"On Earth I am nobody, but here I am Den."

News has just come over that Richard Corben died last week after heart surgery. Corben was a legend, and I find it hard not to have loved him a little in spite of some of the more questionable elements in a lot of his work (he had a thing for conspicuous nudity, which you can take as objectification or not, I suppose). Much like Frank Frazetta, he had one of the most recognizable styles in comics, though I was surprised today to learn that the cover of Meat Loaf's magnum opus Bat Out Of Hell was Corben and I somehow never knew it. (Honestly, I think I probably thought it was Frazetta, but there you go.)

Like a lot of geeks my age, I probably got my first introduction to Corben with the "Den" segment in 1981's Heavy Metal, a movie that (in retrospect) seems like it was probably an excuse for a lot of people from SCTV to convene at a recording studio and do coke together. Neither the segment nor the movie as a whole have aged well, though the soundtrack (conspiculously bereft of actual heavy metal music, not that the genre ever had much to do with Métal hurlant/Heavy Metal the magazine to begin with) has a few gems on it. "Den" particularly feels like an especially juvenile joke, though it's also one of the most quotable sections of the movie. Still, it stood out visually in a way that much of the movie failed to.

(Thinking about it, Heavy Metal (the movie) was also probably my first real exposure to the late, legendary Bernie Wrightson, who has wound up being one of my all-time-favorite comics artists.)

I never became a regular reader of Corben's stuff, though in the past several years I made a point of collecting the entire run of Dark Horse Comics' hardcover reprints of Warren Publishing's Creepy and Eerie, titles in which Corben made several appearances throught the mid-to-late 1970s. His ever-distinctive style stood out in those pages as well, and I think part of the fond sorrow I feel at reading of his passing has to be the result of the pleasure his work has brought me.

How to describe that style, other than the useless "You know when you've seen it." He used a technique that looked airbrushed; it may even have been airbrushing, I lack the knowledge to say. His male and female figures tended to be bulbously exaggerated--not merely the usual male comics artist's regrettable focus on breasts and biceps, but a look that made his human characters look like they had fully inflated balloons stuck under their skin, somehow; a look that nevertheless managed to work since his use of an airbrush or something producing a similar result gave so much of his work a shiny, artificial appearance. For some reason, the word "realism" keeps intuding alongside a contadictory "cartooney," but Corben's work was so over-the-top in its cartooney realism that it was anything but realistic even while it was somehow a million miles away from what most artists do when tasked with drawing a cartoon.

He was wonderful. I don't think I can say I "loved" his work, but it's inescapable that I'm fond of it, amused and entertained by it, that it holds a special affectionate place in my heart despite having qualities that I can't defend at all. He warped the space around comics in an interesting way that frankly may not have been that great for the artform simply because his imitators probably didn't approach human forms with the same mischievious irony Corben brought to so much of his work. His figures may have been hyper-endowed in musculature, butt, and bosom, but I wouldn't say they titillated; as sexual objects, they're deliberately and intentionally ludicrous, which becomes its own sort of meta-joke in Corben's work. All this nudity is a bit silly, get over it.

His work will be missed. Thank you, Mr. Corben, wherever you are.