Dave Stevens (1955–2008)

Well that was so much better than I expected. A perfect homage to the pulp era - he even meets Doc Savage's crew and The Shadow (all unofficially of course). The art is remastered so I'm not sure I like the inking on this edition, but everything is dynamic, fast moving and bursting with snappy dialogue and character that it doesn't matter too much.

A fine throwback to an older classic comic, this will sit nicely on my growing comic book shelves

The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures by Dave Stevens is an omnibus of the Rocketeer comics that began their run in 1982. The comic was later adapted to the big screen in 1991. It was the film that first introduced me to the characters.

In 1982 I was at the right age that I would have eaten up this comic (and similar ones) if I'd had access to them. It's not that I wasn't allowed to read them, it's that I grew up in a suburb with a dwindling child population — a generation squished in show more between the last of the baby boomers and the bulk of the gen Xers. There was exactly one book store that I had easy access to and it didn't exactly cater to tweens. I frankly didn't even know comic books were still being produced — they seemed to be a long lost part of my parents' childhoods (along with baseball cards and sock hops).

I'm still not a comic book reader but I do like to read the collections (they're nicely bound and less prone to tearing). I'm also lucky now to live near libraries that actively stock comics, graphic novels, manga and similar things.

The Rocketeer I watched with my Grandmother (who in her youth had been an aficionada of the Saturday serial). The film is fun but it has some problems — too much emphasis on making Betty a damsel in distress. There's too much emphasis on making the Nazis the big bad (they were of course horrendous but in the 1980s and into the early 1990s there was a glut of Nazi bad guys in movies, either figuratively with the Star Wars franchise, or literally with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade among others. Part of this our 20/20 hindsight delusion to believe the United States gave a fuck about the atrocities happening in Europe but the reality is we didn't take notice until Pearl Harbor.

The Rocketeer comic is more about flying, and money troubles, and a rocky relationship between Cliff and Betty. Betty isn't the damsel in distress here. She has her own story that may or may not involve Cliff. That was refreshing.

There's a good mixture of humor and adventure too. It was a fun book to live blog, and you can see my progress on Tumblr. show less

Dark Horse Comics’ graphic novel The Rocketeer: Cliff’s New York Adventure collects the three issues of Rocketeer Adventure Magazine by Dave Stevens. The first two issues were published by Comico Comics in 1988 and 1989 and the third by Dark Horse in 1995. The story picks up after the the events of the previous volume, with Cliff Secord, the Rocketeer, traveling to New York City to stop his girlfriend, Betty, from boarding a ship bound for Europe. Not a great one for romance, he manages show more to cause more trouble than help, but he ends up working for a man named Jonas (really Lamont Cranston, the alter-ego of the Shadow) to stop a murderer who’s killing carnival workers.

The story has all the pulp adventure fun of the first Rocketeer story, with more of Stevens’ allusions to the 1930s and 1940s. Though he never identifies Jonas as the Shadow, fans of that era’s stories will recognize him. The killer, Lothar, is based on Rondo Hatton, a movie star from the period. As in the first volume, Stevens bases Betty on Bette Page. Further, flashback sequences of Cliff’s youth living and working in the carnival draw heavily upon Tod Browning’s 1932 film, Freaks. The 1991 Disney film, The Rocketeer, drew upon the first book so this story will be completely new to those familiar with the character from that movie.

The success of this character and his lingering place in popular culture ensured that his stories would continue beyond this final volume from Stevens. Following Stevens’ passing in 2008, IDW Publishing collected the entire series in 2009 before beginning various Rocketeer miniseries in 2011, with the sixth IDW miniseries appearing in 2015. show less

A definite throwback to an earlier type of comic book, I enjoyed the art and general concept of the stories, particularly the second one. It can be rather sexist at times, but again, it seems to be going for the comics of that earlier age.