[indistinct chatter]
[Scott] Like most comic nerds, I would go to the comic shop,
and I would flip through pretty much every comic
just to see if there was some little gem somewhere.
What is this?
It looks like some kind of
scrawny Doc Savage-y-looking guy
with a rocket pack. And he's got that
Commando Cody helmet. This is amazing.
[Scott] And I did something that I don't think
I've ever done before.
I bought a book
for the back cover.
[Jaime] I saw the Rocketeer and I was just like,
"God, this guy can draw."
[Thomas] This was a portal into a world of imagination
and artistry that turned me on in a way that nothing else has.
[Bob] That was the world's introduction to Dave,
and it's like, "Well where the hell did he come from?"
[whimsical music]
[calm piano music]
[Dave] I am a real perfectionist to where I know
what I want out of it,
and I demand everything out of myself.
I want to keep trying new things, new angles,
new ways of telling a story.
[Rebecka] Dave definitely lived his life the way he drew.
Everything had to be perfect to a fault.
[Glen] To this day, I don't know that anyone has achieved
what he's achieved with the brush.
Each character has a soul.
This is very difficult for an artist to give a soul
to the character you draw.
[Nathan] Every artist wants to make a connection with people.
They want to do their thing, put it out there,
and hope and pray that somebody cares.
[Adam] Dave's work really opened up my eyes
to a wider horizon.
[David] Dave is really, in some ways,
single-handedly responsible for bringing
the world's attention
back to Bettie Page.
[Danny] Like any artist and the reason
he's getting a documentary made about him,
is because his art says a lot.
[soft music]
[Greg] My dearest and very best friend, Dave Stevens,
was born on July 29th, 1955,
in Southern California.
We started together in kindergarten.
I didn't have a father growing up,
so Dad Stevens was pretty much my father.
And Dave was like my brother.
[William] Dave's Dad was the sweetest, nicest guy.
Dave got his tremendous, good looks from his mom.
[John] His parents were religious, and he wasn't.
Oh, well, I should rephrase that.
He wasn't all that religious.
[Greg] Dad Stevens was very stoic
and I think that had an influence on David.
[Jennifer] The art gene came from our dad.
Dave had described him as kind of a frustrated artist.
[Greg] Dave took it to the[unintelligible], whereas, you know,
his dad was just doing it as a hobby.
He was a unique character.
He had a vision born of America's pop culture.
[Dave] As far back as I can remember,
I was only interested in bizarre stuff...
[chuckles] you know,
monsters and rocket ships
and things that aren't really of this world.
And of course, he loved to draw. That was all he ever did.
First, I wanted to do cartoons, moving comics,
and then I wanted to do comic-comics.
And then when I got older, I wanted to do painting
and fine art and become an artiste.
I would go over to his house, and he'd have some layout
and he would be complaining. And I said,
"What's wrong with this? This is perfect."
And he said, "No, it's not."
[Dave] The only sort of ticket I had
was the fact that I could draw.
My freshman year of high school,
my teacher would tell people,
"Oh, yeah, David's forte is the figure."
It was sort of duly noted
by each successive teacher in art that I had that,
"Oh, watch this kid."
[Greg] He made this for me as kind of his going away.
He told me in parting that he's gonna keep an eye on me.
I cherish this, this is very important to me.
[Dave] In February or March of '72, my family moved to San Diego.
I went to City College downtown for a couple of semesters
and took some art classes.
I knew that I needed more schooling.
There was a lot of class assignments,
things that weren't necessarily
what he would be drawing
if he had his choice.
There's no way he would've decided,
"Hey, I'm going to draw a loaf of bread." [chuckles]
[Dave] You need to learn about composition and design
and everything, from the ground up.
I had no real drawing skills, I could fake it,
but I couldn't really do anatomy.
And I knew nothing about perspective.
I just was completely helpless.
[David] In San Diego,
Dave was at those early Comic-Con's
and got to meet both-- some of his artistic heroes,
but then also other young guys who sort of
rose up in the business with him.
One of the things about Comic-Con is that
people who might never have met each other in life
not only met, but their whole lives
changed because of
being at that one event for a few days.
[Brinke] When I first got involved with the San Diego Comic-Con,
I was 18 years old,
and the first person I saw was Dave Stevens.
And I'm like, "Ooh, he's cute."
Little did I know that we would get married
seven years later.
I met Dave working on the San Diego Comic-Con.
We both did a lot of drawings for the Program Book.
Dave was someone I noticed right away
from the convention booklet.
I was immediately taken with his inking.
[Dave] I did little, tiny ads for papers and stuff.
You know, whoever would pay for some kid
that didn't really know what he was doing.
[Wray] I also hired him to work for me.
I had penciled a ad for Bob's Comics.
He, of course, pulled it together
when he inked it and just made it beautiful.
[Scroggy] Everybody, who ever met Dave
in his early days
recognized his talent,
even though they were still in a formative state.
[Dave] At the '73 Con, Neal Adams was
doing these informal portfolio reviews.
He said, "Are those your samples?" And I said, "Yeah,
but you-- you're getting ready to leave. You don't have time."
And he says, "Well, will you take the time I give you?"
Neal Adams was enormously discouraging to some people
who he just simply felt had no talent
and ought to be told that bluntly.
[Richard] He came to some black and white ink drawings
and then I was astonished to see
that the artist was Dave Stevens.
[Dave] He flipped through it, looking and commenting on each piece,
and at the end of it, he said, "You can ink for Marvel."
[chuckles] Just, just like that.
He said, "I'll send it back east."
I think he was 18 at the time.
I was the grand old age of 23 or 4,
and Dave caught his attention.
[Dave] It took maybe a couple of months
before I got the samples back.
There was no letter,
just a note on the outside
saying, "not ready," underlined.
But at least I knew that the stuff got looked at.
I'm kind of glad I didn't get any work then
because I needed at least two or three more years
to hone my chops with the brush.
I just didn't have it.
My break into comics was with Russ Manning.
He was looking for somebody to assist on the Tarzanstrip,
so, I went up and he seemed to think I'd fit the bill.
[Wray] Russ figured out early on that Dave could ink
the whole thing and make him look better
than he actually looked.
I worked for him in 75
and part of 76.
I suffer burnout really easily, really quick.
At that point,
I was so completely dried out and...
[chuckles] ...exhausted
after a year and a half of
deadline, deadline, deadline.
I just knew I didn't have the temperament for it.
I just decided to turn to film work
and storyboard gigs and advertising.
In fact, why I moved to LA in the late '70s,
it was the only kind of work that I could get with my skills.
In all of my experiences in animation,
I never had once, say, anybody say,
"Where'd you go to school?"
They want to see the work.
And if it's good
and you don't seem like a nut,
you've got the job.
[Dave] I was 22 at the time
when I started at Hanna-Barbera.
[Hanna-Barbera theme music]
In animation, it didn't matter where you came from
as long as you could mimic the style
on whatever model sheet you were looking at.
[Mark] It was a fun place to be if you could deal with the fact
that there was always someone running around yelling,
"Faster, cheaper, faster, cheaper."
A lot of artists were not happy to be part of an assembly line.
[Dave] When I first was on my own in Hollywood,
I was all enthusiasm, I was all gung ho,
and if somebody said, "Can you do this?"
I would say, "Absolutely.
[laughs]
I can start today."
[Wray] When Dave was at Hanna-Barbera,
he was doing the layout.
And layout in the animation process
is a series of poses designed for the animator to work from.
[Shaw!] Here's one of Dave's layouts.
This shows just how detailed Dave was
because the typical layout is more of a sketch,
but there's no real flair to it like this.
Dave was the slowest guy in the building
and he would have been the first one to tell you that.
I'd be up visiting the guys in the layout department.
An artist would go, "Oh, God I'm tired.
I did 80 scenes yesterday."
And somebody else would say, "Oh, I did 60 scenes."
And Dave would say, "I did five."
[Shaw!] Dave wasn't goofing off.
He was working as hard as anybody
and he got a lot of grief from the other artists.
The key was, he was by far the producer's favorite artist.
Doug Wildey was an outstanding cartoonist
who created Jonny Quest.
He kind of became Dave's mentor.
Doug had this real dry wit and also was a bit cantankerous.
He was a true curmudgeon.
A lot of that rubbed off on Dave.
Fortunately, he was doing non-creative stuff with
a lot of like-minded, extremely talented people,
and all of them fed into Dave's skill level and his goals.
He was overqualified for the job,
but he liked the comradery
of working alongside Russ Heath
or a Mike Sekowsky
or an Alex Toth.
[Geofrey] You can't imagine the talent that they had there,
but it never reflected on the screen
because they had to do them so fast.
And they were so cheap.
But man, they had some guys.
Phew.
A lot of the comic book artists
who worked at Hanna-Barbera,
a great example of what
Dave did not want to grow up to be.
Because there were wonderful artists there
who were spending their lives chasing job after job,
doing work that they had no emotional interest in.
One of the reasons I went back to advertising was just,
I got so fed up and frustrated every time
I went in to try and get something
past the directors and past the animators.
It's not really encouraging.
[Mark] Dave had his whole career ahead of him
in a business which was becoming more artist friendly.
[Dave] Comics were fun,
but I certainly didn't want to make it my
life's work.
I only got into it when people would
run into deadlines and they would call me up and say,
"Hey, can you take four pages of this story,"
you know, and I would fill in on
Star Wars or whatever it was.
[Wray] Rick Hoberg did tight pencils and I inked.
We only had a week to do it so,
lots of different people worked on that job,
but the main helper was Dave.
We knew if he inked the close ups of Mark Hamill,
and Harrison Ford, that they would be spot on.
Dave's also inked Russ Manning on the Star Warsstrips.
[Dave] Whenever I ink somebody else's work,
I don't just sit down and mechanically
go over the pencil lines.
I'll go over it and see what I think
needs to be brought out and what needs to be toned down
and make it something that I enjoy working on.
And if it's bad drawing, I will go back
and erase all of the drawing.
And if it's good drawing,
I'll try and make it better.
[Scroggy] If you knew Dave's style
you could really see his rendering
in those Star Warsstrips.
[Dave] The only time I had gone ahead
and done anything in comics at all
after working for Russ was Aurora for Sanrio.
They were putting together a book for Japanese audiences
geared towards young girls.
[Scroggy] It was the first time
Dave was being compensated well enough
to spend the time, to get
the work to be the best it could be.
He proceeded to take so long the company had gone belly up.
The whole operation had stopped
functioning long before he turned it in.
I started modeling for Dave in 1977.
I think that I was the first model he'd ever worked with.
[Scroggy] For Dave, having Brinke Stevens as the model was an inspiration,
not only commercial reasons but emotional reasons.
That was certainly part of the courting process.
For a time, she was the only female at Comic-Con.
[Jackie] Brinke was in charge of the masquerade
and she would put on performances as
the intermission.
[William] Dave noticed her and they began a relationship.
I don't know if she exactly played hard to get,
but it took him a while.
[Brinke] Dave had been in love with me pretty much
since the first time he saw me.
I really felt like I was a muse to him.
He loved to photograph me.
Most of the time though,
he wanted me to model nude.
He said it was so that he could draw
on his own clothing later.
But I think he just really wanted to see me naked.
[laughs]
[Jennifer] Before they got engaged,
Dad was exasperated with him. It was like
marry the girl or break up with her,
make something happen.
A few years ago, I shared a studio
with Bill Stout and, uh, Richard Hescox
and we worked together very well.
We were hoping to have the West Coast version
of the East Coast studio, which had Jeff Jones,
Bernie Wrightson, Barry Smith, and Mike Kaluta.
Bernie could draw like a king, draw circles around the moon.
We initially started talking about sharing a studio together,
he and I,
but it was an economic necessity
having other people come in on it.
We started to think, "Wow,
this is something kind of special happening."
We decided, "How about we do our own powerhouse team
with us three guys?"
It was just this wonderful synthesis
of our three different personalities.
It was, uh, inspirational to be in the same room
with two other artists that you respect.
You kind of bounce ideas off of each other.
We became the hottest studio in LA.
Top-name film directors, actors, writers,
magicians, musicians.
They all wanted to see the studio or hire us to work for them.
By virtue of the fact that each one of you is
very good at what he does,
it keeps you on your toes.
It makes you want to do your best,
your very best work.
We were very open about
criticizing each other's works.
If something was wrong,
we would tell you.
[John] Dave learned a lot from those guys.
But it did, I think, bother him, you know,
a little bit that he wasn't professionally trained.
[Richard] Dave, of course, started with his innate talent.
It was there.
It was enough for him
to be self-taught and still be good.
Whether that led to him feeling insecure,
I'm not sure that that was something he should have worried about.
Gilbert and I was like, "What do you need school for? Just draw."
That was, cause that was where we came from. "Just do it, man. Look here.
There's your piece of paper, there's your pencil,"
and Dave was just like...
[chuckles]
[Dave] I always felt really, really outgunned
by Stout and other artists that could compose a scene
and I really had to struggle with it.
I didn't really start to smarten up
about growing as an artist until around the time
I was doing storyboards onRaiders.
[William] When I was working on Conan the Barbarian
and moonlighting on Raiders of the Lost Ark,
it quickly became clear that I need to totally focus on Conan.
I went to Steven, and I said, "Look, I can recommend a friend of mine to replace me.
His name is Dave Stevens. I think he'd do a great job.
Plus, he loves that period of time."
Steven hired him on the spot
and that's how Dave started boarding for Spielberg.
Dave's perfectionism was certainly one of the things
that I believe made him great.
The only reason it held him back,
and he would always admit this, he was not a fast artist.
He was making it perfect to his standard,
and I don't know if that ever happened.
Every panel had to be a work of art.
[Dave] Steven would hand me his little X's and 0's
and sticks and, and say this is what I want the scene
-to look like, and... -[man 1] Mm-hmm.
And then I would draw all the action.
[Richard] Steven Spielberg would think that they were great and say,
"Oh, more detail, more detail.
I want these to be the best storyboards
that have ever been drawn."
Dave knew that was because Steven Spielberg
had every intention of taking those storyboards home with him.
Lucas would come and go, "What are you doing?
We got to, you know, we got to, come on, come on.
These things are just down and dirty."
Which storyboards generally are,
they, they don't have to be pretty.
So, he's between the two of them.
One to tell them to take longer than the other one coming
and telling him to hurry it up.
It kind of made him a little crazy.
[Brinke] He was making really good money for a young man.
And he said, "Let's get married.
I can finally afford it now."
[Jennifer] The two of them enjoyed playing house,
but I don't think they ever talked about
what they really wanted
out of a marriage with one another.
[Brinke] Dave and I got married in July of 1980.
We had less than 40 people at the wedding.
We wrote our own vows,
and my mother made sandwiches later,
which we ate back at the apartment
that we shared.
So, it was pretty low-key,
just really romantic.
[John] In the beginning, I wasn't too sure of her
'cause I thought she was taking advantage of Dave.
But Dave had a long talk with me about her and said,
"Look, this is the way it is." I'm like, "Okay.
As long as I know you're not getting screwed over.
Brinke's a nice person,
I just didn't want to see you get hurt."
[Brinke] As soon as we got married,
things changed.
Dave did not want me to have a career.
He wanted me to be a wife.
[Jennifer] There was a lot of conflict from the get-go.
I remember my parents being on the phone
with Dave a lot.
Dave just talked about what a...
[chuckles] disaster their marriage was.
[Brinke] He especially didn't like me having an acting career,
doing glamor modeling for photographers.
He just said, "We were young. We shouldn't have done it."
[Brinke] I came home one day, and they were
carting Dave's furniture out.
Dave said, "I'm leaving you before you can leave me."
And he did.
Even though Dave and I got divorced in 1982,
we stayed best friends and lovers
for the rest of the 80's.
I modeled a lot for him.
And by leaving me, he forced me to go out
and make something of my life.
Through the love and the divorce,
Dave got me where I am today.
And I thank him for that.
[Dave] Between animation and storyboarding and advertising,
the question of comics never came up again at all
until the San Diego Con in '81.
Dave knew Bill Schanes and Steve Schanes
from Pacific Comics
from his association with Comic-Con.
[Dave] They just had a book that they were about to launch
with Mike Grell calledStarslayer,
but I think it was short by six pages.
Prior to Pacific Comics,
the comics world had been very oppressive to creators.
[Dave] The Schanes' said, "You sign this deal with us.
It's only two installments of half a dozen pages.
How tough could it be? And you'd own it."
I wouldn't have to surrender up in perpetuity all rights.
What are the ingredients of success?
It's the artist, it's the creator,
it's the characters, it's the setting,
it's how it's presented, it's the time
that it's unleashed on the world.
[John] He liked serials. He liked he adventure theme.
The good guy getting the girl in the end,
and he incorporated that whole thing into his comic.
Jungle Girls, Mask Villains, Rocket Men.
[Richard] Commander Cody, Sky Marshal of the Universe.
I grew up on those and Rocket Man was my hero
when I was about five. You know, I made a little mask and flew around the backyard
like everybody did, I'm sure.
We were also young and clueless
that Dave thought it was in the public domain,
but none of us were sure.
So Dave said, "Well, I'll take it home
and fix it up, so we don't sued."
[Wray] He probably looked at something like Commander Cody and said,
"I really loved that as a kid, but it sure looks dorky now,
how can I take it and do it for today's generation?"
[Dave] It's about a pilot, an aviator,
who stumbles onto a device in the pre-war years
that enables him to fly without a plane.
I wanted to base it in more of a real world.
Just normal people with this one gadget thrown into the mix,
and how would these people respond
and deal with it.
He took everything that he liked.
The cars, the airplanes, the movie serial aspect.
That taught me that you can put
what you kind of love all into one, one work.
I felt that maybe if I could put together a good enough idea,
the Rocketeermay have a chance
and again it may not.
[Richard] All of us artists,
we're egocentric because
we actually think other people might want to see what we do.
Then every time we're in the middle of a painting
or a drawing, it's like, is that good enough?
[Dave] I work until I get a good drawing.
Sometimes it takes one day, two days, three days, four days.
You know, it depends on what the drawing is
and how much trouble I am having with it.
[Scroggy] Dave said his harsh self-criticism
of his drawing came from the flashes of inspiration
where he saw how good it could be.
[Jim] It's a tremendous amount of work
and more work than comic books deserve.
Comic books are not made to be fine art pieces.
[John] Oh, my God.
He would noodle out something on a page
and go, "Wow, that's pretty good."
Then, he'll do it like ten minutes. [gibberish]
"Okay. I want the pose like this to look like that."
Six months later, it's like, "I'm still inking the eyebrow
and I'm erasing it every other day and re-inking it." That's like,
"Ohhh, you're killing me."
So yeah, his process was very lengthy.
[Michael] You know when it's right, you know when it's not right.
It may not be wrong or bad, but you go,
hmm, something.
[Thomas] Dave was making his art for himself.
He wanted it to be the way that he wanted it to be.
And he worked best with no deadlines
and no, um, expectations.
[Wray] Being an artist, a lot of that is kind of like
living a fantasy world of what you really want to be.
You're not gonna be an adventurer,
so you draw adventures. Maybe you won't make movies,
but you'll make your own little movies on your comic book page.
It's wonderful to entertain children
with children's books,
but if you can entertain and enthrall an adult
over and over and over again, there's no price on that.
I would get a new issue of the Rocketeer.I'd read it,
and then I'd go back and just each page, take it in,
just enjoying it.
I think and I hope I'm catering to a different audience.
People who just want to read something that's kind of fun.
It was, uh, an immediate success.
[man 2] Hey, it's the Rocketeer.
[Scroggy] It started off as popular as you could imagine
and grew from there.
One of our real supporters was a comic store in Las Vegas.
[William] Dave was going to do guest signings
there of his Rocketeerstuff.
The time Dave was supposed to be there had passed,
and they were waiting. "Where's Dave? Where's Dave? Where's Dave?"
[Scroggy] Dave decided he was going to
dress for the occasion.
Suddenly, in the distance, they see
this beautifully restored '30s car
with Dave dressed as The Rocketeer
riding on the sideboards.
And I thought, "Man, that's really
a fantastic way to enter."
[Jim] Nobody that I'd seen has had as much fun with it
as Dave did.
Dave's aesthetics was all in storytelling.
That's why the characters in there were, there were unique.
[Glen] Cliff was a reluctant hero.
He was kind of bratty and selfish
and then kind of ended up
being a good person in spite of himself.
[Dave] You know, somebody who's really not that special,
but has a-- an inherent quality that's good,
and I think everybody does. And every now and then
when put to the test,
it shows.
And he doesn't have any superpower,
but he comes through with a little...
[chuckles] broken arm here and there.
[Bruce] That's the thing that kind of makes him an interesting character.
He's a schmuck.
You know, Cliff is a schmuck.
He's this very self-centered guy
and he's kind of scrawny
and he's good-looking like Dave,
and he looks like Dave,
he looks like a young Dave,
but he's not a hero.
[Mark] The early sketches, with the helmet off,
he didn't look that much like Dave.
With every proceeding sketch
he looked a little more like Dave.
The Rocketeer, even though it was about a rocket pack,
was really the story of us.
Minus the rocket pack, this is Dave Steven's life.
He put the people and the things he liked into it.
Doug Wildey is Peevy, and of course Bettie Page.
If the character was Dave Stevens,
the ideal woman was Bettie Page.
He was fascinated by the 1940s,
1950s model, Bettie Page.
And Bettie Page had been totally forgotten by everybody.
He used her as, um, as the image
for the Rocketeer's girlfriend,
Bettie.
She's been my ideal female figure
since I was a kid.
[Brinke] I really had no idea who Bettie Page was.
Then Dave showed me some 1950s pinup magazines that she was in,
and I got it.
[Michael] I don't know what he was seeing
or what he was experiencing, except that
I knew it was genuine,
absolutely genuine.
[Olivia] Bettie's like the beginning of it all.
Marilyn Monroe had predecessors, but Bettie didn't.
She brought a whole new sexuality to the forefront,
and then became a cult type of personality
during the '70s and '80s.
[Brinke] She had a playful,
but sultry, girl-next-door kind of quality.
She looked like she'd be equally good
in the bedroom as in the kitchen.
For me, it was like, "Who is this woman?
God, she's got like the brightest smile
and the most wholesome attitude I've ever seen for a gal who did
skin flicks and burlesque.
[Olivia] She's playing it to the hilt,
and she's doing it with great sense of humor.
[Richard] Being around Dave, you couldn't help
but seeing photographs of her and you couldn't help seeing
her show up in his drawing of women.
[Dave] For something that I originally started
as a kind of a little private thing for me, you know,
I know it's Bettie Page. [chuckles]
Uh, ended up to where
most of the mail, it seems like every other letter,
mentions her by name.
Even a lot of the younger kids know her.
[Chris] I would probably have to say
I first became aware of Bettie Page from Dave's work.
I never even knew who she was or had seen a photograph of her or anything.
[Laura] I remember seeing Dave's art first,
before I realized Bettie Page was an actual
human being and not a pinup girl,
you know, not somebody's fantasy artwork.
[Geofrey] Most people knew her from the Rocketeer.
And for them to suddenly discover
that she actually existed.
A lot of these fans, that would be like finding out
Spiderman really did exist.
[Adam] Sometimes you wander into these truths backwards.
And then all of a sudden, you realize
she's been in front of your eyeballs
forever.
[Dave] Steve Schanes called me and says,
"We have a lot of fan mail here."
[chuckles]
When he told me that look, these people are all assuming
that there's going to be follow-up.
I wasn't prepared to do that even for one more.
Well, to the Schaneses, I mean, they smelled profit,
if they could convince me to do it.
[Michael] His astoundment
went to the fact that he had to produce more.
There wasn't enough Rocketeer
to support an ongoing periodical,
let alone monthly.
For Dave to maintain anything
remotely approaching that schedule
was just impossible.
They just say, give us any Rocketeer
by such and such a date.
[chuckles]
And, and I never do.
We always blow the deadline by at least a month.
Part of the frustration we had with Dave's speed
was because the market was clamoring for more.
[Mark] We had to say, please turn the work in,
we must turn the work in.
That was what you did as Dave's editor.
[Scroggy] We tried threats.
We tried cajoling. We tried bribery.
And Dave was just immune to it.
He had almost finished an entire Rocketeerstory,
and there's one panel left that had a bulldog in it
and that bulldog was completely inked except for one leg.
He must have gone back to that paw
I don't know how many times and redrawn it
because he wasn't happy with it.
His favorite drawing tool was his eraser.
[William] It was just driving me nuts. I was like, "Dave, just ink it.
Just ink it. You, you'll be done with the book.
[Richard] "Just finish it and you'll get paid."
Clearly, he would have been more productive
if he could just kind of let things go,
but then he wouldn't be Dave.
That's part of what makes his stuff so good,
is how kind of polished and beautiful it is.
It's like a, like a diamond, you know? You can't rush a diamond.
[Richard] Later when people were appreciating
his perfectionism, it was paying off.
It was in the earlier days when he was trying to be
"a comic book artist" that it held him up.
As time went on, especially with comics,
he just became more and more frustrated,
wanting to make sure that everything was there.
[Dave] The only grief I've had really has been on the printing end of it.
It's a trash medium. [chuckles]
Newsprint, toilet paper
with water down color and water down inks. So...
I just have to take what I get
and hope it comes out, at least readable.
The joke on Dave is
his fixation on an end result.
He spent months
to get the right color paint for his bathroom.
Meanwhile, he's putting off deadlines
and he's putting off work
and he's avoiding work is what it amounted to.
But it had to be right.
[Thomas] You sense that Dave had the reputation
of being so slow, and so meticulous
that some people were reluctant to hire him.
And I'm sure that he lost a lot of gigs that way.
[Dave] I kept telling them,
"Look, at best
it's going to be bimonthly
and maybe not even that."
They didn't understand why I didn't just quit...
-[chuckles] all my other freelance gigs -[interviewer laughs]
and do nothing but this strip.
And I kept thinking, well, it's simple economics.
I would starve.
I think for everything it was $150 a page,
the writing, the penciling, the inking, the coloring, all of it.
Those early days were kind of like the wild, wild west for comics.
The publishers were working a lot of my shoestrings.
I mean they had some money,
but they went out on that proverbial ledge like,
"I'm going to publish ten titles"
and if seven click then we're good,
but if only four click we're screwed.
[Schreck] Pacific was distributing their own books,
which is a bad thing to do.
[Dave] Eventually it all caught up with them
and they just imploded, you know, bankruptcy. This is in '84.
Within a matter of several months, Eclipse contacted me.
They ended up publishing the last issue as a one-off.
People kept bugging him about making
a Rocketeercollection
out of those short chapters.
Dave didn't think he could do it by himself.
He called me Hurricane Hernandez because he would say,
"Draw this," and I would draw it,
and then he'd go, "Oh, you're done."
[chuckles] One of the pages he gave me
was Betty tied up in the back of a car. I remember asking him,
"You don't want to draw Betty tied up?" [chuckles]
And he was like, "No, no, it's great. It's great. Go ahead."
I was like, "I thought this would have been your favorite page."
[Jessie] Dave needed a production artist for the hardback Rocketeer.
I describe it as being a midwife.
Dave has done all the work of producing this baby
and he just needs a little help delivering it.
And that's what I did.
Dave was getting ready
to re-color the collection.
So, he needed somebody to work cheap and fast
and he gave me a page to try out.
And he said, "Don't get fancy. Don't try to show off."
And then I immediately did exactly th-- exactly the opposite.
He looked at it and he went, "Yeah, you really screwed it up."
[chuckles]
The rest of the page looked kind of okay.
He said, "I think we can work with this.
Yeah, you've got the job if you want it."
I was like, "Hey! I'm working
with Dave Stevens."
So, so, that was awesome.
[Jaime] I helped him finish the book.
I stayed at his house for two or three days
and we just drew back-to-back.
And all the work paid off.
The Rocketeer Graphic Album sold out,
and Dave won awards.
[Bruce] Right after he started getting famous and more popular,
he was doing lots and lots of covers.
And it seemed like every time he did a cover,
he would, like, top himself.
One of my favorite pieces of Dave's was
the cover he did for Sheena.
It was arguably one of the best covers
Dave ever did.
My favorite is that cover for Crossfire and Rainbow.
Has girls.
Has a celebrity humor,
a serious inking.
He's got it all.
[Maria] Planet Comics One.
It's absolutely great because of all the facial expressions,
the body language.
[Wray] Alien Worlds.
He used my sister as the model,
where the girl's climbing out of their crashed rocket.
The Airboycover with Valkyrie, that was amazing.
The Marilyn Monroe cover of Crossfireis astonishing.
[Olivia] There's a lot that I adored.
I love Dave's Vampirella.
The Mr. Monstercover is gorgeous.
That is a favorite of mine.
DNAgent'scover with Rainbow with her legs up.
It's so simple, but it's so beautiful.
Her hair, and the expression on her face.
And that's one of the things
that first spoke to me is like,
"Wow, if you really have a good grasp of character,
and you've got the skill set, you can just make a, a drawing
of somebody just sitting there, sing.
[Mark] It is so perfect in every way.
Every eyelash is exactly right.
There is no way you could improve that drawing,
although I'm sure given enough time,
Dave would have thought of hundreds.
[Bob] There were some shenanigans going on at Eclipse,
and it left a real bad taste in Dave's mouth.
[Dave] I did a smattering of covers and then left
as soon as I could.
Comico came along in '87 or '88?
Bob Schreck was the editor, and he had contacted me
because we had known each other. And he said, "Look, these guys will publish it,
and they seem solid." [chuckles]
We're like, "Yeah, the Rocketeer, Dave Stevens.
I don't have to think about this. Let's go."
[Adam] The Rocketeer Adventure Magazinefrom Comico
was the first new Rocketeerstory in several years.
[Dave] Comico paid okay for those days,
but there was never any backend in terms of royalties or anything like that.
[Schreck] It was another one of those things
where we thought we knew everything was happening,
but, uh, you know...
we hit that wall and that was it.
The finances were gone, and we folded.
[Dave] After Comico went bust
and this guy came in
and seized their assets
or purchased them
and started kind of soliciting
for additionalRocketeer books,
that he hadn't even talked to me about.
[David] Dave's work was creator-owned. He wasn't going to
just work for just some guy
who happened to buy the name Comico.
[Dave chuckles] He was just a clueless guy.
He had no rights to the character at all,
contractually.
The last issue I was working on
went in a drawer,
until this guy went away.
[John] I said, "Geez, why don't we do a pinup?
We can sell it as a print, and we can make some money."
Oh, he was excited about that. "Sure. Let's do it."
He got his models and took photos
and did Bettie's Bath.
[Michael] I admire Betty's Bath.
Especially if you get to see the original
and you get to look into those eyes and going,
"Whoa..."
Dave was a master
of respectfully portraying women,
and even with Betty's Bath, where she's naked
but she's covered up.
Is it sexual?
I don't know, I don't care.
It's so good that it doesn't really matter.
One time, Dave says to me,
"Hey, would you like to see the perfect female body?"
We went to this shabby, crummy little dive,
and there were beautiful women walking around in bikinis or less.
Finally, I said, "Okay, I give up.
Which one is it?" He said, "It's not one.
Imagine that girl's legs, and that girl's torso."
[Dave] It's not one model but a couple.
And you're taking the best aspects of each.
And just Frankenstein this thing together.
Whatever it is that you see in your mind's eye.
Some of my best pieces have been done in that way.
My sister Amanda posed for Dave several times.
She was built like Bettie Page on the backside.
If you look at his early work
for about the first ten years,
you start to see my body there.
Like Betty's Bath, it's very obvious.
[Dave] If it's there in the model, you just heighten it.
You make the eyes bigger,
you make the lips fuller. You, you know,
make the cheeks more hollow or, or more arched.
Dave was really obsessed with quality.
He was a pain in the ass. Oh my God!
We had to scrap an entire print run
because he didn't like the way the paper looked.
So, we had to go on a different paper,
and I said, "Here's the paper, Dave.
Would you like to squeeze it?"
I got a call from John Landis one day
to storyboard this music video
with Michael Jackson called Thriller.
And I said, "John, I am up to my ears in work,
but I've got this great studio-mate, Dave Stevens."
[Jennifer] I don't think we really knew
how big of a deal that Thriller video was.
I mean, nobody made 20-minute-long videos at that time.
That was just unheard of.
I said, "So, how did the meeting go? Very strange.
The whole meeting took place in his bathroom."
I'm like, "Really?
You were in the bathroom with Michael Jackson
for a couple of hours?"
-He says, "You can't tell anyone, anyone... -[Bob chuckles]
Where that meeting took place."
I said, "Are you kidding?
I'm going to tell everyone."
[Richard] After the Rocketeerbecame a comic book sensation,
the idea of making it into a movie was
certainly something that was being bandied around.
[Dave] It was optioned first by director Steve Miner
at the end of '83 I think.
He renewed it for another year,
but by '85 we hadn't come up with a story
we liked, either one of us.
[Danny] Paul De Meo and I met in college.
He probably was the first one who picked up The Rocketeer.
The only writing professor
that Paul and I ever had was John Milius, he's the only one.
And the best advice he gave, which I give to my own students is,
"Write the movie you want to see the most."
[Dave] I met up with Danny Bilson
and Paul De Meo in '85,
through Jessie Horsting.
[Jessie] He said, "Will you go with me
into this meeting?" And I said,
"Sure, I'll go with you.
Let's just listen to see
what they have to say for themselves."
"Hey Dave, you ever heard of this guy called The Creeper,
Rondo Hatton?
And it was like, we had said
some magic word or something.
Dave was,
"I always wanted to do The Creeper."
[Dave] They and I just immediately hit it off.
[Danny] We were all just kids who didn't have much money.
Dave gave us a free option on the movie.
We never paid a nickel
for the six years
from that time until it became a movie,
that was just a friend agreement.
[Jessie] And they were very excited at the idea of The Rocketeer
because they saw another Raiders of the Lost Arkin it.
[Danny] Dave and Paul and I
put together a treatment
for what the story of the movie would be.
It wasn't this can be your Batmanor Superman.
We're pitching it as an adventure movie,
like Doc Savage or Indiana Jones.
[Dave] And then I was contacted by a director
named William Dear
who was just getting started
doing a film called
Harry and the Henderson's
so, we kind of formed
a little team
between the four of us.
How do you take
this masterpiece of comics
and move it to the screen,
and yet not lose
the flavor that made it so popular?
[Danny] Was it about Betty? Was it about the airplanes?
Was it about Cliff?
I think for Dave Stevens, it was
Betty, airplanes, Cliff.
And then for us, of course, it had to be Cliff,
Betty,
airplanes. [chuckles]
[Dave] '86 would have been when we started making
the rounds to every studio.
Within a matter of a few months, we'd gone everywhere.
[Jennifer] Dave was getting frustrated at
not hitting the bullseye
on getting anybody to pick up the Rocketeer.
[Dave] We saved Disney for the last because,
you know, we knew that we wouldn't make any money there.
At a certain point, Steven Spielberg wanted to make The Rocketeer.
[Dave] Steven said, "If Disney doesn't want the thing
or they're not going to give you a good deal,
I'll take it. I'll take it right now."
Spielberg had everything to do
with opening that door so he could sell that product to Disney.
[Dave] Word got back to Disney that Spielberg had tossed his hat in the ring.
[chuckles]
Things got kind of nasty
for a split second.
[Jackie] I was having conversations with Dave
about negotiating with Disney.
He said, "Well, I still can't sit down."
[chuckles softly]
[Dave] We're just going to have to all bite the bullet,
uh, if we want to get the thing made.
Honey, I Shrunk The Kids was my first film.
The picture was a hit
and Disney basically said,
"Any other projects you, you might want to do?"
And I said, "Yeah, there's this graphic novel
called The Rocketeer."
I did not know at the time that Disney
already had the rights
and was involved with some phase
of pre-production with Bill Dear.
Dave had a little story in mind,
you know, very character-driven,
but Bill was thinking blockbusters,
you know, so they kind of didn't dovetail.
[Joe] Before I knew it, we started our design phase
and developing the script
with Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo.
They must've done four
or five or six rewrites at the thing.
At some point, we had another couple of writers come in.
It's sort of typical of the way Hollywood scripts evolved.
In those days it would be like,
"First writer-- okay, who's next?"
And then somebody else would do a draft
and there were other drafts.
But there's one thing that never changed
from the comic to the screen.
And if it didn't change from the comic to the screen,
that means it held through draft after draft,
after draft of the script.
And that's the first time Cliff flies.
[engine roaring]
Which was most like the comic
and is probably my favorite part of the movie.
You know, he just going flat out 200 miles an hour
straight up in the air,
and I, I didn't think too much
about graceful landings.
It was really, like, slogging through, you know,
a pecan pie to try to get the studio
to sign off on it,
cause they always wanted changes.
We wanted changes of our own
that the studio wouldn't necessarily agree to.
And it was just this kind of, sort of, constant... battle,
debate over what it's going to be.
He's reaching for something that's in the comic, it's there.
But getting it in a movie with another hundred people,
it's just damn difficult.
Particularly when if you're going to do
the subtleties that are the potential
in the Rocketeer.
In the comic, the Jenny character
was based on Bettie Page.
[Dave] I wanted Bettie in the film, but Disney felt differently.
There were only a few compromises
as far as characters go,
and Bettie was one of those.
[Danny] That the edgy stuff lasted through some drafts
of the script.
That we knew was going to have to change.
That was not going to fly at Disney.
[Dave laughing]
At the very least,
going in, they were enthusiastic.
But it was mainly because of the name,
Rocketeer, Mouseketeer,
and the fact that they looked at it
and said, "Toys!"
[Danny] Joe Johnston respected the comic,
so Dave had an intimate experience with the movie
that would normally not happen
for a comic book artist whose book was licensed.
[Jaime] In the beginning he told stories like,
"I got kicked off the set."
The set people liked him, but the higher-ups didn't
cause he just had a big mouth,
and he just wanted his thing done right.
[Danny] It was always about money.
Joe Johnston had to squeeze
every penny of that $43 million
to get that on the screen because my impression
of the production was he was fighting for every inch.
[Joe] The main thing that I wanted to translate
from the comic book to the screen
was the way Cliff Secord looked in the outfit.
If we got that right, everything else will
more or less fall into place.
[Cliff] How do I look?
Like a hood ornament.
[Joe] At the same time, Dave knew
that there was a huge difference
between a comic book and a film.
He recognized that there were things
that were going to have to change.
There were arguments
about the helmet design
and the rocket design.
Everything looked goofy when they were trying
to make it look cool.
Disney did not like the helmet. They thought
it made him look like an insect.
The helmet is such an iconic image of what the movie is
you can't really change that.
They wanted to make it look like a NASA astronaut helmet.
[Joe] One of the Disney execs,
he said, "You know, it looks too old fashioned."
Well, yes 1938.
Johnston said, "If that's what you're going to do,
I'm, I'm out of here."
I really admired Joe Johnson for standing up for Dave
and Dave's integrity like that.
I thought that was pretty fantastic
and pretty rare in Hollywood.
The reason I wanted Bill Campbell
as The Rocketeer, 'cause he looked like the character.
Dave was drawing himself, of course.
[Jewel] Bill Campbell was a movie star.
And in Dave's mind, that was, um, him in essence.
And him and Billy Campbell became friends.
[Mark] Dave got a movie made of his character.
It is now commonplace for creator-owned characters
to become motion pictures.
It was not when Dave made that happen.
[Dave] I just went for it.
I, I threw in everything I loved as kid and,
and just stirred up the pot. And,
threw it out there to see what kind of reaction I'd get.
[Mark] He made a real full,
honest-to-God Hollywood movie and had a real,
honest-to-God, Hollywood premiere.
[Jim] People loved it.
I thought it was charming and sweet and beautiful.
[Siskel and Roger] Two thumbs up forThe Rocketeer
a lighthearted and entertaining action fantasy.
[Joe] The only thing Dave said to me
after the movie came out was that,
"That's the version of The Rocketeer
I would've made."
Well, you know,
you can't ask for more than that.
[Mark] The movie didn't fail, it was just not quite
the hit they were hoping for.
You watch it and you kind of go,
"I just wanted it to be a little bit
more than what it is."
I wanted to see him do something
with that rocket pack
other than getting him
from point A to point B.
It had some terrific elements,
but it didn't come together as a film.
[William] Dave may have been disappointed in some aspects of it,
but I don't know of any filmmaker
that's a 100% satisfied
with everything that they do.
We had a deal in place to write the sequel.
There was talk about
a World War II "Rocketeer" story.
A Cold War "Rocketeer" story.
The box office wasn't big enough for them
to even develop a script.
Disney blamed him for Rocketeer not being a big hit.
[John] He wasn't happy with Hollywood after that.
He realized how the game was played there.
I knew that this chapter in my life was over.
Looking back on it, I have to say
I had the most fun on The Rocketeer
than I have on anything else
you know, before or since.
And the Rocketeeralways worked.
It just found the audience over time.
You know, for me it's disappointing.
I mean, for everybody else, it's great.
[interviewer] Let's talk about the movie.
Oh... [chuckles]
It's old news.
[chuckles]
[William] When Dave was making The Rocketeer,
one of the big pieces of advice that I gave him was,
"You're going to go into a deep postpartum depression
unless you start another project right away."
[Richard] At the studio, we always had
in the back of our minds, certain things
that we would like to do if we got the opportunity.
[Dave] This is Wee Willie.
This is the Animation property
that I am working on in my spare time.
It's another period piece, and it takes place in old LA.
[William] I recall thinking,
"Wow, this is a perfect setting
for Dave Stevens,
because there's a kind of
a carny aspect to it
and Dave was fascinated by that world."
If you've seen any of Dave's
Christmas cards that he drew,
he always portrayed himself as a newsy
in the 1930s,
because that was the decade
that Dave seemed to live in.
I would see Wee Willie around a lot.
and I would ask him, "What is this?"
"Um, it's nothing."
It was always just, "Mm, it's nothing."
[Dave] There are projects that you were really hot on,
and then you burn out on them and never touched them again.
I had at least probably half a dozen like that.
[Kelvin] The Outriderswas set in the '50s
and it was about World War II veterans
working out their experiences and their trauma
from their war years through, uh, building and racing hot rods.
It's kind of a tribute to hot-rodding
the way it used to be in California
right around at the war time.
It was always one of those mysteries.
I mean, as with many things,
if you don't ask, they don't tell.
[Jim] He was working for years on a project
in which Marla Duncan was the primary model.
She was a very successful body builder on many, many covers.
[John] Dave did a couple of really nice illustrations.
I mean it had an owl involved and I'm like,
"Okay, an owl..."
[Glen] That's a great visual,
but what's the story that leads up to that?
[Jim] I had no idea where that was going to go,
but I knew he had something in mind.
She was an adventuress.
This French woman of mystery.
Kind of an Arsène Lupin super thief.
[Dave] It's an illustrated novel.
It's called The Mad World of Mimi Rodin.
Kind of a psychic thriller, a horror story.
I don't know if there was reason
he set Mimi Rodin aside.
He'd be like, "Oh, eventually I want to get back to it."
[Adam] It could have been its own fantastic,
marvelous, unique endeavor on its own if it ever happened.
[Dave] I knew that if I ever created anything of my own,
whether it's in animation or comics or whatever,
I would have to really be smart about what I signed.
Cartoonists are notoriously bad businesspeople.
Dave had me and a lot of other friends
constantly giving him advice on how to make money,
how to build upon what he'd created,
and he would listen politely and then completely ignore us.
Other artists have done quite well for themselves
because they focused on the business side
of being an artist.
And they do quite well, and, and the fans are happy,
and the artist makes money.
[Jessie] Exploiting your creative property
is a very collaborative business.
Dave needed to trust in people,
and he had a real hard time doing that.
[Bob] It's not like these guys
who did the first comic book movies
were making buttloads of money.
They were getting paid chump change in many ways
to give their creations to these people.
[Dave] There was never any huge Uncle Scrooge money vault.
That's somebody else's life.
The Rocketeer money...
[chuckles]
That was gone
by the end of '91,
and I used it to put a down
on a little house in Long Beach,
and ended up losing it in the real estate bust.
He called me up and said, "I found her."
[Dave] Bettie Page is alive and well and living in California.
Hopefully at some point, we w-- we will meet.
But...
C'est La Vie.We, we will see.
She lived really close!
I can't remember exactly how,
but then he became friends with her.
We would go to lunch and then he'd go,
"I've got to go see Bettie. I've got to go take her to buy groceries."
He was suddenly getting immersed in her life at that point.
I think that's the sweetest thought ever
thinking of him and Bettie driving around in a car.
[William] He says, "Bill, it's a very strange world for me
to be taking Bettie Page to the pharmacy."
[chuckles]
He says, "I never thought that would be a part of my life."
[Mark] There's an emotional contact there.
It's meeting someone who was part of your life
long before you ever thought
there was a chance of meeting them.
He became very protective of her.
He wanted to be a shield between her and the world.
[Jaime] I would never say it, but I was a goof.
"When do I get to meet her?"
[laughs] You know,
but I never pushed him on that.
[Scroggy] Dave wanted her to know
that the world really did remember her,
so he would, kind of, anonymously take her around to places
so she could see just how much she was back in the public eye.
[Dave] In the 30 years since,
had you ever seen any kind of evidence
that your photos were still being reprinted in magazines?
[Bettie] All of the interest in me after all these years,
that's just something I don't understand at all.
She gets so tickled when she sees some new book
with her picture on it, or some--
whatever product it is.
[Geofrey] They went by the Golden Apple.
She's seeing this and this, seeing that.
And I said, "Why don't you go in the store?"
He goes, "I can't take her in there.
Everybody recognize her."
And I said, "Dave",
I said, "Well, she's 70 years old,
and so she can't have the same hairstyle."
"Well, yeah!"
[Dave] She's legitimized,
whereas back then she was sort of under the counter
and not really given much,
uh, if any respect as a model, as an actress.
I'm wondering if maybe some of it was gratitude
because he had,
I won't say exploited her image,
but certainly benefitted from it.
[Bob] Dave from the very beginning
was hoping Bettie would be found,
'cause he wanted to share
some of the monetary benefits here.
[William] Dave was the first person himself to pay her,
and then Dave would hunt down other people
who were using her image
and force them to pay her as well.
[Jewel] All of the things that he did for Bettie,
he did that because, well, she deserved it,
and she got cheated by everybody else.
[Jennifer] I have letters from her where she would tell Dave
that he was the best friend she'd ever had, bar none.
She did say she loved him very much.
[Laura] Bettie Page was clearly Dave's muse.
The respect he had for her and the, the world he built for her
in his illustrations is just-- will live on forever.
[Mark] Jack Kirby was the creator or co-creator
of most of the Marvel characters
that are now worth billions.
They started on his drawing table.
He was a big influence when I was, um, growing up,
you know, with Fantastic Four and Captain America
and The Avengers.
He was probably the most creative man in comics.
[Scroggy] Jack was an early supporter of Dave and his talent.
And I think he was certainly proud
to have Dave ink his work.
[Dave] He'd give me advice and tell me...
[mimics gunshots] Don't get into comics,
you know, be an illustrator. [chuckles]
He knew then that I was not suited to comic books,
but I didn't realize what he was talking about,
so, it was, uh, falling on deaf ears.
[Thomas] Dave's influences in the comic book world
were guys who had a very meticulous, specific style
and no line was ever out of place.
Guys like Al Williamson.
[Jackie] Al was invited to be a guest to Comic-Con in 1984.
Dave and Al had never actually met.
Dave came from one direction, Al came from another direction,
Dave said, "Dad!"
And Al said, "Son!"
And they were inseparable
for the whole rest of the convention.
Wally Wood obviously was a huge influence.
The few Sterankos that hit town and those really grabbed me.
[Glen] Jim Steranko was the younger punk
who came out and did something sort of slicker and splashier
than the previous generation.
[Kelvin] Dave befriended a lot of old artists.
In my mind, it was like--
he was like collecting these guys.
He admired their work,
but also because they lived
in the actual 30's, which is very interesting
because he was born in 1955.
I always thought that he was nostalgic
for his parents' childhood.
He'd never seen this time period
but he so loved it.
Frank Frazetta was a big influence on Dave.
I came into the whole Frazetta milieu at about 14, 15.
Years later when I did finally get to meet him,
I said the work you did affected so many of us
-so strongly... -'Cause he did. Yep.
...at a real pivotal age that
we just did a complete 360
and started doing work that
no way would we have been doing
if not for having seen those images.
He also loved a lot of the guys who were his contemporaries,
Mike Kaluta and Bernie Wrightson.
He found the best in everybody's work to learn from.
Guys like Bernie, guys like Dave,
their art resembles who they are.
[Jessie] There was a mutual admiration society.
They were all so good at what they did.
[Dave] If you have the respect of other artists
who you look up to, that's as far as I'm concerned,
that's the icing on the cake. That's it.
You excel when you're surrounded by people who inspire you.
You can see the comic book artists
that did influence him, but he was influenced
by so many different artistic movements.
That's what, kind of, I think, made him special.
Because of my roots and my influences
I'd have to consider myself an American artist,
but an artist who's very affected
by the European sensibility.
He loved Mucha and he loved most--
anything Parisian and Art Nouveau, Art Deco.
[Jaime] But I think his main inspiration
were the old pin-up artists from the '30s and '40s.
I could see the DNA of Elvgren in Dave's work.
[Olivia] Elvgren was like Normal Rockwell.
Petty was so elegant.
Vargas women were all made of satin, soft.
Enoch Bolles was just pure fun.
It was interesting to see the way the men
made these paintings of women, the, the kind of exuberance,
the sexuality that they were.
[William] Dave quickly became the guy
to do sexy pinup girls
for comics.
'Cause he did move it up from the Petty and the Elvgren's.
All of his own influences, he subsumed all of their stuff
into his own unique style.
[Wray] "I got to be as good as that or better."
And it's a trap.
If you overbite what you can never chew,
you're never going to be happy.
[Geofrey] A lot of guys had let it consume their artistic identity.
Dave Stevens never let h-- let that happen.
[Thomas] That's what a great artist does.
You take your influences, and you use that
to express something personal.
[Maria] When I saw Dave's art, I was enlightened.
Because I understood that inking was a part of the drawing.
[William] Brush inking is becoming a lost art.
Frank Frazetta, Dave Stevens, Mark Schultz--
guys who fall in love with inking with a brush.
Is-- It just has a whole different look than, uh, a pen does.
I don't pencil all that tightly.
My whole personality is in the inking.
[Shaw!] God, it was beautiful.
He had control over that brush like nobody I've ever seen.
[Thomas] His lines were so clean and so sharp
and so well put together that it was kind of hypnotic.
That's, that's like describing magic.
You can describe how it makes you feel,
but if you put it into words that might take
some of the magic away from it.
Sometimes we do the mistake of conceiving the inking
as a mere tracing of the pencil.
No, because Dave considered the anatomy, the light,
the Chiaroscuro.
Sometimes I would go to his house
and that same piece of art was sitting there...
[chuckles] unfinished, and I'd go, "That looks really good."
And he goes, "Ah, it's not finished."
And I go, "Looks finished to me."
[chuckles]
I know up here, how I want it to look.
I just don't think anybody inks like I do,
or close enough to where I'd be really happy with it.
And I am really, uh, critical of my own work.
He made sure that every line was there
and if it didn't belong there,
phhss, it was out.
He was an annoying perfectionist.
I probably knew him a lot better than most,
but he still had his secrets.
[William] Dave Stevens was a very private individual.
One of the most private I've ever met.
He would tell me what he felt I needed to know
and, mm, not much more than that.
It's just a personality type
that we compartmentalize.
He was multi-faceted in that,
and there was really not too many people
who were parts of all that facet.
[Bob] He had his movie people and he has fine art people,
animation, architecture.
Dave and I shared a passion for Old Hollywood.
He just loved that you could drive through LA
and there are certain parts that looked so out
of a Raymond Chandler novel. It was just incredible.
Dave was really happy that there was still examples of that, sort of,
'30s Hollywood ambiance
is still in little secret pockets around town.
When he was into something, he would find someone
who, who was also into that thing so they could commune about it.
[John] I was lucky.
I got to overlap with
several of the groups.
He didn't have the comic people
mix with the car people
because the car guys were
all old crotchety guys
who were like, "Who are these nerds?"
[David] It's funny. I mean, I feel like I knew Dave really well
and yet I didn't know Dave well.
We didn't talk about religion. We didn't talk about politics.
We didn't talk about
health or money.
Because it somehow seemed ungainly
in a very, just sort of, very gentlemanly way.
[Kelvin] I don't know why he had such a hard time
talking about his feelings.
I've considered that maybe he thought
that these things he held so precious might be diminished
by talking about them too much.
[Greg] If I think back, everybody wanted to be Dave's friend.
And he was always, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hi, hi, hi."
He had to have-- just a core of a few friends.
[Michael] If you were worth it, you guys became pals for life.
He was that way.
[Jaime] For me and Gilbert, us hanging out with Dave
was just like three buddies.
You know, we weren't trying to get anything from him,
and the same back,
cause Dave didn't want anything
from me, but just my friendship.
I think people have multiple soulmates
and it's not just about
being in relationships.
Like, intimate relationships.
It can be friendships, too.
When I came down from getting a divorce,
I was alone all of a sudden.
Dave's on the phone, "Let's go to breakfast,
let's go to dinner, let's go to the movies."
After about three or four months,
I realized I had a best friend.
[Bob] We were just guys fucking around,
having a good time and busting people's balls,
you know rather than being serious.
In San Diego, we'd always go to this place called Pacer's.
It was a, a strip club.
[John] Strip clubs. Yay!
I have a lot of fun stripper stories.
[Scroggy] Occasionally, somehow
they twisted my arm and dragged me along,
and so I went to a few with Dave.
[Bob] He exuded an attitude that the girls enjoyed.
So, they'd always play up to him.
And it was a really wholesome environment
when Dave was around at a strip club.
It was like going to Disneyland, except there were naked women.
[Scroggy] He was more like a fan rooting them on.
But he was never salacious with the dancers.
Just an appreciator of beauty, you might say.
Dave and I were in Portland for the 1990 convention,
and we wanted to go to a strip club.
Dave's throwing money out and hooting and hollering.
She's dancing, she got only high heels on.
And I say, "Take your shoes off."
[chuckles]
She's dancing and stops
and goes, "What?"
"I gave you $10 bucks
to take your shoes off."
And she goes "You're a pervert."
Dave lost it. He was laughing so hard.
He's like, "You're a pervert."
[chuckles]
[Schreck] Dave was very much the male version
of that Bettie Page thing.
Good girl during the day
and the naughty girl at night.
In the back of my mind, I always thought
Dave wants to be a real outlaw.
But he could never be as bad as he thought he wanted to be.
Dave said, "I almost got to meet Orson Welles."
And he starts to tell me
why he didn't get to meet Orson Welles
when suddenly this beautiful woman
came up behind him and said, "Hey Dave."
And he's like, "Oh, hey."
And she put her hand on his shoulder
and she leaned over and whispered something,
and Dave got up and left with this young woman.
And I sat there for a second
and then I looked over at John Koukoutsakis and I said,
"Are they f#*#*#*#*#*#*?"
You know, and John just went...
"Mm-hmm."
To his credit, Dave came about an hour later,
sat back down, went... [exhales sharply]
"Anyway. So, I didn't get to meet Orson Welles because he died."
There's definitely artists out there who
draw women in a way
that can objectify.
But I think that there's a beauty in Dave's drawings.
Let's not be coy about it, you know?
He liked tits, and ass, and nakedness.
The key, I think is, he captured more than the surface.
He captured the spark in their eyes.
[Maria] I try always to portray women
sexy but,
of course, in a respectful way.
Dave did this very, very well.
As a woman, who the hell wouldn't want to be drawn
by Dave Stevens? My God.
He loved to do female figures,
and I think he really put a lot of effort
into being top-notch at it.
But I think it was his favorite field of study.
You know what I mean?
He didn't mind practicing.
[Bob] There's a playfulness.
There's an artistic beauty to it,
and a balance.
[Scott] There's one cover in particular
to me that really stands out.
It's a self-portrait with Dave, very cartoony of him.
And then just a gorgeous drawing of an exotic dancer.
I think that really shows how much he respected
and loved the female form.
Sometimes I think he's looking for something unattainable.
There was perfection that he saw in his mind.
[Bruce] I don't know if he actually worked on his appearance,
but he had a good sense of style and he was a good-looking dude.
I love seeing old pictures of him
when he was really young and he was kind of a tall,
skinny, you know, nerd.
Dave had a little bit of an ego,
and he was a little bit vain about his appearance.
[Jennifer] I remember him standing in the doorway
of the bathroom, just watching him primp.
[laughs]
Jaime Hernandez coined it best when he said
Dave's the prettiest man in comics.
He was the most beautiful boy in comics.
All artists have a sense of self.
He was-- he always was art directing himself in a way.
[Jim] He was neatly turned out on all occasions,
and he preferred retro clothing,
and he that picked out meticulously.
He carried a style with him into the world.
But never flamboyantly, like his friend,
Jim Steranko, who was quite a flamboyant guy.
They cared about how they presented themselves to the world.
Over the years he would change his
sideburns and mustache and goatee.
[Scroggy] Those sideburns.
You could shave with Dave's sideburns.
They were so sharp and crisp.
I guess you could say he was vain.
But it wasn't a problem. It wasn't a detriment
to his character.
Oh, it's not vain. It's having self-esteem.
I never saw Dave with a hair out of place
but, uh, I did see Dave with a pirate shirt.
The famous Pirate shirt incident.
His puffy pirate shirt.
The Errol Flynn pirate shirt.
[Bob] It worked for him, and he felt comfortable with it,
but that doesn't mean you can't make fun of it.
[Elaine laughs]
[Geofrey] "Hey Dave, you got the puffy shirt."
He goes, "Why didn't somebody tell me that?"
He goes, "Do you know how hard it is to find a shirt like this?"
And I said, "Yeah, and there's a reason for it."
[Adam] That big pirate shirt.
And that was for the first chink in the Dave Stevens armor ever.
[chuckles softly] I just kind of went, "Whew".
He was just going through life and playing with the tools that God gave him.
Thing about him is he loved women,
and not in a dirty way.
He just loved women.
And that's what got him into all kinds of trouble.
[chuckles]
Dave was a very sweet guy, and he was very honest.
That was part of why women gravitated towards him.
[John] I couldn't believe when Dave called me,
and said, "You're not going to believe what just happened."
I'm like, "What?"
Well, he had one girl in the bedroom,
and he gets this knock, knock, knock...
[chuckles]
He had one knocking on the door,
he had one in bed,
and he had the other, the third one on the phone.
[John] And he's like, "What are you doing here?
You know you're not supposed to come over without calling first!"
Cause he had a whole litany of rules, you can't come over,
you can't just pop in to Dave Stevens house.
[Jim] It wasn't an erotic story.
It was a guy who got caught
being too nice to too many girls.
How much of this is Dave and how much of this is them?
I'm sure there's, um, a middle ground somewhere.
I think his marriage taught him a lot of things.
[Brinke] This was an excerpt from a letter
that Dave wrote to me.
"Charlene, I had my mind set on the kind of wife I wanted.
And whenever you proved to be otherwise,
I imploded. I panicked.
I know now that the worst thing I could have done, I did,
I left.
I had to have things perfect in my way,
or I wouldn't play."
[Jewel] There was definite love,
just not the obvious kind of love.
Although we tried, I mean,
we tried to, like, kind of look like a couple.
We just failed so miserably.
[Schreck] It was hard for him to make
those compromises that relationships need.
it was always, "Okay, that's enough.
I'm done. I'm going over here now."
[chuckles]
The Rocketeerwas my hobby.
It was something I did in my spare time.
That's why there are so few of them,
because I wasn't all that interested
in doing a huge number of comics.
[David] Dave waited out,
the guy that bought up
the Comico assets.
About three years went by
and he was free to take it
where he wanted to and that was Dark Horse.
This is the last Rocketeerstory
that, uh, I've yet to complete.
It's been sitting unfinished for quite a while.
[Schreck] As time went on,
Dave's love of comics
was slowly waning.
[John] Luckily, he had people he knew a Dark Horse, so,
it was a little easier for him there.
We'll see if people like it.
If they don't, well, it's too bad. [chuckles]
[Scroggy] I got the kind ironic pleasure
of watching Bob Schreck
standing in the shoes
that I had been standing in long before
trying to wrangle the pages of Rocketeerfrom Dave Stevens.
And it didn't work any better for Bob than it did for me.
[Schreck] He was definitely having struggles,
the further and further we went.
They had a deadline and Dave can't meet
a deadline, so bring in the troops.
[Dave] The two guys who wrote the script for the film,
Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo,
wrote with me the last two chapters.
The Rocketeerwas our first comic we wrote,
When it came to laying out the panels, editing,
it's a completely different art form.
Paul and I were just like,
"Wow, this is way more time-consuming
and way harder than we thought.
[Dave chuckles]
[Bruce] Dave was always looking to get
assistants to help him out on the Rocketeer.
Of course, on the second story that he did,
the New York Adventure,
he actually had a lot of help.
He needed people that could really draw.
Dave said that he was up against the wall,
would I do breakdowns?
I said "Well, I'll try."
And I remember calling him up and saying,
"Sorry buddy, this looks like crap."
He said, "Oh, that's perfect! That's all I need!
The thing about Dave is, this sounds weird to say,
but I don't think drawing came easy to him,
even though he drew from a very early age.
He said that starting with a blank sheet of paper is like the scariest thing.
It's like, "I don't really know what I want to draw."
I did a few backgrounds for him.
Gary Gianni did one page.
Arthur Adams.
Sandy Plunkett.
These French guys,
Stan Manoukian and Vince Roucher.
They would help him finish up the book
so that they can get it published.
They came through and got it done.
I used to go over to Dave Stevens' studio.
I do remember seeing pieces of Rocketeer
that weren't part of any of the published material yet,
the Rocketeerart that could have been.
[Dave] So, I've still got file folders full of
plots and characters and all that.
Cliff and Betty go to the desert
and there was a giant Tesla coil.
Peevy has disappeared and because
something, something, something, blah, blah, blah.
It was during World War II,
and he was gonna end up
on Skull Island.
You got the rocket pack,
and he's on this island full of dinosaurs.
Holy cow. Now there, now you're talking.
[Bruce] When he did that last issue of The Rocketeer,that came out
pretty much when the, when the comic book market was crashing.
Dark Horse had to contract
and basically, Dave got the cut.
[Dave] The whole experience of jumping
from, one, two, three, four publishers
in a span of maybe a handful of years,
it just drummed all the enthusiasm out of me.
In the years since I've suggested
a couple of miniseries or two-issue things.
He's like, "I want to do Superman and the Rocketeer." And I was like, "Huh?"
[Dave] I did make that three-issue pitch at DC
for The Rocketeer-Superman crossover in 1998
that was met with complete resistance.
I didn't see any artwork for it,
but he had the Rocketeer, Superman, and
the Orson Welles Broadcast about the Mars Invasion.
Kind of a Max Fleischer Studios' Superman.
[Scott] It was a cool idea, but there were some
issues in the story that DC objected to.
When you do a crossover with a major company
everything has to be very balanced for them
and apparently it wasn't balanced enough.
[Dave] I've since given the scripts to
two or three other editors there
and never heard from them again.
Did I write really crappy stories,
or is it just a thing of bad timing?
After the movie and after the debacle with DC
and Rocketeer and Superman,
I think he lost a whole lot of interest in this stuff.
The thing that he was recognized for,
regarded for at some point,
he started to move away from it.
I kind of feel like he was a little bit lost.
He didn't really know what to do with himself at that point.
[Dave] I just felt so stale and useless,
I just didn't care to put out bad work anymore.
So, I just stopped.
The death of any creative individual
is to go, I'm done learning,
and now I'm just going to coast on what I know.
[Dave] That was one of the reasons that I got so dissatisfied
with everything I was doing from probably
'92 on until about '99.
Okay, if I can't bear to draw comic books anymore,
Maybe I can set this alternate thing,
being a painter on fire if I go back to school
like I should've done years ago.
I went to work for the LA Art Academy
and when Dave learned about it,
he decided that he's going to come to my class.
He had this sort of idea and attitude of,
"I always have to better myself,
and I can do better".
To be a great artist, you need to always
be striving to be better.
And I think Dave always did that.
Dave was embarking on the painting journey,
and it has a learning curve.
The seeds were there. The eye was there.
The technique wasn't there yet.
[Dave] Class after class.
One right after another every term.
All I was after, was just
trying to bring my game up.
[Adam] If that's his response
to being dissatisfied
with his work, then that's a good response.
That's a healthy response, you know,
cause he's being proactive about it.
You got to hand it to the guy for having that...
that kind of humility.
I have never heard of any other artist doing that.
To admit that at 42,
and I'm admitting that having just turned 50.
It's scary. You definitely feel like
you need to continue your education,
or you just wither away.
[Dave] It's heartbreaking to see somebody
doing some virtuoso
drawing or painting
and then to slowly see them
sort of get lazy
and sit back,
and then before you know it,
they're doing really mundane hack work.
And they never rise to it again.
He always felt that there was another artist
he could learn from.
[Nathan] It's interesting being the teacher
of someone like Dave.
Even the greatest athletes have a coach,
and even though they can outperform their coach,
they need that second set of eyes.
And you need someone
with a level of experience
that can spot your blind spots and point them out to you.
[Dave] It's probably going to take me the rest of my life
to get facility enough to where I can just start
laying it down and know that I'm not gonna foul it up.
I went around to the students and asked them,
"How many paintings per week do you want to commit to do?
I, I recommend at least one,
three if you're serious,"
and Dave said, "Five."
Week one, five. Week two, five.
Five, five, five. All the way
through the ten weeks of class.
He came through every single week.
He was a very serious student.
He was just so jazzed.
I hadn't seen that fire in him in quite a while.
[Brinke] He was trying to reach another level
to do something, accomplish something,
try something harder
than he had ever done before.
This is the Black Dahlia.
He designed this beautifully.
He makes the most of all the ordinariness of it.
The expression in the eyebrows,
and just the casual quality of the lips.
[Rebecka] Then you look at her eyes.
There's something completely like disarming.
[Dave] When you do get close
to successful with one of those,
that's the best payoff of anything,
is just knowing that you caught
whatever it was about that person,
in that split second.
And it's rare.
He really had everything going for him.
And then God, of course, dropped kicked him out of the universe.
Right after we were sharing time in the art schools, Dave and I,
he was having some troubles.
I knew that something was going on.
He wasn't shy about it,
but it wasn't a topic of conversation.
He called me. My wife was in the room...
[sobbing]
...she saw me burst into tears.
He said, "Hey, I have to, I have to talk to you about something.
And I don't, I don't want you to get upset."
Well, there's a blood problem.
What blood problem?
What does that mean?
And he finally kind of sat us down
and explained
what was going on.
After further tests and things,
they determined that it was hairy cell leukemia.
Just a very rare blood cancer that attacks the marrow,
basically, in the bones and while it is treatable
for a while, ultimately...
that's one of those cancers they haven't quite really gotten
to the bottom of, unfortunately.
You know I said, "Well, is this something to worry about?"
He goes, "I don't think so."
I don't why Dave
wanted so much to keep it quiet.
But he did.
[Jim] That was his business.
He just suffered through that silently.
[Geofrey] Jim Silke had called me up,
and he said "I want to tell you something.
Although he did not want me to tell you."
But I said, "Goddammit, he's your friend
and he should know, and I'm going to tell him
because you can trust him."
So, I didn't know what to think.
And then it became public knowledge
that he was quite ill.
He got mad.
He was mad at me.
He said, "You told somebody."
I said, "I haven't talked to anybody."
There were a couple of relationships
that became pretty strained.
He would do a few things arbitrarily
that he wouldn't have done if he hadn't been...
...sick. Very, very sick.
I would call him, and he wouldn't pick up
and I'd call him again and I'm like, "Look, dude,
you either pick up the phone, or I'm going to call your mom.
And she's going to get you to call me."
Well, he picked right up.
And I'm like, "Okay, so what's the story?
And he said, "Somebody told that I have this leukemia."
Our conversations never really talked about
death or anything like that. It was always...
it was always trying to be up about it.
I'm happy that there were people around him
who were able to help him because
how do you go through something like this by yourself?
He told me he would need some more help from time to time.
He would need me maybe to get groceries for him every now and then.
I'd be visiting, and I'd be hanging out,
and we'd go spend three hours at Kaiser Permanente.
I drove him to the chemo cause that's a killer,
for hours you're miserable, every time you do it.
You know, I'm always optimistic.
Now you know you have this illness,
and let's hope that the treatment
really improves quality of life.
My dad felt if he prayed hard enough,
Dave would not have to go through chemo.
And I think he really had a hard time
wrestling with the fact that
his prayers were not answered.
[Jim] He had just come home from chemotherapy
and he saw himself in the mirror.
[Jewel] He was able to draw himself
in the anger and the frustration, and the pain.
There's nothing as bitingly real
as anything else in his art.
It's a whole different look at the world.
And I guess he could do it 'cause it's himself.
I never thought about it that way until just now.
Nobody was seeing Dave as much as we used to,
and I think he was sensitive about people seeing him sick.
[Jim] I've got a heart problem, a kidney problem.
But we could laugh about it.
It was dark humor.
I'd say, "I'm going to tell them about the puffy shirt."
"Aah, you can't tell 'em that!"
[chuckles] You know?
[Brinke] He wanted to be at the Comic-Con,
but he wanted to look healthier
and more robust than he really was.
[Scroggy] Dave used to, literally, pump himself up.
He would get a bunch of blood transfusions
to withstand the rigors of exhibiting for four days.
[Jaime] This went on for years. He'd go, "I'm done signing, I've got to go lie down."
And then he goes, "But it's no big deal."
He was worried that people were going to stop giving him work.
So, he really didn't want to lose that because
he had all these bills coming in.
The illness did affect his ability to work
because almost all treatments for cancer
affect you physically,
usually sap your energy.
And as far as his career is concerned,
Dave's trying to be very optimistic.
You know he had one more project to do,
he wanted to get it done.
After the treatments, instead of resting,
he would just dive right back into work.
[chuckles]
[Scroggy] He would try to keep
as many projects in the air
as he could.
[David] Around 2006,
Dave started working on Brush with Passion.
The second the book was a go,
what he really wanted to do was
recolor some of the old artwork
because, well, it wasn't up to snuff.
[Richard] If he had drawn it one way earlier in his life,
and now it was coming up for publication again,
he was as likely as not to completely redo the thing
because that older stuff just wasn't good enough for him.
Two friends of mine, Kelvin Mao and David Mandel
asked if I would be interested in digitally coloring,
uh, a couple of pin ups for Brush of Passion.
[Scott] Laura Martin is one of the premier colorists in comics
and she has been for a long time.
[Kelvin] Computer coloring was relatively new
and Dave was, let's say a little bit unsure.
I sort of convinced him to give her a few pieces to try.
[Laura] The Catwoman piece was a darker palette,
and the Aurora piece was much brighter.
I wanted to get the sun on the skin,
the brighter tones that suggest
a completely different lighting situation.
There were some exchanges, a few little minor changes
but he was very impressed and really happy
with the results.
It was a little heartbreaking watching Dave work
on Brush with Passion
during his illness.
It really gave him something,
I think each day,
to sort of look forward to and to do
and kind of kept his spirits up.
But then also at the same time, was sort of draining.
I remember the moment
when other people had to buy Dave
his groceries. And I thought,
"Dave used to do that for Bettie
and now people are doing it for him."
[John] Dave said he didn't want anyone to tell Bettie.
I think she had a little bit of dementia going on, too.
So, she wasn't as lucid as they thought.
[Rebecka] My feeling was sort of like,
"Who you've helped her so much,
she should know that there's a reason
that you're not around.
And he said, "No, absolutely not.
I don't want Bettie to know."
When he got sicker,
we had a dinner together
and he said, "Take care of Bettie."
He was worried about her.
So, he's not going to say goodbye.
He's just going to, literally, fade away.
And I think, honestly, to the day she died,
she didn't know.
[Jim] Meanwhile, Dave was taking art classes,
and he was helping me teach,
and he fell in love in the middle of that
sickness.
She was one of the women that he was dating,
that had become the woman.
Amy.
[Jim] Dave was an absolute bonafide,
incurable romantic.
He will never say it, he'll deny it.
But his feelings go very, very deep.
[Michael] When he finally realized that she was the one
and that just wasn't going to happen,
he got very, very blue about that.
[Jennifer] Not only was he ill and depressed from chemo,
but the demise of the relationship added to that.
It was really kind of hard, dark time for him.
He was hurt. He was hurt.
I didn't know how to calm him.
In November of 2007, he wound up in the hospital
and that's when they found out that
he had congestive heart failure,
and that was as a result of the chemo.
Literally, he lasted nine years with this
and I thought he was going to last longer.
You know, something was going to happen.
He was sick, he was weak.
You could really hear it in his voice.
And that really shook me up and scared me, you know?
Dave was really determined to just
work on this book as much as possible.
I would sneak into the hospital
and would give him these signature plates to sign
because they wanted to do a big signed and numbered edition.
When we were in the hospital,
he and I had a conversation about who knows,
who should I tell,
who doesn't know that needs to know.
You know, I kind of gently urged him, you know,
"Now might be about time to, to let, let your close friends know."
[Rebecka] We started, just one by one, calling them.
In the end, he, he said, you know, "You did good."
It was really nice to see him in those last few weeks
to really get to spend time and see everybody.
Our mom went down to stay with him
December through March.
And I'm sure that was just an absolutely horrible experience
for both of them
because their personalities
were kind of oil and vinegar.
[Michael] He said, "They're throwing all my shit away."
I got to watch every step."
His mom and sister were there,
and they were going through his shit.
And Dave was freaking out,
going to Koukoutsakis,
"Hide the porn, hide the porn."
Yeah. We were in our 50s and we're like,
"God, we're just like little kids,"
like, "Oh, no, mom's going to catch us
with the Playboy magazine."
Dave just shook his head after she left us.
"Oh, I can't believe we're in this much trouble."
I said, "I'm not in trouble, you're in trouble."
When he was told by the doctor
that he had probably, maybe six months to live,
he was like, "Well, I thought I had a lot longer than that."
He said, "I can't take care of myself anymore, Jim.
I've got to go live with Mom."
He'd just be like, I'll see you soon.
I'm not gone. I'm just-- I'll be there.
And he was always very positive about it.
He was so frail.
He was like 100 years old...
...and he stood up...
...and I said, "Okay man, I'm going to hit the road,
take care of yourself."
And he came over
and the only time
I'd ever hugged this guy in 25 years.
He said, "I'll see you around."
And I left.
[sobs]
We said goodbye and I got up and...
...I put my hand on his shoulder,
squeezed it, and left.
It was tough.
[Brinke] Being an artist is a very solitary lifestyle.
You sit in a room by yourself, and you draw.
[Bob] Dave Stevens was a once-in-a-lifetime artist.
His compositional skills, his techniques were incredible.
You can't look at one of his finished inks
and not be in awe of it.
Dave carved out his own particular corner
of artistic importance.
He influenced a lot of people.
[Adam] You could look at Dave's life, and go,
"This is what it's like to pursue a life
as a creative individual."
You can't just crank it out.
You can't just do it for the money.
There's got to be something genuine to it,
and Dave was genuine.
[Jessie] You want to know who Dave Stevens was?
Look at what he drew.
[Jim] There's a certain magic involved,
and that intensity, that detail, that love,
that passion for what he's doing,
and the obsession with it.
Those of us who knew him, feel privileged.
That's a selfish way of looking at his legacy,
but it's valid.
It's one of my regrets.
I wish I had stayed in touch with him.
[Scroggy] The Rocketeer is a timeless piece of work.
It may be a finite and short story,
but it's among the best.
[Thomas] I think of me, in my bedroom
with a Rocketeercomic book
under the covers with a flashlight,
being so deeply pulled into someone else's vision.
It changed the way I saw life, beauty, reality, love.
[Chris] Dave created this perfect combination
of this helmet and this jet pack.
And as a kid, you can take an old oatmeal canister,
and bicycle helmet with a cardboard fin
and fly around and have adventures.
I love that aspect of it.
His legacy is what a refined comic look like.
[Jim] He's unique, and you just
wish there was more of it.
[Geofrey] He said, "I'm not interested in quantity.
I'm interested in quality."
[Mark] How many people leave a body of work
that is timeless and that will be admired?
The same way Dave admired Frazetta
or Steranko, or Jack Kirby.
Other artists will have Dave in similar lists.
[Chris] He's part of the lineage of the pin-up artist.
He follows suit into people like Adam Hughes
and some of the newer comic book artists
that are coming along.
[Adam] Several years after we had met,
I had the newly released Laserdisc
of The Rocketeerfilm,
widescreen, it was a very, very thrilling time
and Dave signed it, "To Adam, The Reigning King."
I was so moved by that,
you know, and I said,
"Wow, man, I can't believe you wrote that."
And Dave looked at me and said, "Well, I don't want the job."
[chuckles]
If you do good work and it's available,
young artists are going to keep seeing it
and take inspiration from it.
Without even knowing him, he was able to reach me
in a very small town in Italy.
It's a chain.
Everybody's passing his torch,
and that's what a great mentor is.
He contributed to create artists.
Dave passed away in 2008, and at that point,
Rocketeerhad been out of print for basically a decade.
A small group of friends slowly convinced Dave
that it might be a good idea.
Let's it have its rebirth.
A few weeks before he passed away,
he sat me down with his mom and he said
that he trusted Dave Mandel and I to do it right
and he gave us basically his blessing.
But of course, nothing's ever that easy,
especially when it comes to Dave.
Ultimately, we were really lucky enough
to end up with IDW and Scott Dunbier.
[Scott] The first book that came out
was The Rocketeer Deluxe Complete Adventures.
Oversized hardcover.
It's got the entire Rocketeerseries.
[David] They were willing to
do the book the way
Dave would've wanted to do it,
including a top to bottom recoloring by Laura Martin.
[Laura] All I wanted to do was to provide Dave's vision.
I wanted to be the set of hands that Dave didn't have.
[David] At some point,
I remember just kind of looking
to Kelvin and just kind of going,
"We're going to do our best.
And let's just be sort of confident
that no matter what we do here,
Dave would figure out a way to find fault with it."
[Scott] It was a big success.
I take great pride in the achievement that we all did.
It's definitely a privilege introducing
a whole new generation of fans
to The Rocketeer.
But it is bittersweet that Dave's not here to see it.
[Jackie] The Eisner Awards are the Oscars
of the comics industry.
To be in the Hall of Fame,
your first professional work has to have been at least
35 years ago.
[Jackie] Dave was elected in 2019, the minute he became eligible.
If Dave were still alive, I think
he'd be making more motion pictures.
[William] As ratty as the film business can be,
I think there was a special place in it for Dave
and his ideas.
[Joe] I would like to sit down with Dave
and watch The Rocketeer.
I could say, "Dave, if I could do this again,
I would change that.
How about you?"
[Adam] I'd like to think that he would have
circumnavigated the self-introspection globe
and come back to comics.
[Olivia] He would've continued to work, continued to feel insecure,
continued to just beat his head against the desk
trying to get better
and just to get to the next level.
[John] He would be a force right now in that painting field
'cause he would have had the education by now.
And that's the one thing he always wanted.
[Jennifer] He had so many works in progress.
Those things probably would have been finished
at least to the point where we could've said,
"This is perfect." And he would've said,
"No, it's not."
[Jim] It's amazing how much you can miss a guy like that.
It's the attraction to their sense of character,
and what you share.
But you do miss him.
His life, and his art will live forever.
He had a lot more to do, Dave Stevens.
He had a lot more to do.
[soft music]
[Billy] All my adult life the clock has been my enemy.
There's never been enough time
because I've never made good use of it.
It seems to me that one of the worst things
a creative person can do is to squander his talents
on meaningless, trivial, selfish pursuits,
which benefit no one.
And the greatest shame in an artist's career
would be to leave an endless trail
of unfinished works and abandoned projects,
which clearly had endless potential.
All lost to time and indifference.
That is something that terrifies me,
and rightly so.
My growth and potential has largely been limited only
by my own lack of foresight and commitment.
Maybe I'll get there, maybe not,
but at least I can look in the mirror and know
that I am trying my very best.
Sum up Dave Steven in three words.
-Three words. -[chuckles]
So many words you can use about Dave.
Handsome, brilliant and funny.
Handsome, funny and brilliant.
Buddy, mate, friend.
Impeccable, perfectionist and sweet.
Generous, intractable, and determined.
Extraordinarily talented perfectionist.
Visual, collaborative.
-Artist. -Two words are master illustrator.
Dreamer.
Guy was always dreaming about something.
[in Italian]
Interminably fantastic art.
Handsome, dashing, and gone.
Particular, understated, important.
Born too late.
World's most fastidious.
Proper, Wry, and absolutely committed.
Meticulous, kind and stubborn.
"It's fine, Dave. It's great, Dave."
A man's man and a woman's man.
In three words, my only husband.
My best friend.
No true real answer.
Tits and ass.
Talented, that's an understatement.
My favorite artist.
Two words. Fucking Dave.
[laughs]