![]() ![]() ![]() It was, of all things, a collaboration – or at least something very close to one, an image/text dance that mashed up 3D Steranko illustrations with Harlan Ellison’s classic sci-fi short story “Repent, Harlequin!” Said The Ticktockman. In 1978 came Steranko’s final work of graphic storytelling before his return to a more traditional mode of comics narrative in Outland. Not to mention sundry previews and concept art for a raft of projects that promised untold riches but never materialized, their very nonexistence lending what fragments of story and art we do have from them the mysterious aura of the “deconstructed narratives” that have so recently become popular in comics. Then the glorious neo-noir sleaze of Chandler – a work that rounds back onto the archetypal private-eye yarn while pushing the comics form into an utterly bizarre hybrid of prose and spot illustrations. There was the techno/horror freakout Frogs!, which pushed the gridded comics page to its absolute storytelling limit in a way that only Chris Ware has come close to since. ![]() A bewildering succession of strange experiments marks his next decade in graphic storytelling. Still, ever hungry for new frontiers and perhaps disenchanted by the shorts’ uniform failure as commercial items, Steranko turned away from the sliced-up darkness of those stories and focused his energies elsewhere. Tightly gridded, drenched in blacks, and displaying unexpected syntheses of cartoon and photorealism, they were comics unlike any that had come before, statements on an entirely new way of doing things by an artist who had mastered every aspect of his craft. What all of these works had in common is that they were genre stories elevated to the level of art by the unique approach Steranko brought to them. There was the exuberant, flowing ‘60s romance of My Heart Broke in Hollywood, and then the oppressive, harsh-noise formalism of At the Stroke of Midnight, which saw expansions of its claustrophobic, meticulously staged aesthetic in the self-published The Block and the unreleased Dante’s Inferno. Here Steranko cemented an entirely unique way of drawing mainstream comics – both in concept and execution – and he played it to the hilt in his final two Marvel shorts. His journey begins with the straightforward pulp action of Spyman and winds through increasingly avant-garde formal gestures on SHIELD before exploding to life in his hugely innovative three-issue run on Captain America. Jim Steranko’s career in comics is one epic movement from familiar forms to newer, more experimental ones. The great experimenter’s greatest experiment ![]()
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