Tales from the Edge #11
James F. Steranko (born November 5, 1938) is an American graphic artist, comic book writer / artist, historian, magician, publisher and film production illustrator.
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. Jim Steranko earned lasting acclaim for his innovations in sequential art during the Silver Age, particularly his infusion of surrealism, op art, and graphic design into the medium. His work has been published in many countries, and his influence on the field has remained strong since his comics heyday. He went on to create book covers, become a comics historian who published a pioneering 2-volume history of the birth and early years of comic books, and to create conceptual art and character designs for films including Raiders of the Lost Ark and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He was inducted into the comic book industry’s Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.
Early life.
Jim Steranko was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. His grandparents emigrated from Ukraine to settle in the anthracite coal-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania. One of 3 children, he spent his early childhood during the American Great Depression living in a 3-room house with a tar-paper roof and outhouse toilet facilities.
Jim Steranko had begun drawing while very young, opening and flattening envelopes from the mail to use as sketch paper. He studied the Sunday comic strip art of Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, Chester Gould and Frank Robbins, as well as the characters of Walt Disney and Superman, provided in ‘boxes of comics’ brought to him by an uncle. Radio programs, Saturday movie matinées and serials, and other popular culture also influenced him.
By his account, Jim Steranko 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. 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. At 17, Jim Steranko and another teenage boy were arrested for a string of burglaries and car thefts in Pennsylvania.
Up through his early 20s, Jim 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. Jim Steranko, whose first band, in 1956, was called The Lancers, did not perform under his own name, claiming he used pseudonyms to help protect himself from enemies. He also claims to have put the first go-go girls onstage. The seminal rock and roll group Bill Haley and his Comets was based in nearby Philadelphia and Jim Steranko, who played a Jazzmaster guitar, often performed in the same local venues, sometimes on the same bill, and became friendly with Bill Haley guitarist Frank Beecher, who became a musical influence. By the late 1960s, Jim Steranko was a member of a New York City magicians’ group, the Witchdoctor’s Club.
Early art career.
During the day, Jim 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. He moved on after 5 years to join an advertising agency, where he designed ads and drew products ranging from ‘baby carriages to beer cans’. Interested in writing and drawing for comic books, he visited DC Comics as a fan and was treated to a tour of the office by editor Julius Schwartz, who gave him a copy of a script featuring the science-fiction adventurer Adam Strange.
He initially entered the comics industry in 1957, not long out of high school, working for a short time inking pencil art by Vince Colletta and Matt Baker in Vince Colletta’s New York City studio before returning to Reading. In 1966, he landed assignments at Harvey Comics under editor Joe Simon, who as one writer described was ‘trying to create a line of super-heroes within a publishing company that had specialized in anthropomorphic animals’. Here he created and wrote the characters Spyman, Magicmaster and the Gladiator for the company’s short-lived super-hero line, Harvey Thriller. His first published comics art came in Spyman #1 (September 1966), for which he wrote the 20-page story ‘The Birth of a Hero’ and penciled the first page, which included a diagram of a robotic hand that was reprinted as an inset on artist George Tuska’s cover.
Jim Steranko also approached Marvel Comics in 1966. He met with editor Stan Lee, who had Jim Steranko ink a 2-page Jack Kirby sample of typical art for the superspy feature ‘Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.’. This led to Stan Lee’s assigning him the Nick Fury feature in Strange Tales.
During the Silver Age.
Jim Steranko began his stint on the feature by penciling and inking ‘finishes’ over Jack Kirby layouts in Strange Tales #151 (December 1966), just as many fellow new Marvel Comics artists did at the time. Two issues later, he took over full penciling and also began drawing the every-other-issue ‘Nick Fury’ cover art. Then, in a rarity for comics artists, he took over the series’ writing with Strange Tales #155, following Roy Thomas. ‘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.
Jim Steranko introduced or popularized in comics such art movements of the day as psychedelia and op art, drawing specifically on the ‘aesthetic of Salvador Dalí’, with inspiration from Richard M. Powers, ultimately synthesizing a style he termed ‘Zap Art’. He absorbed, adapted and built upon the groundbreaking work of Jack Kirby, both in the use of photomontage (particularly for cityscapes), and in the use of full- and double-page-spreads. Indeed, in Strange Tales #167 (January 1968), Jim Steranko created comics’ first 4-page spread. All the while, he spun outlandishly action-filled plots of intrigue, barely sublimated sensuality, and a cool-jazz hi-fi hipness.
Nick Fury’s adventures continued in his own series, for which Jim Steranko contributed four 20-page stories : ‘Who is Scorpio ?’ ; ‘So Shall Ye Reap … Death’ inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest ; ‘Dark Moon Rise, Hell Hound Kill’, a Hound of the Baskervilles homage, replete with a Peter Cushing manqué ; and the spy-fi sequel ‘What Ever Happened to Scorpio ?’. Yet after deadline pressures forced a fill-in ‘origin’ story, Jim Steranko produced merely a handful of additional covers, then dropped the book.
He also had short runs on X-Men for which he designed a new cover logo, and Captain America. Jim Steranko introduced the Madame Hydra character. He went on to write and draw a horror story that precipitated a breakup with Marvel Comics. Though that 7-page tale, ‘At the Stroke of Midnight’, published in Tower of Shadows #1 (September 1969), would go on to win a 1969 Alley Award, editor Stan Lee, who had already rejected his cover for that issue, clashed with Jim Steranko over panel design, dialog and the story title, initially ‘The Lurking Fear at Shadow House’. Stan Lee phoned him about a month later, after the two had cooled down.
Jim Steranko returned briefly to Marvel Comics, contributing a romance story, ‘My Heart Broke in Hollywood’, in Our Love Story #5 (February 1970) and becoming the cover artist for 15 comics beginning with Doc Savage #2-3, Shanna the She-Devil #1-2, Supernatural Thrillers #1-2, and ending with the reprint comic Nick Fury and his Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. #2.
Publisher and paperback artist.
In 1973, Jim Steranko became founding editor of Marvel Comics’ official fan magazine FOOM. He served as editor and also produced the covers for the magazine’s inaugural 4 issues before being succeeded editorially by Tony Isabella. He had previously been associated with Marvelmania, producing 2 of the club’s 12 posters.
Jim Steranko then branched into other areas of publishing, including most notably book-cover illustration. From these inauspicious beginnings, he compiled a portfolio of half a dozen paintings and met with Lancer Books’ art director Howard Winters, to whom he immediately sold his fantasy piece. This led to a career illustrating dozens of paperback covers, popularly including those of Pyramid Books’ reissues of the 1930s pulp novels of the Shadow.
Jim 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. In 1970 and 1972, Supergraphics published 2 tabloid-sized volumes entitled ‘The Steranko History of Comics’, a planned 6-volume history of the American comics industry, though no subsequent volumes have appeared. Written by Jim 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.
Comixscene #3 : Frogs – Supergraphics (March 1973)
Supergraphics projects included the proposed Talon the Timeless, illustrations of which appeared in a portfolio published in Witzend #5, and a pinup girl calendar ‘The Supergirls’ consisting of 12 illustrations of sexy super-heroines. Through Supergraphics, he also published the magazine Comixscene, which premiered with a December 1972 cover date as a folded-tabloid periodical on stiff, non-glossy paper, reporting on the comics field. It evolved in stages into Mediascene (beginning with issue #7, December 1973) and ultimately into Prevue (beginning with #41, August 1980), a general-interest, standard format, popular culture magazine, running through 1994.
Jim Steranko wrote, drew, and produced the illustrated novel ‘Chandler : Red Tide’ in 1976, for Byron Preiss Visual Publications / Pyramid Books. Aside from occasional covers and pinup illustrations, he has rarely worked in comics since, although he did illustrate a serialized comics adaptation of the Peter Hyams 1981 science-fiction thriller Outland for Heavy Metal magazine. His only major work for DC Comics appeared in Superman #400 (October 1984), the 10-page story ‘The Exile at the Edge of Eternity’.
Film and television work.
For the movie industry, Jim Steranko has done sketches for movie posters, 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. He also served in a similar capacity as ‘project conceptualist’ on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and wrote the episode ‘The Ties that Bind’ of the DC Comics animated TV series Justice League Unlimited.
He has amassed an enormous portfolio of more than 60 projects (which he called the ‘Theater of Concepts’) designed to be seen in multimedia form.
Arte Noir 