From Creepy #68 (January 1975), here’s “Anti-Christmas,” with story by Gerry Boudreau and art by Richard Corben:
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I invented a technique —my system of color overlays —which apparently nobody can understand, but it’s really very simple. The luminescent quality of my color overlays is derived from the way I combine the colors. I shoot the photomechanical separations myself, to a slightly higher contrast than a normal photo engraver would do. This makes the colors appear brighter. I’m excited when I do finally see the colors. I can see if my ideas work well or not so well.”
—Richard Corben in conversation with Brad Balfour,
Heavy Metal #53 (August 1981)
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Richard Corben comic art pages will go on sale via the official Corben website on Saturday 16 July 2011, at Noon, Central Time. The sale will include ten pages from Hellboy: The Crooked Man by Corben and Mike Mignola, ten pages from Corben’s Children of Fire (including the original black-and-white cover art for issue #3 — see above for the colour version), and ten pages from The Bodyssey by Corben and Simon Revelstroke. Right now, the pages are up for “viewing only.” The prices will be posted when the sale goes live. Click here to jump to the sale page.
The Eisner-winning dynamic trio of writer Mike Mignola, penciller/inker Richard Corben, and colourist Dave Stewart reunites for an original 56-page hardcover Hellboy graphic novel (ISBN-10: 1-59582-757-9; ISBN-13: 978-1-59582-757-9), available in November from Dark Horse. “Devastated over the loss of his luchador comrade to vampires,” writes the publisher, “Hellboy lingers in Mexican bars until he’s invited to participate in the ultimate wrestling match with a vicious Frankenstein monster!”
Corben’s unique method of producing full-colour art by combining a continuous-tone black-and-white grisaille (produced using airbrush, pen and ink, markers, pencil crayons, brushes and paint, etc.) with overlaid, handmade colour separations, gave his finished work a luminosity, intensity, and above all, a texture, that artists who relied on airbrush alone struggled to imitate; it also meant that all of the images produced via Corben’s process — including not only many classic covers but also entire graphic novels such as New Tales of the Arabian Nights, the multi-volume Den saga, and the Heavy Metal reprint of Bloodstar — only exist in colour in the printed versions. The cover of 1984 #1 is a case in point:
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Corben’s cover art for the debut album by Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, Bat Out of Hell, is explosive, iconic, classic. And since Bat Out of Hell is one of the best-selling albums of all time, I suspect that a great many people would recognize Jason Brashill’s cover to Judge Dredd 1996 Mega-Special as a homage to it. Still, I am delighted that the magazine’s editors acknowledged, on the indicia page, that the front cover art is “after MEATLOAF: Bat Out of Hell”; I am disappointed, however, that they didn’t see fit to mention Corben by name. Because technically speaking, it’s Corben’s art alone that Jason Brashill’s work is “after”; the typographical choices of the designer of the Bat Out of Hell cover have been completely ignored.
From Eerie #90 (February 1978), here’s “A Woman Scorned,” with story by Bruce Jones and art by Richard Corben:
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