Obituary for Dave Stevens
Condolences to all family and friends of Dave Stevens, born July 29, 1955 in Lynwood, California, who died way too young at the age of 52 on March 10, 2008. The Illustrator, comic book and graphic artist Dave Stevens might be best known for his 1982 created character “The Rocketeer” (the same year in which he received the Comic Con International’s Russ Manning Award). In the early 1980s he worked as a storyboard artist for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as well as for “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark”) before he started developing a “Rocketeer” movie proposal in 1985. He finally managed to sell the rights in it to The Walt Disney Company, which lead to the 1991 movie “The Rocketeer”.
Dave Stevens functioned as Co-Producer of the movie directed by Joe Johnston featuring Billy Campbell (aka Bill Campbell) in the title role of Cliff Secord as well as Timothy Dalton (the former James Bond actor) as the movie’s villain Neville Sinclair. Dave Stevens was highly involved in this Disney production, co-wrote the screenplay and functioned (together with Billy Campbell) as host for a TV documentary to promote the movie. Unfortunately the movie did not perform as well as had been hoped for by Disney at the box office. Plans to establish “The Rocketeer” as a franchise where therefore put to rest. Today the movie’s majestic score by James Horner though is still highly popular among fans of movie scores (excerpts of it used to play in the area surrounding Space Mountain in Disneyland Paris till the attraction was relaunched as “Space Mountain: Mission 2″).
For more about this great artist check out his bio on wikipedia.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
i wrote the same thing on my blog 10x for it.