Damn. Another one. It seems to be the week for tributes to the departed. This one will require a bit of set-up, so here we go:

Way back in 1991, while I was working as an usher at that movie theater I’m always talking about, a nifty little flick called The Rocketeer premiered. It was completely ignored by the movie-going public, but, personally, I loved it. It was a lighthearted adventure flick about a barnstorming pilot of the 1930s who comes into possession of a rocket-propelled backpack that lets him fly like Superman. The problem is, lots of other people are after this little gizmo — Nazis, gangsters, the FBI — and our hero is just a regular joe who wants to get his girl and his life back. The movie had lots of humor, a beautiful musical score, some nice period atmosphere, and an appropriately old-fashioned (i.e., bloodless) tone, as well as Timothy Dalton (just out of his James Bond contract) chewing the scenery as an Errol Flynn-like Hollywood star who is revealed as a Nazi spy. And it featured a very young and very yummy Jennifer Connelly as the love interest; she’s never looked prettier than in this film, in my humble opinion.

(I’ve always liked to think the film’s relative failure was just bad timing, because as I recall Terminator 2 opened a couple of days later; if The Rocketeer had been given time to build some word of mouth, maybe things would’ve been different. Or maybe I’m just a dreamer.)

Sometime after seeing the movie, I learned it was based on a comic book, and, me being me, I was naturally soon on the hunt for the original source material. It wasn’t an easy task to find these comics due to certain peculiarities in the book’s publishing history. Briefly, the character first appeared way back in the early ’80s as a “back-up feature,” i.e., a short segment only a couple pages long that was published at the back of another comic-book title (specifically, a book called Starslayer, if you’re really curious). After a few installments in this format, The Rocketeer got his own solo comic, but there were long, irregular stretches between issues and the series never really took off (forgive the pun). In the end, I believe there were only seven or eight issues total, plus the Starslayer segments, published at various times by no less than four different publishers over a period of 13 years.

Even with the sporadic publishing schedule, however, the series still managed to garner critical praise as well as a cult following that reportedly includes the infamous science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison, among others. The comics are simply brilliant — every panel of every page is bursting with period details that don’t suggest the 1930s setting so much as recreate them; the art is beautiful, rendered in a generally realistic style that evokes classic illustrative and pin-up art; and the story is both a loving homage to early pulp adventures and a postmodern pastiche of same. (One element I particularly love: in the movie, the rocketpack was an invention of Howard Hughes, which was entirely fitting and even plausible, but in the comic the creator of the rocket was none other than the greatest of all the pulp heroes, Lester Dent’s Doc Savage. But here’s the thing that was really neat about how the comics handled this idea: Doc and his men are never identified by name. The only way you’d know who they are is if you’re familiar with 1930s pulp, which, of course, is exactly what The Rocketeer is meant to be. This doesn’t feel like an in-joke, though; it’s more like an “easter egg,” a treat for people who know their lowbrow literature.) Oh, and the series is widely credited with the modern-day resurgence of interest in Bettie Page, because The Rocketeer’s love interest Betty — the character Jennifer Connelly played as “Jenny” in the movie — was modeled after the iconic 1950s pin-up girl.

The truly remarkable thing about The Rocketeer comic, however, is the fact that the entire series written and drawn by a single man: Dave Stevens. That was, in part, why there were so few issues, because Dave was doing the work of an entire staff by himself… and he was doing it better than anyone in the business. The books are entirely the product of Dave’s vision and knowledge and skill; they are true works of personal art in a way that very few other comics can be said to be. My interest in comics has waxed and waned over the years, and I find there aren’t many that I’ll go back and re-read. But I love Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer books.

I learned this afternoon from Peter David and Chris Roberson that Dave has died of leukemia at the tender age of 53 after a long period outside the public eye. I think most of his fans, like me, had probably just assumed that he was working on something at his usual glacial, perfectionist pace.

There’s a nice tribute and some photos of Dave and his work here, and Mark Evanier — who was a personal friend of Dave Stevens — shares his thoughts here.

I hope somebody finished the Art of Dave Stevens book that Evanier alludes to; I’d buy that in a heartbeat…