Comic book artist James Dean Jim Steranko was born on this day in 1938. The son of a stage magician, he did that himself for a while, but it's the feats of magic performed on the drawing board that's made him a legend in his field. At least it was his field, as his stint in comic books was mostly in the latter half of the 1960s. Since 1970 or so, he's run his own publishing company and done much work in Hollywood as a production designer, most notably working with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on Raiders of the Lost Ark, helping them come up with the Indiana Jones "look" (though he didn't design Harrison Ford; that was God's doing.) The still-debonair Steranko hasn't completely abandoned the comics field, returning every now and then for a limited run on some book. And he can often be found at the many comic-cons, i.e., conventions, which is where we find him in this clip:
Steranko mentioned Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division--even Stan Lee in his 1975 book Son of Origins of MarvelComics couldn't tell you what it was a division of), who is his intelligence agency's own best agent, and seems to assign most of the missions to himself! Fury wasn't always a secret agent. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, he made his debut in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos as an Army noncom fighting the Nazis during World War II. Two years later, inspired by the success of the James Bond movies and TV shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Lee and Kirby turned Fury, now a WWII vet with an eyepatch, into a spy, and assigned his cloak-and-dagger (and often laser beam) missions to the comic book Strange Tales, where he shared space with Doctor Strange. Kirby left the feature at the end of 1966, and that's when Steranko took over, eventually getting a book all to himself to play with. Kirby had already revolutionized comic book art by giving it a touch of the avant-garde. Steranko went further, and farther out. He took his inspiration not so much from Milt Caniff and Alex Raymond but the latest Jimi Hendrix album cover and Grateful Dead concert flyer. These were tie-died spies, op art operatives. It was counterculture counterintelligence, espionage for acidheads. As much Peter Max as Maxwell Smart. Intrigued? I can't tell you anything more until you've given me your password...What's that? You're already logged into your computer? Well, yeah, I guess to do that you would have had to use a pass--OK, just draw down the shades and turn on the lava lamp. Here are some intriguing and arresting examples of Jim Steranko's national security state psychedelia:
When you're a spy, they'll send you anywhere. You don't even have to know Jeff Bezos.
I admit I always get carried away with myself with these comic book posts, but it all looks so purty on a computer screen, don't you think? Speaking of comic books, you'll notice on the above cover in the upper right hand corner, this bit of censorship:
