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“…He sat on his throne for a long time, above the moving and multicolored field of world comics, like an effigy of the leader, a strange monolith, a sublime visitor, a solitary enigma.”
This quote illustrates the vast talent Richard Corben employed throughout his tenure in the world of comics. The quote wasn’t given out just by anybody either, it was given by one of the gods of comics, Moebius. I’ve read a lot of comics in the 20 years since I started, and I’ve never seen comics like Corben’s. He seems to be able to draw out energy from the strange ether of the medium and bends this energy to his will, creating some of the most visually stunning graphic fiction.
The first Corben comic I ever read was the Crooked Man issue from the Hellboy series. I had been reading along and was used to Mignola’s clean lines and was shocked to see Corben’s art. It was truly unlike anything I had ever seen up to that point. The artwork challenged my notions of what a comic is and I think that is at the core of what Corben does best.
Corben started off in the underground world of comics, but his art really set him apart from his contemporaries like R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson. Where most underground cartoonists turned away from the pulp genre, Croben wrestled with the very notions of it. This allowed Corben to find two very different audiences, those seeking something different in the world of comics, and those seeking stories of the pulp variety. What made Corben’s work really stand out was his coloring process. This accompanied by his line work gave his art the appearance of 3D models, I can only imagine what it must’ve been like to see his work next to other titles coming out at the time.
If we consider the likes of Moebius, Frank Miller, George Perez, and many more cartoonists who revolutionized mainstream comics, then Corben is that rare one of a kind precursor race that came before and illuminated the path forward. Corben passed away in 2020, but he left such a varied and staggering body of work that lives and breathes independently from the artist, and that’s what great work is all about. May he rest in peace and his work live on for generations to come.
