The major comics artist and creator Richard Corben has passed away. <\/p>\n
He came of age as an aspiring young artist in Sunflower, Kansas, and worked for a decade in making animations for business and industrial training purposes. But comics were his love, and from 1970 he produced many horror and science-fiction shorts for Eerie<\/em> and Creepy<\/em> magazine (now collected as Creepy Presents Richard Corben<\/em>) and underground comix titles, including short b&w adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft tales. His black-and-white adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “The Valley of the Worm” (1934) was perhaps the culmination of this period. This was the still highly-regarded Bloodstar<\/em> (1976), published as a single volume inspired by the French BD format, and was the first to describe itself as a “graphic novel” in the modern sense.<\/p>\n Corben worked for a while as the colourist on Will Eisner’s Spirit<\/em> magazine, and his own style flowered into full colour. This found a home in Metal Hurlant<\/em> and Heavy Metal <\/em>magazine, and such mass-market pulp-inspired work was also able to take full advantage of the uninhibited and anti-censorship mood of the 1973-1986 period. His finely painted and sensual airbrushed style became a well-known feature in the early Heavy Metal<\/em> magazine, and other titles as they introduced colour sections. But his signature colour style found an even larger audience when he created the classic album cover for Meatloaf’s best-selling rock album Bat out of Hell<\/em> (1977). As the times changed, from 1986\u20131994 Corben ran his own Fantagor Press to publish his work.<\/p>\n His colour and strong composition gained him a cult following over the years, but his black-and-white work is what most Lovecraftians will cherish him for. This is exemplified by his collected Haunt of Horror: Lovecraft<\/em> (2008), containing his short masterly adaptations done in fine black-and-white and printed on paper able to reproduce subtle gradations and shades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The major comics artist and creator Richard Corben has passed away. He came of age as an aspiring young artist …<\/p>\n