| Birth Name: | James F. Steranko |
| Birth Date: | 5 November 1938 |
| Birth Place: | Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Write: | y |
| Art: | y |
| Publish: | y |
James F. Steranko[1] (; born November 5, 1938)[2] is an American graphic artist, comic book writer/artist, comics historian, magician, publisher and film production illustrator.
His most famous comic book work was with the 1960s superspy feature "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." in Marvel Comics' Strange Tales and in the subsequent eponymous series. Steranko earned lasting acclaim for his innovations in sequential art during the Silver Age of Comic Books, particularly his infusion of surrealism, pop art, and graphic design into the medium. His work has been published in many countries and his influence on the field has remained strong since his comics heyday. He went on to create book covers, become a comics historian who published a pioneering two-volume history of the birth and early years of comic books, and to create conceptual art and character designs for films including Raiders of the Lost Ark and Bram Stoker's Dracula.
He was inducted into the comic-book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.
Steranko was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. According to Steranko's authorized biography, his grandparents emigrated from Ukraine to settle in the anthracite coal-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania. Steranko's father, one of nine siblings, began working in the mines at age 10, and as an adult became a tinsmith. Steranko later said his father and uncles "would bootleg coal – they would go up into a mountain and open up a shaft." One of three children, all boys,[3] Steranko spent his early childhood during the American Great Depression living in a three-room house with a tar-paper roof and outhouse toilet facilities. He slept on a couch in the nominal living room until he was more than 10 years old.[4] Steranko's father and five uncles showed musical inclination, performing in a band that played on Reading radio in the 1930s, Steranko has said.[5]
Steranko recalled beginning school at age 4.[6] Later, "Because my father had tuberculosis (and I tested positive), I began third grade at what was called an 'open-window' school, a facility across the city that had a healthy program for kids with special problems. I was bused to school for four years, then dropped into standard junior high." There, being smaller and younger than his classmates, he found himself a target for bullies and young gang-members until he studied boxing and self-defense at the local YMCA and began to successfully fight back.[7] His youngest brother was born when Steranko was 14, "severing even the minimal interaction between me and my parents."[8]
Steranko had begun drawing while very young, opening and flattening envelopes from the mail to use as sketch paper. Despite his father's denigration of Steranko's artistic talent, and the boy's ambition to become an architect, Steranko paid for his art supplies by collecting discarded soda bottles for the bottle deposit and bundled old newspapers to sell to scrap-paper dealers. He studied the Sunday comic strip art of Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and Chester Gould, as well as the characters of Walt Disney and Superman, provided in "boxes of comics" brought to him by an uncle. Radio programs, Saturday movie matinées and serials, and other popular culture also influenced him.[9]
Steranko in 1978 described some influences and their impact on his creative philosophy:
By his account, Steranko learned stage magic using paraphernalia from his father's stage magician act, and in his teens spent several summers working with circuses and carnivals, working his way up to sideshow performer as a fire-eater and in acts involving a bed of nails and sleight-of-hand. At school, he competed on the gymnastics team, on the rings and parallel bars, and later took up boxing and, under swordmaster Dan Phillips in New York City, fencing.[10] At 17, Steranko and another teenage boy were arrested for a string of burglaries and car thefts in Pennsylvania.[11]
Up through his early 20s, Steranko performed as an illusionist, escape artist, close-up magician in nightclubs, and musician, having played in drum and bugle corps in his teens before forming his own bands during the early days of rock and roll.[12] Steranko, whose first band, in 1956, was called The Lancers, did not perform under his own name, claiming he used pseudonyms to help protect himself from enemies.[13] He also claims to have put the first go-go girls onstage.[14] The seminal rock and roll group Bill Haley and his Comets was based in nearby Philadelphia and Steranko, who played a Jazzmaster guitar, often performed in the same local venues, sometimes on the same bill, and became friendly with Haley guitarist Frank Beecher, who became a musical influence.[15] By the late 1960s, Steranko was a member of a New York City magicians' group, the Witchdoctor's Club.[16]
Comics historian Mark Evanier notes that the influential comic-book creator Jack Kirby, who "based some of his characters ... on people in his life or in the news", was "inspired" to create the escape artist character Mister Miracle "by an earlier career of writer-artist Jim Steranko".[17]
During the day, Steranko made his living as an artist for a printing company in his hometown of Reading, designing and drawing pamphlets and flyers for local dance clubs and the like. He moved on after five years to join an advertising agency, where he designed ads and drew products ranging from "baby carriages to beer cans".[18] Interested in writing and drawing for comic books, he visited DC Comics as a fan and was treated to a tour of the office by editor Julius Schwartz, who gave Steranko a copy of a script featuring the science-fiction adventurer Adam Strange. Steranko recalled in 2003, "It was the first full script I'd ever seen, complete with panel descriptions and dialogue. I learned a lot from it and eventually went on to create a few comics of my own."[19]
He initially entered the comics industry in 1957,[20] not long out of high school, working for a short time inking pencil art by Vince Colletta and Matt Baker in Colletta's New York City studio before returning to Reading.[21] In 1966, he landed assignments at Harvey Comics under editor Joe Simon, who as one writer described was "trying to create a line of super heroes within a publishing company that had specialized in anthropomorphic animals."[18] Here Steranko created and wrote the characters Spyman, Magicmaster and the Gladiator for the company's short-lived superhero line, Harvey Thriller. His first published comics art came in Spyman #1 (Sept. 1966), for which he wrote the 20-page story "The Birth of a Hero" and penciled the first page, which included a diagram of a robotic hand that was reprinted as an inset on artist George Tuska's cover.[22] [23]
Steranko also approached Marvel Comics in 1966.[24] just as many fellow new Marvel artists did at the time.[25] Two issues later, Steranko took over full penciling and also began drawing the every-other-issue "Nick Fury" cover art. Then, in a rarity for comics artists of the era, he took over the series' writing with #155 (April 1967), following Roy Thomas, who had succeeded Lee. In another break with custom, he himself, rather than a Marvel staff artist, had become the series' uncredited colorist by that issue.
"Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." soon became one of the creative zeniths of the Silver Age, and one of comics' most groundbreaking, innovative and acclaimed features. Wrote Les Daniels, in his Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, "[E]ven the dullest of readers could sense that something new was happening. ... With each passing issue Steranko's efforts became more and more innovative. Entire pages would be devoted to photocollages of drawings [that] ignored panel boundaries and instead worked together on planes of depth. The first pages ... became incredible production numbers similar in design to the San Francisco rock concert poster of the period".[26]
His peers took note of his experimentation. Writer-artist Larry Hama, in an introduction to Nick Fury collection, said Steranko "combined the figurative dynamism of Jack Kirby with modern design concepts", and recostumed Fury from suits and ties to "a form-fitting bodysuit with numerous zippers and pockets, like a Wally Wood spacesuit revamped by Pierre Cardin. The women were clad in form-fitting black leather a la Emma Peel in the Avengers TV show. The graphic influences of Peter Max, Op Art and Andy Warhol were embedded into the design of the pages – and the pages were designed as a whole, not just as a series of panels. All this, executed in a crisp, hard-edged style, seething with drama and anatomical tension."[27]
Steranko introduced or popularized in comics such art movements of the day as psychedelia and op art, drawing specifically on the "aesthetic of [Salvador] Dalí]," with inspiration from Richard M. Powers, ultimately synthesizing a style he termed "Zap Art."[18] A.M. Viturtia notes Steranko drew on the James Bond novels, and claims that the influence went both ways: "Although Steranko was primarily influenced by spy movies, after Nick Fury came on the comics scene, the directors of those same movies began to borrow heavily from Steranko himself!" He absorbed, adapted and built upon the groundbreaking work of Jack Kirby, both in the use of photomontage (particularly for cityscapes), and in the use of full- and double-page-spreads. Indeed, in Strange Tales #167 (Jan. 1968), Steranko created comics' first four-page spread, upon which panorama he or editor Lee bombastically noted, "to get the full effect, of course, requires a second ish [copy of the issue] placed side-by-side, but we think you'll find it to be well worth the price to have the wildest action scene ever in the history of comics!"[28] All the while, Steranko spun outlandishly action-filled plots of intrigue, barely sublimated sensuality, and a cool-jazz hi-fi hipness.
Writer Steven Ringgenberg assessed that