Ragged Claws Network

Another selection of Corben comic art pages will go on sale Saturday 21 August 2010, at 12:00 noon, Central Standard Time. The sale includes 10 pages from Hellboy: The Crooked Man, 11 pages from Rip in Time (which I hope have been scanned and the files properly backed up, so a best-possible-quality new edition can be published at a later date), and 10 pages from Ghost Rider. The pages are up for “viewing only” now. The prices will be posted when the sale goes live on Saturday, the 21st.

If I had the money to purchase one item from the sale, I’d buy the original black-and-white art for the following page:

The following interview-based article on Richard Corben from the June 1993 issue of Airbrush Action was published at a time when Corben’s creative energy was almost entirely focused on his own Fantagor Press. The article includes a brief overview of Corben’s career to that point, technical information about how Corben used Paasche H and V airbrushes in conjunction with other media, and cool tidbits such as Corben’s recollection that the celebrated Bat out of Hell album cover took him only two days to produce.

And as a bonus, at the end, I’ve included a pair of images that don’t appear in the interview.

Enjoy!

This morning, I received an email announcement that original black-and-white comic art pages by Richard Corben are now up for preview at the Corben Studios Web site and will go on sale on Saturday 29 May 2010, at noon CST. [N.B.: Due to technical difficulties with the secure cart service, the Corben art sale has been stopped today, 29 May 2010, and will be rescheduled. Please consult the Corben site for updated information!] Prices will be posted when the sale goes live, and pages will be allocated on a first-come, first-serve basis: “the first person to complete the shopping cart, gets the page.” The sale includes pages from Hellboy: The Crooked Man, Aliens: Alchemy, and Rip in Time. Here’s an example of a page you could own:

And one final thought: let’s all hope somebody somewhere has good quality digital scans of all of these pages, with proper backups, because reprints scanned from printed comics always show it, and I don’t mean in a good way!

Just noticed that CBR news has a preview of the forthcoming collaboration between Mike Mignola and Richard Corben, entitled Hellboy: Double Feature of Evil. Mignola and Corben have worked together on several different Hellboy stories in the past few years — every one of which is worth adding to your bookshelf — so I think one can safely say that, at last, Corben has found a new regular collaborator (à la Jan Strnad) who is genuinely excited to work with him and fully capable of delivering compelling scripts that play to Corben’s strengths as an artist!

“Richard and I were talking about shorter stories,” Mignola explained to CBR. “Richard apparently likes drawing Hellboy, and my opinion is, as long as he wants to draw Hellboy, I will keep throwing stories to him.

“One of the things I said to him was, ‘Would you mind if I came up with a couple of shorter stories for you to do?’ Both of these were stories that had been knocking about in my head for a long time, and so Double Feature Of Evil was just us coming up with a name for a one-shot that would have two stories.”

“With Double Feature of Evil,” adds Hellboy editor Scott Allie, “there was some internal factor in Mike making him think about these stories more often, but the external factor is that Richard did such an excellent job on Crooked Man that we wanted to give him some more straight horror stories. A lot of Hellboy stories aren’t really horror stories. They’re monster stories or action adventure stories. Double Feature is a pair of horror stories that Richard can pull off just about better than anybody.”

Hellboy: Double Feature of Evil is scheduled for publication later this year.

BONUS LINK:

Dark Horse: Corben’s cover for Buzzard #1 by Eric Powell

The Luke Cage image is from 2002; the picture of Snoop is from 2010.

From the pages of Comix International #4 (Warren, 1976), here’s “The Believer,” with story by Budd Lewis and art by Richard Corben:

I’m a bit late to the party, but knocking about on the Web this morning I happily discovered that on October 2nd, 2009, the Directors of Spectrum, an annual showcase of “The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art,” announced that Richard Corben would receive the Spectrum‘s 2009 Grand Master Award. Previous recipients of the award include Frank Frazetta, Don Ivan Punchatz, Leo and Diane Dillon, James E. Bama, John Berkey, Alan Lee, Jean Giraud, Kinuko Y. Craft, Michael William Kaluta, Michael Whelan, H.R. Giger, Jeffrey Jones, Syd Mead, and John Jude Palencar. A biography and full appreciation of Corben appears in Spectrum 16, on sale now. Congratulations, Richard!

BONUS LINK:

Book Review: Spectrum 16: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art

From the library of yours truly:

BONUS LINK:

Figure Gallery at corbenstudios.com — 69 years old, and still going strong…

As advertised on the Corben Studios Web site, Odds and Ends is to be a 32-page, black-and-white collection of unfinished, cancelled, and abandoned projects as well as works in progress, including the second chapter of From the Pit, book and CD covers, and more. No specific release date has been announced, but if this little project does eventually come to fruition, it will be the first publication from Corben’s own Fantagor Press that we’ve seen in a long time.

Here’s a fun single-page comic, written by Robert Barrett, drawn by Richard Corben, featuring dopplegangers of Conan, Tarzan, and Prince Valiant:

According to The Most Complete Comicography of Richard Corben, “Duel of the Titans” was first published in the fourth issue of the venerable E.C. fanzine, Squa Tront, in 1970, and was reprinted eleven years later, in 1981, on page 25 of the only book on Richard Corben’s career and art, the long out-of-print (not to mention long out-of-date) Flights into Fantasy.