RIP Richard Corben (1940–2020)

I feel very fortunate to have grown up when I did. The period between the late '60s and the early '80s was one of remarkable esthetic ferment, a brief artistic Indian Summer sandwiched between the exhaustion of the post-War years and the creeping corporatism of the Reagan era. As the old creative order crumbled, a period of reckless experimentation and wild invention took hold, the ultimate results of which were decidedly mixed – and, arguably, failures, given what followed in the decades to come – but which nonetheless produced some powerful art and artists. Among them was Richard Corben, who died on December 2 at the age of 80.

Growing up, Corben was not an artist with whom I was directly familiar. I didn't know his name but I knew his art. As a kid, there was a drugstore within walking distance of my house. My friends and I used to go there quite regularly to pick up candy bars, baseball cards, and comic books. There were a couple of spinner racks, one for DC and one for Marvel, in that drugstore and my friends I would spend a lot of time flipping through them, occasionally even buying copies to take home with us. 

Not far from the spinner racks were three or four shelves of magazines, back in the days when print periodicals were still alive and well. While none of us spent as much time looking at those shelves as we did the spinner racks – unless Life or Time had a cover story about Star Wars, though Starlog was a more reliable source for stories of that sort – it wasn't at all uncommon for our eyes to stray there occasionally, casting furtive glances at the brash, burning covers of Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and, of course, Heavy Metal. 

I don't recall who among us was the first one bold enough to pick up one of those "adult" comic magazines and open it up. Whoever it was, doing so was both frightening and exhilarating, the kind of perverse charge one only gets by doing something forbidden. Though it's been more than four decades, I remember well feeling that we "shouldn't be doing this" and trying to convince my friends that the latest issues of Spider-Man and The Avengers were much more interesting than those strange, unsettling black and white comics hidden behind the hypnagogic covers of Heavy Metal. 

I was wrong, of course, both about the fact that we shouldn't be reading these comics and that those superhero comics were more interesting. A big part of that was the presence of Richard Corben's distinctive artwork. As I said, I don't think I ever heard Corben's name mentioned until much later – sometime in college, I'd expect – but his style was unmistakable and it had a powerful, unsettling impact on my imagination. Corben's art is highly exaggerated, almost to the point of caricature, and it's oddly this quality that somehow makes it seem more realistic, if that makes any sense. There was a surreal sensuality to Corben's art that was at once titillating and revelatory, especially to a sheltered, preteen suburban boy like myself. More to the point, Corben's art was completely unlike what I'd seen in the pages of mainstream comics: moody, idiosyncratic, and powerful. This was not made-to-order illustration but rather the product of an individual communing directly with his own grotesquely buxom Muse. 

Interestingly, Corben reappeared a little later in my life – again, I didn't realize it at the time – on the covers of the US editions of the Fighting Fantasy books. He did the first half-dozen or so volumes, including The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and I was fascinated by those covers. Though obviously geared toward a more child-friendly audience than his work on Creepy or Heavy Metal, those covers were clearly his work. The same paradoxical, cartoonish hyper-realism is present, along with small hints of darkness and even salaciousness. They're terrific stuff and I have a hard time imagining contemporary children's books with covers of this sort. Like I said, it was a weird and wonderful time to grow up.

Oddly, despite my fascination over the last decade or more with the esthetic and cultural cauldron out of which the modern fantasy genre and, by extension, roleplaying games arose, I don't think I gave much thought to Richard Corben until a few years ago, when I stumbled upon some issues of Mike Mignola's Hellboy comic that he illustrated. I understand he did illustration work for other similarly well known comics in his later years, though I've never seen them myself. When I learned he had died a few days ago, I was unexpectedly moved by it, as if his death signaled something more than just the demise of an octogenarian in ill health. That probably says more about my own skulking senescence but I felt it nonetheless. A unique artist is gone; we shall not see his like again.