Stevens & Page

With the passing of Bettie Page, I became nostalgic for the Rocketeer. Yeah, the Disney film from the 90's with Jennifer Connelly and Bill Campbell that maybe, two of you saw. I always thought it was an underrated superhero film that did the comic book justice, a film that would have succeeded if it only came out ten years later...even though it was a post-WWI pop epic that required the slightest leap of faith to follow. But Bettie, Bettie....

I wouldn't know who Bettie Page was, if not for Dave Stevens.

Dave Stevens created The Rocketeer in the eighties, and I recall it started out as one of those appendages you would find in comic books: Perhaps the magazine publisher wanted to test the waters, or the selling comic's lead act writer / artist was getting all prima donna and wanted to do fewer pages - but the Rocketeer began as a bonus seven pages at the end of unrelated material. I swooned at the art.

He contemporized classic comic book art. He also put together a story that was believable, a rarity in the graphic medium. And he knew how to draw women. I was pulled in, and rose to the challenge of putting together half stories unfairly buried in thes comic indicies. But: Bettie Page.

Stevens was a huge Bettie Page fan, and he based his leading lady (perhaps due to the temporal context) on Page. That character you see in the movie, played by Jennifer Connelly (when she had a fighting chance to do so), was meant for Bettie Page. Dave Stevens went on to more direct comic efforts, creating Bettie Page Comics:

I'm a sucker for referential art in any form. The Rocketeer harked back to an age that I knew little about, and it seemed designed to amuse the 40's youngster as much as it could an eighties teen. There aren't many writer / artists who see a viable market in that...many today are competing with video games and bringing to the reader the impossible, the unimaginable, or a new novelty. Stevens' was a more modest art, the integrity of a realist. He took on the wire walking challenge of creating a past fiction, the story of what could have been. It is a different leap of faith, and I think, more challenging than forging a new universal tangent. The art must be believable, since reality has already excused the story.

Stevens was open about his basing the supporting character on Page. It was an homage. Being the elusive idol she was in her later years, the reader could relate to the unfulfilled pining.

Dave Stevens passed away from Leukemia in March 2008. He was only 52, part of a rare breed of artists who tied the past history of comic books to their craft.