Broken Frontier

Dave Stevens’ first launched The Rocketeer almost thirty years ago in 1982. Back then, I was a kid and if it didn’t have Marvel and DC on the cover, I wasn’t buying it. We all have to start somewhere, I guess. At the time, I didn’t understand the contribution to comics Stevens’ masterpiece represented. Elegant and sexy, exquisitely crafted and packed to bursting with light-hearted adventure, The Rocketeer wasn’t just a slickly illustrated comic with hot babes but an homage to the glamour, intrigue, and resolve of America during the Second World War.

Although only published sporadically during the intervening years since it first blasted off, The Rocketeer’s influence on comic book artists cannot be underestimated. Guys like Adam Hughes, Terry Dodson, and Frank Cho all owe at least a tip of their collective hats to Stevens’ clean, exuberant style, if not their careers. It’s no great surprise then that IDW has followed up last year’s immensely popular Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer, The Complete Adventures with a brand new series featuring the first original stories of Cliff, Betty, and Peevy in over fifteen years.

Rocketeer Adventures #1 contains three new exciting and insightful stories by some of the industry’s top talent, including John Cassaday, Mike and Laura Allred, and Kurt Busiek and Mike Kaluta(!). The anthology format suits the property well, allowing the contributors to narrow their focus and highlight those innate qualities fueling the characters’ ongoing popularity. Cassaday’s story showcases the light-hearted sense of humor found in every Rocketeer adventure, while Busiek and the legendary Mike Kaluta explore the strength of Cliff and Betty’s relationship in a series of heartwarming letters. Meanwhile, the Allreds craft a tale of intrigue and suspense, the breakneck pace of their story evoking the same crispness and bounce of Stevens’ own work.

The Rocketeer has always felt more like a comic strip character to me. Cliff Secord arguably represents the last of the true comic strip adventurers – those heroes and crimefighters, like the Phantom or Dick Tracy, who continue to resonate in the popular imagination long after their conception, thanks to a certain simple elegance in their creation. Stevens understood the allure of the tight, well-crafted adventure stories found in comic strips and old-time movie serials and purposefully developed a property free of the chains of major continuity to take full advantage of his setting, period, and pace.

There was always talk of following up 1995’s Cliff’s New York Adventure with more original stories by different creators but it never happened during Stevens’ lifetime. IDW’s anthology series has been long overdue, as far as most fanboys are concerned. There never was enough Rocketeer to satisfy the masses and considering this book is going to literally fly off the shelves, there won’t be enough any time soon.