Steranko in the Windy City

© Black Dog Books.

Back in the early carbon-copy days of SuperStuff (and I’m talking 1974 here), we could’ve only dreamed of sitting down and having a conversation with one of our idols. So this past Friday morning I started the day with no idea that by early afternoon I would’ve had a 30-minute conversation with famed  illustrator, comic historian, publisher and advertising/creative designer Jim Steranko, still vigorous, engaged and excited by the potential of the medium.

It happened this way. It had been a year since my last report of the annual Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention (see here for the 2022 report), so I decided to swing over to Yorktown Westin hotel in Lombard on Day One of the 2023 event to see what had changed in the year since the first post-COVID con had taken place. I was pleased to see that it was already vibrant and humming at 11am in the morning.

The Windy City Pulp & Paper con is a fascinating event, anchored around a main dealers room, with pulp-related films, auctions and panels taking place in smaller ball-rooms around the building. This is no scruffy comic mart set in the back-room of a downstate bowling alley. Attendance was high for a Friday morning, and a cursory look at prices indicated that the lower prices from last year, where many dealers were looking to shift pre-COVID inventory, were a thing of the past.

Upon arriving my welcome back contained a copy of Windy City Pulp Stories #22, an annual book published especially for the con by Black Dog books of Normal, Illinois.  In addition to reprinting some rare pulp stories ,it lead with a very interesting historical essay by Will Murray on the uncredited authors of G-8, plus also some fascinating excepts from the writers' trade journals of 1933, providing great insights in market conditions at that time. The idea of this book, providing content and context to stimulate further interest in the hobby seems a very sound one to me, and could be transferred to the comic-con world as well.

Being a pulp convention, the pickings for comics enthusiasts was generally limited to pulp-related comics, but also included many interesting novelties such as the colour Sunday Funnies sections from 1940s newspapers.

A box of Superman and Tarzan Sunday Funnies from the 1940s

My own route into the pulp world had been via the Doc Savage, Shadow and Avenger paperback reprints in the early 1970s, and then by the subsequent DC and Marvel comic adaptations of those characters. My knowledge of pulp history was subsequently informed by the research and writings of Will Murray and Ron Goulart. So I’m pretty much a pulp novice who doesn’t know too much about G-8 and His Battle Aces, or The Spider, or any of the more obscure characters that surfaced in the 1930s, parallel to the growth of the nascent Science Fiction pulp world. But if I had a barrel of cash this con would be the place to fill in the gaps in my knowledge - table after table of classic pulps - both adventure and SF - and 1950s/1960s paperbacks with their saucy, enticing covers by the artists who had made their bones in the pulp world. 

My first stop was at Chuck Welch’s table. Chuck is the editor of the pre-eminent Doc Savage fanzine “The Bronze Gazette”, which had carried a version of my blog entry on the links between Serpico and Doc Savage from a while back. It was a pleasure to meet him. I encourage anyone with an interest in Doc Savage to take a look at the website  . 

Following my first turn around the dealers table, I headed over to Will Murray’s table, shared with Anthony Tollin, to pick up a copy of Mr Murray’s expanded, revised and retitled edition of his 1980 work “The Duende History of the Shadow”, now christened “Dark Avenger - The Strange Saga of the Shadow”.  I can’t wait to find the time to read the book. Mr Murray also shared that he will be publishing a further volume, collecting a multitude of Shadow articles written over the years, which I will no doubt seek out.

© 2022. Will Murray

Finally I came to a table which was devoted to rare pulp items for sale. What had caught my eye was a copy of #1 of the UK Batman mini-pulps published under the World Adventure Library banner by World Distributors in 1967 - priced at $300! I had paid a pre-decimal one shilling for it in 1967, as recounted in this 2021 blog entry  .

Raising my eyes from the table, I encountered the outstretched hand of Jim Steranko himself on the opposite side, safari-suited and coiffed hair, introducing himself with the question “Can you think of any other comic book artist who has also held a fine art exhibition in one of the most prestigious galleries in the US?”.   I hazarded a guess that perhaps Frank Robbins had exhibited his paintings once he had retired to Mexico, but I don’t think that was the answer that Mr Steranko was looking for. 

Artwork © Steranko

Referring to his artbook “Steranko and The American Hero”, published as a companion piece to his exhibition by the Butler Institute of American Art, we then had a pretty wide-ranging conversation about his approach to art. He opined that artists were either intuitive or analytical. He put Kirby in the intuitive category - someone who drew from his imagination without initial regard to composition - whereas Steranko saw himself on the analytical side, thinking through the placement of elements in a  picture, very much influenced by his advertising discipline.  One example of Kirby’s approach was a sketch of Captain America where Kirby started by drawing Cap’s belt buckle, and then expanding the image out from the centre.

We discussed Steranko’s work on Chandler, as well as his cover design for the Philip Marlowe graphic novel collection.

We also discussed his Shadow paperback covers commissioned for Jove/Pyramid back in the 1970s, and the degree of freedom that he had on overall design. There were no unpublished covers in that series - he always worked on commission. All fascinating stuff.

Mr Steranko  is still working today, most currently on conceptual art for Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film Megalopolis (currently in production), continuing a strand of conceptual artwork creation which encompassed Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner and Coppola’s Dracula.

My final question was about his famous work “Steranko’s History of Comics’, which was published as two volumes of an anticipated six-volume series. Steranko told me that in fact  he had envisioned a four-volume set. He said that he had completed much of the content for Volume 3, but whether it would ever be published was an open question.

I would have liked a photo of Mr Steranko, but he declined as it had been a policy of “no photos” that he’d had to adopt. I made do with his personalized signature in my copy of Steranko and The American Hero”. It was a great pleasure to meet the gentleman ; he is truly a force of nature and remains an outstanding talent. 

And now one of the last men standing from the Bronze Age.

Text © Ian Baker.

All images used are copyright their respective owners and are included here under the context of  Fair Use for the purposes of illustration