creepy follows; beginning with the severed-tongue-in-cheek shocker ‘Lycanklutz’ after which Doug Moench stumps up a Halloween teaser in ‘Change… into Something Comfortable’ and the whole hirsute Hall of Horrors concludes with the John Pocsik scripted Puritan immorality play ‘Fur Trade’.
Richard Corben is a unique visual stylist blessed with a love of the dark and graced with a scathingly sharp sense of humour. Combine that with the World’s apparently insatiable hunger for hairy monsters and this book is just the aperitif any fan needs to start the night right…
© 1979-1984 Richard V. Corben. © 1984 Doug Moench for “Change into Something Comfortableâ€. © 1984 John Pocsik for “Fur Tradeâ€. Introduction © 1984 Gaetano Liberatore. All rights reserved.