The Rocketeer

AUTHOR: Stevens, Dave

ARTIST: Dave Stevens (illustrator); Laura Martin (colorist); Carrie Spiegle (letterer)

PUBLISHER: Comico Comics; Dark Horse Comics; Eclipse Comics; IDW Publishing; Pacific Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:Starslayer (1982); Pacific Presents (1982); The Rocketeer: Rocket’s Red Glare (1984); The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine (1988-1989, 1995)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1985

Publication History

The Rocketeer was published with great difficulty at first because, as creator Dave Stevens noted, its publishers “kept dying.” The Rocketeer was first published in 1982, with the first two episodes of the character’s adventures featured as backup strips in two issues of Starslayer, published by Pacific Comics. Two more installments appeared in Pacific Presents before Pacific Comics went out of business in 1984. The Rocketeer then moved to Eclipse Comics, where Stevens’s work was given its own special-edition, one-shot comic book, The Rocketeer: Rocket’s Red Glare, published in 1984.

Eclipse collected all of the character’s appearances in a single graphic album, The Rocketeer, in 1985, releasing it in three different versions and price tiers. The graphic album won two awards and featured an introduction by noted author Harlan Ellison. Other artists contributed pinup art related to the character to this and other editions.

Stevens and The Rocketeer left Eclipse a few years prior to the company’s demise, launching The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine with Comico, a company that did not outlast Eclipse by many years. After producing two issues published in the late 1980’s, Stevens concentrated his energies on the 1991 feature film adaptation of The Rocketeer, delaying the character’s return to print. At that point, every previous publisher of the project had gone out of business, and Stevens took his project to Dark Horse, which released the final installment of The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine in 1995 and collected all three issues of the magazine into a trade paperback released in 1996 as The Rocketeer: Cliff’s New York Adventure.

After 1995, no new stories of The Rocketeer were created, and fourteen years passed before The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures was published by IDW. The volume collects the entire 1982-1995 run of The Rocketeer and was published after Stevens’s death in 2008.

Plot

Over the thirteen years that The Rocketeer was published, only two stories were ever completed: an origin arc set in Los Angeles and a follow-up story set in New York City. Installments of these two adventures were designed as action-packed episodes reminiscent of classic Saturday matinee serials and focused much more on adventure than on character development.

Set in the 1930’s, the first story arc of The Rocketeer tells how daredevil stunt pilot Cliff Secord finds a stolen “rocket pack” and finned helmet stashed in his circus plane and uses them to prevent a drunken fellow pilot from accidentally killing himself, thus establishing himself as a heroic adventurer. Cliff seeks to earn fame and fortune with the rocket rig and impress his voluptuous girlfriend, Betty, but he does not account for the Nazi agents who stole the device from its inventor in the first place. In addition to dodging the hoodlums, Cliff must deal with the pack’s inventor, a famous scientist, do-gooder, and businessman with a team of talented and colorful assistants.

In the second story arc, Cliff searches the East Coast for Betty, who is missing and was last seen accompanying the sleazy photographer Marco of Hollywood on a “trip to Europe.” Cliff must battle the photographer’s henchmen. Aided in the fight by a mysterious dark avenger with a vast network of secret operatives, Cliff reciprocates by helping the man investigate a series of grisly murders committed by a hulking figure. Along the way, he catches up with old friend and fellow pilot Goose Gander and becomes embroiled in a weird circus sideshow and a Coney Island-style amusement park.

Both story arcs are intentionally episodic and two-dimensional, leaving the reader simultaneously satisfied by the dazzling artwork and fast-paced action and dissatisfied with the deliberately unfinished plot elements and unfulfilled characters. The Rocketeer ends with a sense that the series was meant to be continued.

Volumes

•The Rocketeer (1985). Collects the first story arc, in which Cliff discovers the rocket pack that allows him to become the Rocketeer.

•The Rocketeer: Cliff’s New York Adventure (1996). Collects the second story arc, in which Cliff searches for his missing girlfriend and is aided by a mysterious figure.

•The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures (2009). Collects both arcs, concluding Stevens’s contributions to the character he created.

Characters

•Cliff Secord, a.k.a. The Rocketeer, the protagonist, is a handsome and daring young barnstormer pilot. He can be stubborn and thoughtless at times, but he throws himself recklessly into peril to help others whenever adventure calls.

•Peevy is a charmingly crusty “grease monkey” who is Cliff’s mechanic and mentor, serving as a voice of reason and second set of hands. Peevy acts as a foil to Cliff’s impetuousness, but he enables his adventures by keeping the young man flying high.

•Betty is Cliff’s girlfriend, a beautiful model trying to break into Hollywood. She appears in various states of undress and danger throughout the plotlines, engaging Cliff in a roller-coaster romance along the way.

•Marco of Hollywood is a rather suspect “art photographer” who works with Betty. He represents the lure and danger of the big city to honest young people such as Betty and Cliff.

•The Inventor is a towering, muscular genius with deeply tanned skin. He created the rocket pack and helmet that Cliff appropriates to become the Rocketeer, and his attempts to reclaim it make him an indirect antagonist to Cliff.

•The Inventor’s bodyguard is an apish but surprisingly bright man with red hair, great physical strength, and a strong sense of humor. Teamed with the Inventor’s lawyer, he is tasked with helping to track down and retrieve the rocket pack from Cliff.

•The Inventor’s lawyer is a handsome dandy with an eye for women and a flair for adventure. Along with the Inventor’s bodyguard, he tries to force Cliff to give up the rocket pack for his own good.

•Goose Gander is a likable, blond stunt pilot and an old friend of Cliff who works for a shadowy mastermind in New York City. He leads Cliff to his employer, helping trigger the second story arc.

•The Shadowy Mastermind is a sinister and elegant man who controls his own system of agents in the Manhattan area and appears to be waging a secret war against crime and evil.

•Lothar is a homicidal sideshow performer with an immensely powerful build and an advanced case of acromegaly, a disorder causing the enlargement of various body parts. Visually, he is modeled on the 1940’s character actor Rondo Hatton (Universal Pictures’ “Creeper”). His pursuit of gruesome revenge is the ultimate plotline of the second arc of The Rocketeer.

Artistic Style

Despite the presence of additional Rocketeer pinup and tribute art by guest contributors in various collected editions, as well as masterful recoloring by Laura Martin for the graphic novel’s 2009 rerelease, The Rocketeer was always creator Stevens’s project. Stevens wrote, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered his own work, providing cover and interior art alike.

Stevens had worked for years as an animation and storyboard artist before creating The Rocketeer, which became his breakout project. The comic displays his solid attention to research and detail as well as his artistic influences. Stevens’s art takes a painterly approach to sequential storytelling and is lushly naturalistic and deeply human. In the novel, this is juxtaposed with a mixture of Art Deco and newspaper comic strip-style composition that creates an appealing contrast of geometric shapes with softly organic characters and warm, rounded objects.

The influence of illustrator William Stout, with whom he worked during the 1980’s, is visible in Stevens’s art, as is the influence of an array of classically trained artists, including Alex Raymond, Frank Frazetta, Hal Foster, pulp cover artist Norman Saunders, pinup artist Gil Elvgren, and even Norman Rockwell. Stevens was particularly noted for his “good girl” art, which both idealizes the female form and humanizes the pinup image, rendering sexy fantasy women as recognizable human beings. After years of experience in animation and film, Stevens was an accomplished visual storyteller with a mastery of pacing.

Stevens was highly critical of his own work and later lamented that The Rocketeer had both created his career and boxed it in. Though grateful for his fans’ support, he felt that he had never fully achieved his potential as an illustrator, regarding much of his work as little more than an imperfect homage to his early influences.

Themes

It is often difficult to reconcile the rosy glow of cultural nostalgia with an object of affection. All too often, cultural artifacts such as favorite childhood films are remembered with a great deal of fondness but are perceived as disappointing when viewed years later, revealing flaws that had been overshadowed by nostalgia. The Rocketeer is a loving homage to a bygone pop culture that takes its often crude or rickety execution and replaces it with glossy, painstakingly crafted images that are almost a shrine to days past.

Building on the Commando Cody and Rocketman serials of the 1950’s, which are perhaps best cherished in the lens of fond memory, The Rocketeer mixes classic concepts with an eclectic jumble of period icons and gives them a polish. Stevens intended to deliver on what the old stories could only promise, and to a great extent, he succeeds in doing so.

Stevens’s affection for homage shapes more than just the overall concept of the comic. It is no coincidence that Cliff Secord strongly resembles Stevens, his girlfriend resembles the 1950’s fetish and pinup model Bettie Page, and his mechanic, Peevy, resembles Stevens’s friend and fellow comics artist Doug Wildey. Stevens’s playful nature also comes through in the story, which he had originally drawn and written one page at a time, with no overall plan for the plot or character development.

Every lesser theme in The Rocketeer is tributary to these ideas of nostalgic fun and daydreaming. As dimensional as the character of Betty may be, she is a highly sexualized damsel in distress precisely because that is what most female characters in the setting would be. While Cliff himself is the titular hero of the comic, his efforts are only part of larger plots involving the rocket pack’s inventor, in one arc, and a mysterious avenger of crime, in the other. At heart, Cliff is just an average person who happens to be handsome, adventurous, lucky, and prone to running into trouble.

Cliff stands in for the author and the reader alike, acting out fantasies from long-ago serials, Big Little Books, pulp magazines, radio shows, comic strips, and comic books. The small, exciting world of Cliff Secord is bound up in larger events and the goals of more influential characters, cementing the story as a whimsical, lightweight bagatelle. Stevens’s intention is clearly nothing more than to offer up a fan’s delight: old fantasies “done right.”

Impact

Regarded by its fans as a beloved cult classic, The Rocketeer is best remembered for its lush and dazzling imagery as well as its loving attention to detail. The depiction of the character Betty was the springboard for a revival of interest in the largely forgotten bondage and glamour model Bettie Page, who would soon become a highly recognized pop-culture icon. Stevens contacted Page after The Rocketeer became successful and was instrumental in helping her reap some financial benefit from her renewed popularity.

The novel’s two story arcs are fast-paced and jam-packed with visual detail and bone-jarring action, and both stories are hooked on “uncredited” appearances by two of the world’s most popular Golden Age characters: Doc Savage, created by Lester Dent, and the Shadow, created by Maxwell Grant, a pseudonym for writer Walter B. Gibson. Though both characters are kept carefully unidentified to protect Stevens from legal and financial entanglement, fans identify them readily, and the stories offer entertaining versions of their adventures as seen from Cliff Secord’s vantage point. This has resulted in an increase in the popularity of the Rocketeer, a pastiche of Golden Age characters, and the Golden Age characters with whom he associates.

The implication of the story—that many figures of classic film and pop culture coexist in Cliff Secord’s world—is a popular fan and author device that has appeared in fiction for years, most notably in the pastiche and homage worlds stitched together by British authors Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, 1992), Warren Ellis (Planetary, 1999-2009), and Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 1999- ). However, while these other writers have given a great deal of thought and care to every nuance and detail of how such “retroactive shared universes” could function, it seems clear that Stevens simply wanted to have fun with the idea, pulling together his pulpy references as he went and taking Cliff Secord from a Hollywood back lot to a sideshow featuring the cast of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) with no other thought than that it would be amusing to do so.

Films

The Rocketeer. Directed by Joe Johnston. Walt Disney Pictures, 1991. This film adaptation stars Billy Campbell as Cliff Secord and Timothy Dalton as Neville Sinclair. It differs from the novel in that the creator of the rocket pack is actually Howard Hughes, rather than the fictional and strategically unidentified Doc Savage; Cliff’s girlfriend is a nonmodel named Jenny; and the entire original story arc is expanded and clarified, introducing a new villain in the Errol Flynn-like actor Sinclair. The villain Lothar, from Cliff’s New York Adventure, is also introduced in this film.

Further Reading

Malmont, Paul, et al. Doc Savage (2010- ).

Motter, Dean, et al. Batman: Nine Lives (2002).

Williams, Rob, et al. Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Gods (2008-2009).

Bibliography

Cooke, Jon B. “Of Hollywood and Heroes: Rocketeer Creator Dave Stevens on His Life as an Artist.” Comic Book Artist 15 (November, 2001): 12-33.

Fenner, Arnie, and Cathy Fenner, eds. Brush with Passion: The Art and Life of Dave Stevens. Nevada City, Calif.: Underwood Books, 2008.