The comic book industry lost two of its brightest luminaries over this past Thanksgiving holiday, and while it's been a little while since I've been able to get back to this blog, I wanted to at least acknowledge their passing before moving ahead.
Dave Cockrum will no doubt be best-remembered as the visual progenitor of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, and his style of visual storytelling set the tone for the entire industry as comics moved into the direct market. Dave was first and foremost a fan, and he brought an unbridled enthusiasm to every art job he took on, infusing it with an energy and a style that set his work apart from everything else around it. And especially during the '70s, Dave's sense of super hero costume design revolutionized the industry.
Less has been written about Dr. Jerry Bails, who has rightly been called the Father of Comic Book Fandom, a title he well deserved. It's hard to imagine today, but there was a time when collecting comic books was a very solitary activity. Jerry Bails changed all of that, pulling together and uniting a readership scattered from coast to coast through his pioneering comic book fanzines, the Alley Awards to acknowledge excellent work, his hosting of the earliest large-scale cgatherings of comic book fans (which would one day grow into the conventions we know today), and his pioneering work in indexing the comic books of the past and identifying writers and artists who might otherwise have been forgotten.
More later.
Tom B
