Dave Cockrum finished up his first turn as
X-Men artist with the following run of sensational splash-pages. (You can see his first batch of stunning splashes
here.) His character and costume designs left an indelible mark on our favorite mutants, making them the hippest, most modern, most with-it heroes of the Groovy Age. Ladies and gentlemen...
X-Men #'s 101-107!
Dave's replacements were no slouches in the art department--the penciler/inker team of John Byrne and Terry Austin. They went on to a long run of highly-acclaimed (to put it mildly) issues before All-New, All-Different co-creator Dave would return post-Groovy Age to take our merry mutants to even greater heights.
Dave Cockrum's 1st run was way too brief. As much as I loved Byrne's & Austin run. I still would had perfered if Cockrum had stayed on until like issue #150. Shades of the LoSHs! His Imperior Guard was a great tribute to the Legion. What a great era to be a kid & teen!
ReplyDeleteThanks again Groovster for bringing back great memories of my teen years. Now if we could only go back to that much funner & simpler time. Remebering some of the things we know know huh? Wish I owned some of these beautiful pages!
I saw Dave at a comic sale—spread throughout some big New Jersey shopping mall—where he had the original pen-and-ink version of that X-Men vs. the quasi-Legion spread propped up behind him. A thing of beauty.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this! I remember as a kid looking at Cockrum's covers (he did covers far past his run on the interiors) and comparing them to Byrne's. Why, I asked myself, were Byrne's (and I worshipped his art at the time) so much worse than Cockrum's? I think Cockrum was a better designer, instinctively. A run of Cockrum covers would be groovy too!
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