SUNDAY, FEB. 25, 2 PM

I was sitting in Room 1E16 of the Javits Center, waiting for the start of the last panel I would attend at this year’s New York Comic-Con, “Dave Cockrum Remembered.” Cockrum is best known as a fan favorite artist on DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes in the 1970s, and as the co-creator of the “new” X-Men, who debuted in Giant-Size X-Men #1 back in 1975. For that landmark issue, Cockrum and writer Len Wein jointly created three of the X-Men’s most prominent members, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Storm, all of whom were derived from drawings in Cockrum’s legendarily voluminous sketchbooks. Cockrum, whom I interviewed decades ago for Fantagraphics’ X-Men Companion, was one of the foremost superhero comics artists of the 1970s and early 1980s. But a new generation of readers and editors seemed oblivious to his considerable talents. Worse, Cockrum became seriously ill with pneumonia and diabetes, and he finally passed away last November.

There were four speakers on the panel. First was the moderator, Clifford Meth, Cockrum’s longtime friend. In 2004 Meth edited a tribute book, filled with contributions from other comics artists and writers, to raise money to pay for Cockrum’s medical care. Aardwolf Publishing has just republished the book in hardcover form as The Uncanny Dave Cockrum, with additional artwork by Cockrum and other comics professionals. During Cockrum’s lifetime Meth also successfully negotiated a deal with Marvel whereby Cockrum would receive royalties for the members of the X-Men he co-created.

Also on the panel were three of Cockrum’s collaborators on X-Men: writer Chris Claremont, editor Louise Simonson, and inker Joe Rubinstein. Present as well was Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, who is also renowned for his work on the Legion of Super-Heroes. (During the panel Levitz pointed out that his run on the Legion followed Cockrum’s, but that they did collaborate on a short story in Legion #300.)

Following his appearance at last year’s New York Comic-Con, Claremont had health problems of his own, and had vanished from public view for months. However, he looked hale, hearty, and energetic as a participant on the Cockrum panel.

Starting the panel, Meth said he would “open with a joke,” which proved to be a grim one. He recalled visiting Cockrum in the hospital three years ago. Cockrum had tubes in his throat and arms, in such a bad state that he was being fed through his rectum. On this occasion, Meth said, Cockrum felt “antsy” and told the nurse he “needs a cup of coffee.” The nurse warned Cockrum about it, but Cockrum said, “I don’t care.” So the nurse poured some coffee through the aforementioned orifice, and Cockrum screamed. “Was it too hot?” asked the nurse. Cockrum replied, “Too sweet.”

And that said a lot about Cockrum’s personality. Meth then told the audience that Cockrum had been released from the hospital, but that “we lost Dave” at the end of November. Meth brought up the tribute book and said that there “wasn’t a single person in the industry who didn’t want to participate in the tribute while Dave was alive.”

Louise Simonson praised Cockrum as “really good-natured.” With her taste for the concise, she explained simply that he was “a really good guy. That’s it.”

Claremont reminisced that when “You sat down” with Cockrum and “started talking ideas, you never knew where they would lead you,” or “where he would inspire you to go with it.”

In the “early days, working on X-Men” in the 1970s, Claremont said, “We wanted to do aliens.” X-Men was a book about mutants, but “Why not? If we could imagine it, let’s do it. Suddenly he would come in with design sketches for spaceships based on bugs” and “beetles,” referring to the Shi’ar spacecraft that you can see in X-Men (first series) #97 (1976) and subsequent issues. Then Claremont recalled the “race of evolved dinosaurs” they had come up with for “two issues of Ms. Marvel” (#20 and 21 in 1978) and expressed his “frustration” that they could “never take” the idea further because the “book got canceled.”

“With Dave it was a never-ending delight,” Claremont said, “every time you explored imagination with him.” You “left wishing other people could see with those eyes,” and there could be “more books, more opportunity” to work with him. But, Claremont added, sounding a recurring theme for this panel, “how transitory the creative turned out to be.” He was talking about how his periods of collaboration with Cockrum inevitably came to an end, for one reason or another, but one could not help but think of the end of a creative artist’s life, as well.

Paul Levitz told the audience that it was “important to put it in context,” and that the “time when Chris did his X-Men work with Dave” and “when Dave did his Legion work” was a “period when the heart of the comic industry was set up” so that people would “not to do more than necessary to get your paycheck”: there were “no royalties” and “no shares” in the profits for freelancers. Levitz recalled an old joke: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”

Then Levitz stated that “from his first moment as an artist in the field” Cockrum was “not only generous in spirit but had a generosity of creativity to his readers.” Cockrum “would labor for hours recostuming a Legionnaire,” and designed “modern costumes for each Legionnaire,” most of whom had been created twenty years earlier. If it was decided “let’s do aliens,” Levitz said, Cockrum would “come back with an entire universe of aliens sketched out.” According to Levitz, the “old pros of the period” wouldn’t do such a thing, and would say, “they’re not paying me to do this,” while the “young pros breaking in generally didn’t have the skill yet.” Cockrum, Levitz continued, was “one of the first” whose attitude was “Screw the deal. I’ve got to give this everything I’ve got.”

Joking that the panel’s unanimity of opinion might be getting “monotonous,” Joe Rubinstein agreed that “Dave was a really nice guy.” But Rubinstein found his own variation on the theme, telling us that “Dave was childlike.” with regard to working in comics, “he loved it, he loved it. If you paid him he’d like it better.” If Cockrum hadn’t been employed in the comics industry, Rubinstein contended, “he would’ve worked in a shoe store [or] a bookstore, and go home and draw the Blackhawks.” Rubinstein summed up, “His work was filled with joy.”

Thanks to the way the comics industry ran in the 1970s, Cockrum did not receive a cut of the money Marvel made from characters he had co-created.
The panel turned to the subject of the settlement that Meth negotiated with Marvel for Cockrum. “Without the money,” Meth asserted, Cockrum “wouldn’t get out of the hospital.” However, Cockrum was “happy” with the settlement he finally received, and was “absolutely thrilled” that on of his artistic heroes, “Will Eisner contributed” to the benefit tribute book. “He was always a fan. He created things he wanted to look at.”

Claremont stated that Cockrum had “a tremendous work ethic. When you ask for a character to be designed now, and to an extent then,” he continued, you will “get a sketch, maybe two sketches.” But there is no time to do more, “you take what you can get,” because the “book’s got to go to press.” In contrast, Claremont told the audience, “When Dave and I say down and decided we were going to redesign Phoenix”–by which Claremont probably meant devising the Phoenix identity and costume for X-Men cast member Jean Grey– “he did 50 designs”: there were “a couple of dozen specific visualizations,” and the rest were variations on those. Claremont praised Cockrum for “a wealth of creativity, a wealth of commitment, a wealth of craft.”

Claremont worked with Cockrum on X-Men in the initial years of its revival in the 1970s, then John Byrne came in as penciler and co-plotter, and Cockrum returned in the early 1980s after Byrne departed the series. Claremont declared that the “X-Men’s success” lay in the fact that for the revival’s “first eight years” it was the “product of two men” (along with himself): Dave Cockrum and John Byrne. Claremont asserted that this was “a commitment of creativity that very few books, especially today, have.” Again, he told us that you “don’t realize how wonderful an experience” it is “until it’s not there.”

Cockrum left X-Men the second time to try his hand at writing and drawing his own creator-owned project, The Futurians. It’s “not a bad thing to try to make something that you own,” observed Louise Simonson. But The Futurians wasn’t as commercially successful as he might have hoped.

Claremont revealed that “one of the things that knocked me over as a reader, reading Legion of Super-Heroes, was the marriage of Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy.” Claremont continued, “Way back then we were used to seeing the superheroes in costume or they wore an [everyday] suit. There was very rarely a sense of individuality” to what a character wore out of costume “that extended beyond being a superhero.” But for this 30th century wedding in Legion, “Dave designed the clothes for everybody and they were different.” In other words, each character’s clothes expressed his or her individual personality. “It wasn’t like they all went to the same futuristic tuxedo shop. They [the clothes] were consistent with character, culture and the future. And they were cool.”

Similarly, “In X-Men if Storm was going out to the opera, she wore a gown that was unique to an African in America.” Claremont didn’t mention this, but it was Cockrum who not only designed Wolverine’s highly distinctive unmasked face, but also his characteristic Western style of dressing when he is out of costume. “The costuming, the look of characters defined by. . .who they were as people,” Claremont said, was not only a “revolutionary. . .concept” but “It became an inspiration.” According to Claremont, Cockrum’s attitude was “I love the characters; let’s just have fun.”

Paul Levitz recalled that in the 1970s Cockrum and his friends “were frustrated with the comics industry of the time.” Returning to the subject of the Legion wedding, Levitz again established a context: “This was the last. . . year or two before original art began being returned to the artist.” The highlight of the wedding story was a “double-page spread.” Levitz said that “Dave put his heart and soul into this scene” and “must have done an army of sketches.” Cockrum even drew the scene on the larger sized pages that had been used in the 1960s so that he “could pour the detail in.” Moreover, Cockrum spent his own money on photostats in that pre-computer era, and “probably paid half his page rate”–which was low by today’s standards–“just to do the page right.” In exchange, Cockrum “thought he’d get to keep the page,” but, of course, the “company wouldn’t let him.” That was “one of the reasons he left Legion and went to Marvel to do X-Men.” That was “right at the cusp moment,” Levitz commented, when there was a sense “boiling up in the community” that artists had a right to get their original art back. And indeed Cockrum did finally get that double-page spread back years later.

Rubinstein reminisced about inking Cockrum’s second run of X-Men and his Nightcrawler miniseries in the 1980s. “Dave wasn’t a penciler or writer,” Rubinstein asserted; “he was a comic book creator.” Nightcrawler was Cockrum’s personal favorite of the X-Men, and he turned him into an updated version of the swashbuckler heroes of another era. “Nightcrawler turned into Errol Flynn for a while,” remarked Rubinstein.

That reminded Claremont of another highlight of Cockrum’s career, “Kitty’s Fairy Tale” in Uncanny X-Men #153 (1982), in which the series’ familiar characters took on new guises, like Kitty Pryde as what Claremont called “a runaway pirate,” and Wolverine resembled Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil. Claremont described Cockrum’s work on the story thus: “Each page is ‘Can you top this?’”

Claremont continued, “With Dave there was a sense there was nothing you couldn’t ask for, and he’d make you plotz with delight.” For example, “You ask for a starship that’s fifty miles long, and he gives you one that’s made of a fish, and it works!” (This is a reference to the Acanti, the ‘space whales” introduced in Uncanny X-Men #156 in 1982.)

Claremont revealed that he felt obliged to get his script “up to that level,” to match Cockrum’s creative achievement, and then the following month “he’d top you again.” Claremont explained that “You want to be on his level,” as Cockrum kept “raising the bar.” Claremont then confessed that “It was so much fun that you didn’t notice” how special this collaboration was “until it was gone.” and Cockrum had left the series. Then, Claremont said, “There’s this hole in your page.”

But then why is it that a man of such great talent as Dave Cockrum had trouble getting work in the comics industry after the 1980s, and fell into obscurity in the current comics marketplace?

“All of us see it, particularly these days” Louise Simonson said carefully, presumably referring to veteran comics professionals of the 1970s and 1980s like Cockrum and herself. She explained, “Editorial people have forces that drive them,” one of which is “market forces.” Hence, “they’re looking for the bright new thing.” From their point of view, “Dave was an old, tarnished object, not a bright, shiny one,” and he “faded into obscurity.”

Clifford Meth noted that “for twelve years “ Cockrum “could only get work from small publishing companies.” (One of these was Claypool Comics, for which Cockrum drew Soulsearchers & Company for nearly three years, in what appears to have been his last regular assignment. Claypool editor Richard Howell was not asked to speak on the panel, but you can find his tribute to Cockrum on the inside back cover of Soulsearchers #82, its final issue, currently on sale. So for a time Soulsearchers was written by Peter David, drawn by Dave Cockrum, and had covers drawn by Amanda Conner, all acclaimed comics professionals, and yet it was still ignored by most of the comics industry and readership!)

Meth said that Cockrum would look for work by making phone calls to editors. One highly placed person at one of these companies “hurt” Cockrum by telling him, “Your work is just too stodgy.” Meth said that “He felt largely ignored at that point in his career.” He “would get work but not regular work.”

Louise Simonson noted that “Dave was also very slow.” He could do “zillions of sketches,” but when it came to doing “actual comics pages,” he was “not fast.”

But his creativity remained high. Meth said that one day Cockrum sent him “five redesigns” of Marvel’s character Quicksilver; he ended up “putting them on eBay.”

So why didn’t someone at a comics company realize how valuable it would be to have Cockrum regularly designing costumes and characters and starships and such for them? On the panel Louise Simonson suggested that Cockrum should have been doing character designs for animation, but Meth responded that Cockrum “was too sweet a guy to work in that environment,” implying it was dog-eat-dog.

Claremont again extolled Cockrum’s talents, stating that “as a writer toy could present anything” to Cockrum, “whether it was a castle in Scotland full of leprechauns”–this is actually a reference to the Banshee’s leprechaun-infested castle in Ireland in X-Men (first series) #102–“or an alien invasion, and he would do it. . .and find a way to make it work and make it better. That is rare in any era of the industry.”

Cockrum “made the characters” into the readers’ “friends,” Claremont said, “people the readers wanted to see every four weeks,” whose lives they relate to.

So, apparently, did Cockrum: Meth told the audience that when Cockrum saw the X-Men movie, “he cried” because he was so “happy to see his characters on film.”

Claremont recalled that when the “new” X-Men began, Jean Grey and other members of the original team left the series. But then Claremont and Cockrum brought her back for a guest appearance, and when Claremont saw how Cockrum drew her this time, he said “She’s hot! Why did we write her out of the book? Can we bring her back, please?” And thus, Claremont asserted, began the road that “led to Phoenix and Dark Phoenix.”

As for another character in the series, Meth told us that “Dave often commented that Nightcrawler was his alter ego.” And it seems it was Nightcrawler who prevailed in Meth’s negotiations with Marvel. The Marvel lawyers maintained that Nightcrawler had been created under a work-for-hire agreement. But then, Meth told us, he revealed that Cockrum had published the “exact” design he used for Nightcrawler in a fanzine before Giant-Size X-Men #1! Now wouldn’t you like to have seen the Marvel lawyers’ faces when they first heard that? In what Meth called the “unprecedented deal” that was worked out, Cockrum’s widow Paty will continue to receive royalties for Nightcrawler and other Cockrum co-creations for the rest of her life.

And there is still more work by Dave Cockrum still to be seen; Joe Rubinstein announced on the panel that he is inking an unpublished Futurians story that Cockrum did.

Towards the end of the panel, Chris Claremont delivered a thought-provoking eulogy to Cockrum. “You always keep thinking that there’s more time,” he told us, saying that he assumed he would work with Dave Cockrum again. “The reality is we are finite, as much as we like to imagine ourselves being like our characters, who are not.” Cockrum’s passing, he stated, was “a reminder to cherish people and talents while they exist,” and “not to be in a position of talking about what should have been but [what] was.” Dave Cockrum created “what may not be as large a body of work as others’,” Claremont declared, but it “will last and bring credit to him long after many of us have moved on.”

Concluding the panel, Paul Levitz commended the Hero Initiative, the organization that offers financial aid and medical care to veteran comics creators in need. Levitz then told the audience that there was “something else” that was within “your power” to do, and that was to help in what he called the “emotional protection of the old creators.” He told us that if you see any of them at a convention, you “don’t have to commission a sketch,” but you should at least “spend a minute with them, [and] tell them how much you like their work.” Levitz noted that many of the older creators worked in anonymity and “frankly didn’t know anyone gave a damn.” Hence, he continued, meeting their fans at conventions has provided “some of the best moments of their lives” and that “in most cases that’s more important than economic health.”

Then Levitz observed that “comics people generally not smart about their economic health” whereupon Claremont burst into loud laughter at the truth of this observation. (Why, it was as if they were talking about me!) Levitz joked that “I’m the last guy Hero Initiative has to worry about. I’ve gone over to the Dark Side.” But he made the point that comics fans should show their appreciation not just to the Golden and Silver Age pros, but also to younger comics writers and artists who, for whatever reason, are, in his words, “not the flavor of the month.” Though he did not say so, obviously Dave Cockrum would have been in that category.

As if to exemplify what Paul Levitz had said about the elders of the comics profession, shortly after the convention ended, Arnold Drake, the co-creator of Deadman and Doom Patrol, passed away. Drake was one of the people whom I had been scheduled to interview on the convention’s “Classic Age of Comics” panel. That assignment fell through, and now I would never have my chance to interview him.

SUNDAY, FEB. 25, 3 PM:

Following the Cockrum panel I made a last stop on the main convention floor, which has seemed pleasantly, relatively quiet on Sunday morning but was again jam packed in the afternoon. High overhead still floated the malevolent elder god Cthulhu in his guise as a balloon of Pikachu, draining America’s youth of their life energies and taste in cartoon art. Then, below him, I saw a horrifying sight: a small, child-size Pikachu standing on the floor beneath him (her?), posing for passers-by. To adapt W. B. Yeats’ celebrated line, what rough beast slouches towards the Javits Center to be born? It’s Pikachu, Jr., that’s who. It was time for me to escape, and spend the evening at home writing up convention reports for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week.

And so ends my coverage of this year’s New York Comic-Con, but not my discussion of the issues raised by the Cockrum memorial panel. The way that significant creative artists fall victim to the changing tides of taste and fashion and the marketplace deserves further examination. The Dave Cockrum panel reminds me of another panel discussion I recently heard about another important comics artist of the mid-1970s who passed away in the month following the convention. This was Marshall Rogers, whom I mentioned last week, whose work ranged from Don McGregor’s Detectives, Inc. to Chris Claremont’s Daughters of the Dragon to his many collaborations with Steve Englehart, including Batman, Silver Surfer, Mister Miracle, and his alternative strips for the early independent comics publisher Eclipse, Captain Quick and a Foozle, Coyote, and Scorpio Rose.

In Comic Zone’s Internet radio tribute to Marshall Rogers, his contemporary, inker Terry Austin, talked about how when they were breaking into the comics business, certain unnamed people in authority at DC Comics would castigate both them and their work. According to these people in power. Marshall and Terry were doing their art all wrong. The Comic Zone interviewer sounds clearly astonished by this. How could anyone not recognize the talents of Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin?

That’s the fate of innovators. There is an Old Guard who rejects the new, perhaps because the Old Guard’s tastes are different, perhaps because they are overly set in their ways, perhaps their artistic vision is too limited to see the potential of the new work that is right before their eyes. Once the innovators have made their mark, the Old Guard’s attitude looks ridiculous.

And so, once Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin’s collaboration on Batman appeared in Detective Comics in the mid-1970s, discerning members of the comics readership hailed it as an instant classic. I should know; I was one of them. Their Batman work was so influential that it served as an inspiration for the Batman movie that producer Michael Uslan was developing for Warner Brothers.

But a decade later it was Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns that was considered the most influential treatment of Batman. As I pointed out last week, it took over a quarter of a century for DC Comics to reunite the Englehart, Rogers and Austin team for Batman: Dark Detective. Uslan briefly, loyally mentions the Englehart-Rogers Batman on the special edition DVD of the 1989 Batman movie, but otherwise the DVD’s special features ignore it.

Neither Rogers not Austin were as much in demand recently as they had been in the late 1970s and 1980s. Peter Gillis observes in his blog’s tribute to Rogers that “deserved the fame he got and didn’t deserve the waning of that fame.” (Look further down on Gillis’s blog, and you will find his moving tribute to Cockrum.) Yet both the original Englehart/Rogers/Austin Batman and the new Dark Detective remain great, and will surely be recognized as classics ten, twenty or fifty years hence.

There’s the period when a creator hasn’t yet become fashionable, then he has his time in the spotlight, which may seem as if it will be permanent, but then the fashions change, and he may fall from favor, even though the quality of his work may not have changed. This is what happened to Cockrum.

It happens to others as well. Lately I’ve been reading Walt Disney and Europe, written by Robert Allan, and published in 1999 by the Indiana University Press. I picked up a remaindered copy at the New York Is Book Country street fair some years back, and I’ve never seen a copy anywhere else. That’s too bad, because this is an excellent study of how Walt Disney and his artists were influenced by European art, literature and music in creating their animated films. This book is the obvious basis for much of the “Once upon a Time” Disney art exhibition that is currently in Montreal (see “Comics in Context” #161).

In this book Allan writes about Kay Nielsen, a Danish artist whom Disney appointed as art director for the “Night on Bald Mountain” and “Ave Maria” sequences in Fantasia (1940). (The only important film I saw at Lincoln Center’s 2005 festival of musical cartoons that I haven’t yet written about was Fantasia. Maybe someday!) According to Allan, “after the second world war Nielsen returned to Denmark, endeavoring to obtain work again as book illustrator or stage designer, but without success; his style was too rigidly locked into the precise art mould which had originally brought him fame. It was too soon for a revival of interest. He returned to California where he died destitute in 1957. His wife Ulla died a year later. Forty years later his original artwork was fetching tens of thousands of dollars at auction.” (Walt Disney and Europe p. 163).

Here’s the pattern again: Nielsen became famous for his work, but fashions changed, and his work did not change with it, and he died in poverty. But consider Allan’s brief line: “It was too soon for a revival of interest.” If art has enduring value, then the “revival of interest” will come. Art which lasts transcends fashion and becomes classic.

Nielsen and his wife were unlucky in that they did not live to see this happen to his work. Their fate reminds me of the famous case of Vincent Van Gogh, who was recognized as a brilliant artist during his lifetime by fellow artistic giants such as Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec. Even so, it is said that Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime (and used the paintings to pay the rent or other bills).

Jack Kirby was lionized by comics fans in the 1960s, but in the 1970s, as I’ve said before, I’d hear comics pros refer to him as “Jack the Hack.” But his skill as an artist hadn’t changed, and luckily for him, the pendulum swung back quickly, and he was hailed by comics pros and fans alike as a living icon in the 1980s. Had Kirby lived twelve years longer he would have seen his artwork hang in museums as part of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition.

Time is a determining factor of greatness. Work that conforms to the passing fashions of the day may achieve great popularity in its time, but unless it rises above fashion, it will be forgotten as the decades pass. Great work may fall from fashion for a time, but its lasting merits will be rediscovered by new generations. Great work speaks not just to its own time, but to all time, as I shall attempt to illustrate in next week’s column.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

I have just written a review of Fantagraphics’ collection The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger, a pioneering early 20th century cartoonist, for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week. Ad you may be interested in seeing what my Comics Week editor says about “Comics in Context” over at the Beat.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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