Fallen Heroes

It seems like all we do here on The AV-Room is count down the lives of our heroes who we have passed. I’d like to think that life after 40 is more than that, that we can look at the culture we live in and think that our lives are ongoing, but it just isn’t so. In the past six months since my friend CJ and I started the AV-Room we lost Steve Gerber, Gary Gygax, and also recently a personal idol, I won’t call him a friend even though I met him 15 years ago and bonded with him while he was still drawing his strip for Eclipse Comics: Dave Stevens.

Dave Stevens was the finest illustrator I have ever met personally. He adored the early American illustrators, as much as Steve “The Dude” Rude, or Adam Hughes or even Frank Cho do today, but he was the first. His strip “The Rocketeer” was a fetishistic rite into early airplane culture, a return to the time of the pulps and the serials that it was clearly based on, but also an adaptation and a modern distillation to whatever is modern and nostalgic about the culture that our parents or our grandparents were obsessed with. It was a yesterday filtered, filled with the adolescent yearning of planes, adventure and pretty women.

Oh, and the specter of Betty Page. Dave and Betty, Betty and Dave. Tied together, his pictures captured her and translated her essence to a kid too young to have ever seen her at her best. I talked to one and yearned for the other through my teens. I yearned to draw like Dave though, and in the end that is what we can all aspire to. To have touched someone enough to have driven them to follow in our path. I’m sure the Adam Hughes’s, and Steve Rude’s will cite him as a primogeniture, but me I’ll look at his splash pages and his pinups and wonder what might have been if he had lived.

He was born 10 blocks from where I was raised. Him and Weird-Al Yankovick, just ask me who I’d rather have around right now,  He assisted Russ Manning on Tarzan, helped Doug Wildey in Saturday-morning animation, and kept alive the image and likeness of every pinup model who ever lived, or he had ever loved.

He was an inspiration, as much for him as Jack Kirby was even though I didn’t have half the talent he did. I am thankful for his art and for The Rocketeer, and for Jennifer Connelly as Bettie Page, even if they couldn’t get her likeness for the movie, although we all pictured her in fishnets and chains, and all that we have Dave Stevens to thank for.

I know he had given up on his greatest creation, embittered by his Disney vacation, but I’d like to say that he was an inspiration. Rest in peace Dave. Thanks for the memories. It was a pleasure to have met a true gentleman.

-Herbie P.