Wednesday, November 29, 2006

More Cockrum obits

Due to his involvement with the X-Men, Dave Cockrum's obituary has now been written up in the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Associated Press, with those three reprinted in scores of papers and entertainment-based websites around the world. The AP story noted that he died in his Superman pajamas and a Batman blanket, and will be cremated in a Green Lantern t-shirt. (that surprised me - I figured it would have been a Nightcrawler one). Most of them mention how he reinvigorated the Legion before moving to the X-Men.

Evan Dorkin adds a Legion memory:

Costume design was a specialty of Cockrum's, who worked on DC's Legion of Superheroes book previously to the X-gig. LOSH is a book which practically demands bold and unique costumes in order to differentiate a seemingly endless load of bland, lookalike fratand sorority kids running around in a rocket ship clubhouse doing lots of silly crap. I read only one issue of LOSH as a kid (being fervently anti-DC at the time, I can't recall how I ended up with a comic from the dreaded "Distinguished Competition"), an issue which happened to feature the debut of Wildfire, a Cockrum-designed character I was instantly taken with. Wildfire died at the end of the story, and so did any further interest I might have had in the book. I didn't see Cockrum's art again until Giant-Size X-Men # 1 came out.

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