The first artist whose work I recognized on sight. I'm going to recognize and celebrate that. Feel free to join with your own fond memories please!

This final splash from X-MEN # 99 certainly wowed little Lash!

After wracking my brain a bit, I have determined that AVENGERS # 126 from 1974 is my earliest recalled exposure to COCKRUM art!

He is listed as inker over Bob Brown, but his influence seems to overtake Brown's style completely.

Cockrum is the definitive Wildfire artist!

As my avatar picture should show, Cockrum had a huge impact on my formative days as a Legion fan.

I've never been a huge Wildfire fan, but damn! that panel just rocks. Wildfire demonstrates easy confidence and panache with a ray blast from his foot, cleaving Molecule Master in half!

That's badass art!

As a character designer, Cockrum was unrivaled among his generation.

GIANT SIZE AVENGERS # 2, late 1974. I can remember holding this comic in my hands when I was a little LITTLE kid. A spectacular story, high brow indeed, yet nothing that a kid couldn't understand: Prime among them, never underestimate ANYONE. Kang couldn't even be bothered to dispatch The Swordsman, and it was then the Swordsman who mounted the force that eventually freed his allies, and foiled Kang's plan to take the Celestial Madonna (Mantis) as his own. This was probably also my first encounter with heroes in tubes and my first comic book death. Englehart's amazing story of redemption, heroics, love, and forgiveness would have been disserviced by anyone BUT Dave Cockrum.

I was too young and didn't have any idea yet who Dave Cockrum was yet, but when I was a little kid, this cover used to have me totally mesmerized. It was a few years later that I discovered his legendary work on the Legion, the all-new, all-different X-Men, and various other things.

His history on Spidey is all too brief, but he did some awesome covers of PP:TSS back in the day!

I have that on a shirt!

[img:center]https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd....4585978_0ef24d759b70b687442b8ec1074ea91a[/img]

I share Lash's love for Giant-Size Avengers #2.

He was okay.


lol


I got all those books nearly two decades after the fact but it sure had to be an exciting time to be a Legion fan.

The first Legion stories I read were in a digest with art by Curt Swan and David Cockrum (his was "The Fatal Five Who Twisted Time.") Those Legion stories he inked himself have what is probably my favorite Legion art of all time and I've grown to love his early X-Men art more than the following John Byrne run which was not the case when I first got into the X-Men (ca. Paul Smith's run.)

Plus, he was the first ever comics pro I interacted with online; he was a really good guy and never got bored with being pestered by Legion fans on an X-Men board. I think a bunch of us here were part of a petition on the old DC board that helped push DC to give him his last Legion art gig if I'm remembering right. It's one of my favorite memories about Legion fandom.

Thanks for sharing that, matlock. Very heartwarming.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the Futurians yet.

Hmm that pose and costume are eerily similar to this

I thought it would be nice to bump this thread, since we're currently discussing Cockrum's Legion run in the Legion forum.

OMGOSH that WHERE NO X-MAN HAS GONE BEFORE splash. Artists today and in the future should all take lessons.

I'll gladly mention THE FUTURIANS! The graphic novel was insane, and when the monthly came out... Well EXCITED doesn't fully cover how I felt!




Cockrum says he was going for a 50s monster movie vibe, and he succeeded with a horrifying and satisfying tale. He established FUTURIANS earth and even other super-heroes unrelated to the team SO WELL. He was ahead of his time in this, going the IMAGE route before IMAGE (and being 50 times the artist AND writer of any of the original IMAGE gang, most of whom should never be allowed to write again)

Sadly, the indie he took his property to folded after only 3 issues, leaving the story ONE ISSUE SHY of finishing and burning me for YEARS on indies (this would happen AGAIN with both SUPREME and YOUNGBLOOD by Alan Moore on a Liefeld comic indie years later).

AARDWOLF saved the day a decade-plus later when FUTURIANS # 0 appeared, and finished the story at long last!! (dreamy sigh)





No lie, I would have paid $20 for it brand new off the shelf. Maybe $100. It was an answer to a comic book prayer.

I'm proud that THE FUTURIANS is my first (and so far, only) KICKSTARTER backing. Clifford Meth (AARDWOLF publisher/owner) and Paty Cockrum have put together Dave's final FUTURIANS story and about a zillion artists have contributed. It's a few months late but I'm keeping up with it and am very excited to know it is close to shipping.

I almost NEED it. (fanatical smile)

Thanks for all the Futurians love, Lash.

Please let me know when the final story comes out, I'd like to read it, too.

Cockrum was indeed 50 times the artist and writer that the Image founders were, and I absolutely agree, most of them should never be allowed to write again. LOL

For Facebookers:

DAVE COCKRUM ART APPRECIATION:


https://www.facebook.com/groups/davecockrumartappreciationgroup/


THE FUTURIANS fanpage:


https://www.facebook.com/DaveCockrumFuturians?fref=ts


(both run by Dave's friend AARDWOLF publisher Clifford Meth)


For everyone:


http://thecliffordmethod.blogspot.com/2015/05/meet-paty-cockrum-get-futurians-return.html

^re: FUTURIANS RETURN

Thanks, Lash.

BUMP

Any thoughts on Dave's little-remembered 4-issue Nightcrawler solo mini-series from 1985, with Kitty & Illyana in guest-star roles? I only read it recently, after I found all the issues in the discount bin of a comic shop. I think it's pure fluff, but fun fluff nonetheless, and I think it's better-drawn than most of Dave's art from his second UXM run with Claremont (144-164.) Also, by late 1985, UXM had gotten really...well...GLUM, and pretty lame, all for a variety of reasons, and Bill Sienkiwicz had just then left New Mutants, so I imagine Dave's NC mini must have seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time.

I've not read it Fickles. I was probably enjoying a bit of the mutant angst with the issues of that period. A swashbuckling character, who has fun in improbable space fantasy settings, instead of improbable urban settings? What were they thinking? I wasn't a huge fan of Kurt's Eroll Flynn routines in Excalibur either. How dare he have fun when there's mutant angst to be gone through.

I'd like to think I'd be more appreciative of it these days.

I started re-reading the Nightcrawler mini a few years ago for some reason (likely, I was considering selling some books but never followed through). I agree: It's fluff. I didn't finish the re-read.

In 1985, I probably had a higher opinion of it. Kurt was my favorite X-Man precisely because he didn't take himself seriously. Despite his demonic appearance, he had high self-esteem and a fun-loving personality; he imagined himself a swashbuckler! His frequent use of German was one of the reasons I became attracted to the language, in which I eventually minored.

By 1985, I had stopped reading the X-Men because it was so gloomy and the stories never went anywhere. It was great to see Cockrum draw Nighty again, but the mini did nothing to rekindle my interest in the franchise.

Thoth, upon reading in for the first time less than 2 years ago, I certainly liked it more than I probably would have back in the days of teeth-grinding, visceral intensity (which would have been between 1991, when I started reading superhero comics, and 1997, when I began a 7-year hiatus.)

He Who, fair enough. I imagine that, perhaps at that time, the NC mini felt like it was going too far to the other extreme?

Could be. Looking at the covers, it seems intended for a very young audience, not the angsty, depressing teens of the 1980s.

During the OJ trial, Johnnie Cochran...

Wait, what?

I am not on the OJ forum? Which one?

Legion?

I really need to keep these forums straight.

So this is Legion. Cockrum.

Oh...OH!

Never mind.

"If the pencil fits, you must acquit."

I'm pretty sure the Nightcrawler mini was inspired by the positive response to and was a quasi-sequel to the "Kitty's Fairy Tale" story.

Doing this mini and the later Excalibur series, which was generally less angsty and lighter than the other X-books, were pretty good changes of pace instead of just more of the same.

Good points well taken, Lardy. "Kitty's Fairy Tale" is one of the few issues from Claremont/Cockrum Mark 2 that I can still re-read. I mean, the Brood Saga does eventually pick up a full head of steam around the time that Carol becomes Binary, it just takes an eternity to get there IMHO.

I still wonder how the Post-Byrne UXM would have been like if Brent Anderson, who I think did a magnificent job on the Cyclops vs D'spayre done-in-one, had become the ongoing artist instead of Dave coming back.

And I consider the Excalibur prestige special (aka "The Sword is Drawn") to be Claremont's last truly great mutant story. Excalibur the ongoing didn't really work for me until Alan Davis became both artist & writer.

I first joined the book during that second Cockrum run, so I will always have a special place for it in my heart, even if it's not the most dynamic period of the book, and the space stuff went on FAR too long. Into the Paul Smith run, IIRC.

Yep, Cockrum did indeed jump ship before the end of the Brood Saga, so he could do the Futurians graphic novel (which I re-read last week, and I thought it held up beautifully.) Smith really seemed to turbo-charge the book both art-wise and pace-wise, although the last time I re-read the majority of the Smith UXM issues (collected many, many years ago as "From the Ashes"), I felt that the "B-Plot" (all the stuff in Japan) far outshone the "A-Plot" (the whole Madeline Pryor/Mastermind thing seems kinda sad and uninspired and creepy to me, in hindsight, and I feel like from Smith's departure on, Claremont seemed to put more oomph and imagination into New Mutants than UXM.)

Yeah, Dave Cockrum inspired a lot of comic book love.
I started reading comic books and seeing his Legion of Superheroes and X-Men
I had no idea how influential his work was until the Legion of Superheroes hardback collections. Wow. His work is ridiculously inventive, surprisingly adult and kinetic

FYI, Cockrum fans:

Until this morning, when I was combing my collection for anything even tangentially related to Wally Wood, I'd forgotten that Dave Cockrum did some very good work on the short-lived Baxter Format "T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents" revival from the early-mid 1980s.

And I'm pretty sure that run has been collected in a trade, at least fairly recently (I have the original issues, as well as the three JC Productions low-budget reprint issues of the Silver Age stories. I wish I'd known back in the treasure-hunting days of the mid-1990s that all this obscure Silver and Bronze stuff I was collecting would be properly appreciated in the next 20-plus years, and that I wasn't crazy for loving it. But, really, I'm just grateful I kept most of the really rare stuff.)