Goodbye to Dave Stevens

This has not been a very good month for my past. First, E. Gary Gygax, the man whose “Dungeons & Dragons” game sparked my descent into geekhood, fantasy fiction and gaming, passed on. Now, artist Dave Stevens died of leukemia.

Blog@Newsarama and Mark Evanier provide more complete description of Stevens’ work and influence, (UPDATE: I meant Journalista has a roundup of Dave’s career, or, if you like, here’s DS’ website, sorry), but it gives me an excuse to post this example of his, ahem, lush artwork from the cover of The Comics Journal:

Couple of thoughts to add:

* It saddens me that Dave was such a meticulous worker that he produced relatively little in his 35-year career. As Evanier writes:

“It wasn’t so much that he was slow, as his friends joked, but that he was almost obsessively meticulous, doing days of study and sketching to create one panel, and doing many of them over and over. Even then, he was usually dissatisfied with what he produced and fiercely critical of the reproduction.”

There’s not much more I can say about that. It was obviously his choice to do so.

* As a result, he also did very little with “The Rocketeer,” which started because Pacific publisher Steve Schanes asked him if he had anything to fill six pages in the back of a comic book. That led to the “Rocketeer” comic book, collected in a larger format, and a sequel set in New York City. The failure of the Disney movie finished off Dave’s interest in the character. I don’t think he did any more comics work, just private commissions and spot illustrations.

I suppose it’s one of the curses, where we have genuinely wonderful creators such as Stevens and Bill Watterson, who are with us for awhile and then wander off elsewhere, while the hacks who are productive stick to the culture like barnacles.

UPDATE: The Beat has more, including information on a book collecting Stevens’ art that will be published in ’09.

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