Jim Steranko: A Biography
More than any of his contemporaries, Jim Steranko brought the noir sensibility to comics: in his characterizations (heroes and villains alike driven by alienation and psychotic obsession), narrative themes (cynicism, paranoia, eroticism, tragic irony, fatalism), and the visual style (chairoscuro, montage, symbolism, metaphor, expressionistic rendering) he used to develop them. As critics implied, he transferred his frenzied youth to the page, treating it as a forum of self-expression; the result was a graphic tour de force that produced more than 75 innovations never seen previously in comics. A recent CBG poll named Steranko as the 21st most influential artist in comics history--a stunning achievement considering that his total contribution to the form is only 29 stories, all done a quarter century ago.
While most artists struggle for a lifetime to evolve a personal idiom, Steranko literally morphs his style with each assignment --not as variations, but radical, new approaches! He flunked high-school art classes, yet mastered techniques so diverse it seems impossible to believe that the man who created the SHIELD techno-thrillers for Marvel; a hundred book covers including 30 Shadow paintings; the psycho-architectonic OUTLAND film adaptation; the 3-D TICKTOCKMAN Portfolio; the tinkly My Heart Broke in Hollywood; the panoramic SUPERMAN 400 epic; the cinematic CHANDLER; and more than 5,000 PREVUE MAGAZINE pages are even the same individual!
The anomaly is compounded by a series of kaleidoscopic careers as a musician (he gigged with Bill Haley in the early days of rock 'n' roll and put the first go-go girls onstage), a magician (who developed a multitude of revolutionary card techniques at the close-up table), a pop-culture lecturer (his two volumes of THE HISTORY OF COMICS have sold more than 100,000 copies each and are still the definitive resource of the four-color chronology), a filmmaker (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola chose him to collaborate on some of their most popular movies), an escape artist (his death-defying performances inspired the character Mister Miracle), and more--carnival pitchman, ad agency art director, sideshow fire-eater, photographer, male model, typographer, stand-up comic, designer, publisher . . . the list goes on. Steranko work has been exhibited at 200 international exhibitions, including in the Louvre, and his cover recreations have sold at major auction houses for $10,000, while originals have hammered at almost double that amount. His recent projects include a mass-market Captain America cover that scored a record-breaking sell-through; an innovative, digital flip-book treatment for an upcoming Byron Preiss-produced Marvel book; an uncensored, rewritten, and redrawn version of his hard-boiled graphic novel RED TIDE for Dark Horse; and a new Coppola assignment. And he's still the best-dressed man in comics.
-- J. David Spurlock