Richard Corben—dinosaurs, rounded forms and a claymation aesthetic

 

This image shows all the factors I mentioned in the title that make Corben's work great. I left one thing out though (many actually)—his amazing use of color. He was a pioneer when it came to color in comic books in the 70s. He came up with some kind of crazy way of using fax machines (I think?) to create 3-color separation plates so he could get amazing never-before-seen color work in his stories, like the cover above. He basically drew the art in black and white and then created the color separation plates by hand, and he had no way to see what the results were going to look like until it was printed. But he had such an amazing art sensibility he knew how to do it. 

Here again you see one of his favorite juxtapositions—smooth beautiful female flesh against the rugged hide and sharp teeth of a dinosaur. Sometimes it was a different kind of monster, or a rotting zombie, but always the counterpoint of youth, flawless beauty and vulnerability against something rough and terrible or putrid and corrupted. 

He was definitely influenced by those Ray Harryhausen movies of the 50s 60s and 70s with whipping reptilian tails and scaly hides and swaying serpentine necks. He loved stopmotion animation, and I believe especially claymation, or at least a certain kind of visual aesthetic you often see in clay animation, with bright colors and bulging rounded forms. But he also loved the scaly hides and other textures, things you can't do in a claymation film because the moment you grab the puppet to animate, you'd mash out all the textures and details. But in his drawings he could have all of it together at once. 

There's almost always a cartoonish, caricatured thing going on, no matter how horrific or heroic the story is, and he mastered all of it, though often it seemed like he drew some panels hastily and let things go all wonky. We forgave him, because when he got to the big important ones, he was totally zoned in and able to create those colorful, sexy artistic monstrer dreams on paper that got us through a few decades. 

Here you can see that his tendency toward bulging rounded forms covers just about everything, from muscles and certain female body parts, to hair. He would hire models to pose for photographs and then draw from the pictures, and he always tried to choose models, both male and female, with these kinds of haircuts. If not he'd draw it that way. Many of his male characters were bald, and so were a few of the females. He also had a very 70's thing for military uniforms worn casually. He also sometimes made sculptures of the heads of his main characters that he'd hold in his left hand under a light to get shading, and draw with his right hand. He often did shading in a combination of either ink and charocal or ink and pencil. I believe this one was done with ink and pencil. 

Bloodstone, in black & white and in color. Another great thing about his comics work is the cinematic qualities. His sense of timing and camera movement is impeccable. 

One of my favorites was his story Mutant World, serialized in the Warren magazine 1984. It was, like many of his, the only color story in an otherwise black & white magazine. When Corben did color, it was a major event. In fact, at one point, Warren had him doing color for many of their best artists who normally drew in black & white. It was a glorious time. It reminds me of Technicolor, which was more beautiful than the standard color film stocks when they came out in the 60's (and still to this day). It was difficult to do, required massive amounts of light, and also required a Technicolor specialist to be on set all the time to make sure everything was being done just right, but the results were aesthetically beautiful in a way that normal color film stock just never allowed. Very much liike Corben's strange beautiful comic art.