Steranko
He had previously been associated with Marvelmania, producing two of the club s 12 posters. Steranko gradually withdrew from comic books during this time. Countess Valentina (Val) Allegro De Fontaine (sic) made her debut in Strange Tales #159 (Aug.Marvel s all-purpose terrorist organization HYDRA was introduced here as well. Steranko, hired as an unknown commodity with little experience in comics , Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. soon became one of the creative zeniths of the Silver Age, and one of comics most groundbreaking, innovative and acclaimed features. The women were clad in form-fitting black leather a la Emma Peel in the Avengers TV show.
Ron Goulart, in his Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, wrote, Steranko introduced or popularized in comics such art movements of the day as psychedelia and op art, drawing specifically on the aesthetic of Dali, with inspiration from Richard Powers, ultimately synthesizing a style he termed Zap Art. All the while, Steranko spun outlandishly action-filled plots of intrigue, barely sublimated sensuality, and a cool-jazz hi-fi hipness. 1967) by flooring Nick Fury during a training session, proving that she could take care of herself! She looked like a character who had just stepped out of a James Bond poster . Mark Evanier: Jack based some of his characters (not all) on people in his life or in the news..
According to Steranko at a 2006 panel In 1973, Steranko became founding editor of Marvel s official fan magazine, FOOM, which superseded the two previous official fan clubs, the Merry Marvel Marching Society and Marvelmania. For these and other reasons, he gravitated away from the rigors of producing full monthly comics in favour of covers and special projects.
Projects such as the history of comics and his own publishing efforts took up more and more of his time. Writing, penciling, inking and coloring his own work, Steranko was unable to meet the monthly publication deadlines of the comics business of the time. (See Homages , below.) Steranko also had short runs on Captain America (three issues out of four, missing a deadline that required Kirby to draw an issue over a weekend) and X-Men, for which he designed a new cover logo.
He moved on after five years to join an advertising agency, where he designed ads and drew products ranging from baby carriages to beer cans . After first attempting to find work at Marvel Comics in 1965, Steranko instead entered the comics industry with Harvey Comics, landing assignments under editor Joe Simon, who was trying to create a line of super heroes within a publishing company that had specialized in anthropomorphic animals. (nothing became of it), and met with Marvel editor Stan Lee. Miracle Free and Barda was based largely — though with tongue in cheek — on the interplay betwixt Jack and his wife Roz.
Among others, his work has been shown in the following locations: Steven Ringgenberg: Steranko s Marvel work became a benchmark of 60s pop culture, combining the traditional comic book art styles of Wally Wood and Jack Kirby with the surrealism of Richard Powers and Salvador Dalí. Steranko served as editor and also produced the covers for the magazine s inaugural four issues before being succeeded editorially by Tony Isabella.
James Steranko (born 5 November, 1938, Reading, Pennsylvania, United States) is an American graphic artist, comic book writer-artist-historian, magician, publisher and film production illustrator. Of course, the whole escape artist theme was inspired by an earlier career of writer-artist Jim Steranko . Jim Steranko has produced a large body of work over five decades in the comics industry. .
Decades afterward, however, their images are among comics best known, and homages to his art have abounded — from updates of classic covers with different heroes in place of Fury, to recreations of famous pages and layouts. In a black-and-white long shot with screentone shading, the couple is beginning to embrace, with Fury standing and the Contessa on one knee, getting up. Steranko combined the figurative dynamism of Jack Kirby with modern design concepts , wrote Larry Hama.
He slept on a couch in the nominal living room until he was more than 10 years old. Steranko began drawing while very young, opening and flattening envelopes from the mail to use as sketch paper. #2, described by Robin Green in Rolling Stone: When reprinted in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Who Is Scorpio? (Marvel Enterprises, 2001; ISBN 0-7851-0766-5), however, Steranko s original final panel was reinserted.
Aside from occasional covers and pinup illustrations, Steranko has rarely worked in comics since, although he did illustrate a serialized comics adaptation of the Peter Hyams 1981 sci-fi thriller Outland, for Heavy Metal magazine. Steranko earned lasting acclaim for his innovations in sequential art during the Silver Age of comic books, particularly his infusion of surrealism, op art, and graphic design into the medium.
did not bear fruit. For the movie industry, Steranko has produced a number of posters for various films, and was a conceptual artist on Steven Spielberg s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), doing production designs for the film and designing the character of Indiana Jones. In 2003, Steranko worked with the History Channel to create a TV series titled Comic Superheroes Unmasked. He has amassed an enormous portfolio of more than sixty projects (which he called the Theater of Concepts ) designed to be seen in multimedia form . Steranko has won awards in fields as varied as magic, comics and graphic design. A 1997 attempt to negotiate Steranko s return to S.H.I.E.L.D.
When Steranko took over the series, he recostumed Fury from suits and ties to a form-fitting bodysuit with numerous zippers and pockets, like a Wally Wood spacesuit revamped by Pierre Cardin. The visual came about shortly after songstress Lainie Kazan posed for Playboy..and the characterization between Scott Mr.
His most famous comic-book work was with the 1960s superspy feature Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Marvel Comics Strange Tales and in the subsequent eponymous series. Radio programs, Saturday movie matinées and serials, and other popular culture of the time also influenced him. Steranko in 1978 described some influences and their impact on his creative philosophy: By his account, he learned stage magic using paraphernalia from his father s stage magician act, and in his teens spent several summers working with circuses and carnivals, working his way up to sideshow performer as a fire-eater and in acts involving a bed of nails and sleight-of-hand.
Despite his father s denigration of Steranko s artistic talent and the boy s ambition to become an architect, Steranko paid for his art supplies by collecting discarded soda bottles for the bottle deposit and bundled old newspapers to sell to scrap-paper dealers. Big Barda s roots are not in doubt.
Steranko also dabbled with a romance story, as well as a horror story — At the Stroke of Midnight , published in Tower of Shadows #1 (Sept. All this, executed in a crisp, hard-edged style, seething with drama and anatomical tension . Fury s adventures continued in his own series, for which Steranko contributed four much-reprinted 20-page stories: Who is Scorpio? (issue #1); So Shall Ye Reap..Death (#2), inspired by Shakespeare s The Tempest; Dark Moon Rise, Hell Hound Kill (#3), a Hound of the Baskervilles homage, replete with a Peter Cushing manqué; and the spy-fi sequel What Ever Happened to Scorpio? (#5).
Steranko s father, one of nine siblings, began working in the mines at age 10, and as an adult became a tinsmith. His work has been published in many countries and his influence on the field has remained strong since his comics heyday. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006. According to his authorized biography, Jim Steranko s grandparents emigrated from the Ukraine to settle in the anthracite coal-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania.
The graphic influences of Peter Max, Op Art and Andy Warhol were embedded into the design of the pages — and the pages were designed as a whole, not just as a series of panels. Lacking any experience as a painter, his decision to effectively quit comics in 1969 led him to an artist friend who earned his living as a painter , from whom Steranko obtained an hour-long lecture , and the suggestion that he work in acrylics rather than oils, for the sake of speed. Steranko also formed his own publishing company, Supergraphics, in 1969, and the following year worked with writer-entrepreneur Byron Preiss on an anti-drug comic book, The Block, distributed to elementary schools nationwide.
Written by Steranko, with hundreds of black-and-white cover reproductions as well as a complete reprint of one The Spirit story by Will Eisner, it included some of the first and in some cases only interviews with numerous creators from the 1930s and 1940s Golden Age of Comic Books. Other ideas for Supergraphics work included the proposed Talon the Timeless, illustrations of which appeared in a portfolio published in witzend magazine #5, Steranko wrote, drew, and produced the illustrated novel Chandler: Red Tide in 1976, for Byron Preiss Visual Publications/Pyramid Books. Yet after deadline pressures forced a fill-in origin story by another team in issue #4 (and the aforementioned Comics Code-derived censorship), Steranko produced merely a handful of additional covers, then dropped the book.
Though that seven-page story would go on to win a 1969 Alley Award, editor Lee, who had already rejected Steranko s cover for that issue, clashed with Steranko over panel design, dialog, and the story title, initially The Lurking Fear at Shadow House . He studied the Sunday comic strip art of Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and Chester Gould, as well as the characters of Walt Disney and Superman, provided in boxes of comics brought to him by an uncle.
A partial list includes: Steranko s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 160 shows. And he created his own version of Bond girls, pushing what was allowable under the Comics Code at the time. One notable example is a silent, one-page seduction sequence in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Steranko s early childhood, during the American Great Depression, was spent in a three-room house with a tar-paper roof and outhouse toilet facilities. Steeped in cinematic techniques picked up from that medium s masters, Jim synthesized a style he christened Zap Art — an approach different from anything being done in mainstream comics, though it did include one standard attraction: lots of females in skintight, sexy costumes.
In 1970 and 1972, Supergraphics published two tabloid-sized volumes entitled The Steranko History of Comics, a planned six-volume history of the American comics industry, though no subsequent volumes have appeared. He branched into other areas of publishing, including most notably book-cover illustration.
At school, he competed on the gymnastics team, on the rings and parallel bars, and later took up boxing and, under swordmaster Dan Phillips in New York City, fencing. Up through his early 20s, Steranko performed as an illusionist, escape artist, close-up magician in nightclubs, and musician, having played in drum and bugle corps in his teens before forming his own bands during the early days of rock and roll. During the day, Steranko made his living as an artist for a printing company in his hometown of Reading, designing and drawing pamphlets and flyers for local dance clubs and the like. Steranko inked a two-page Jack Kirby sample of typical Nick Fury scenes (first published in 1970 by Supergraphics in the extremely limited edition Steranko Portfolio One , and then again thirty years later in slightly altered form in the 2000 trade-paperback collection Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.), leading to Lee s assigning him the Nick Fury feature in Strange Tales, a split book shared each issue with another feature. Future Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, then a staff writer, recalled Steranko s arrival at Marvel: The 12-page Fury strip was initially by Lee and Jack Kirby, with the latter supplying such inventive and enduring gadgets and hardware as the Helicarrier — an airborne aircraft carrier — as well as LMDs (Life Model Decoys) and even automobile airbags.
1969) — that precipitated a breakup with Marvel.
