Dave Cockrum: A Comics Legend Passes Away
One of comics’ great unsung heroes passed away on Sunday. Dave Cockrum had been unwell for many years, suffering from diabetes and related illnesses.
Dave’s first professional comics work was on Vampirella for Warren Publishing in 1971. Later that same year he did his first work for one of the big guns, working as inker on DC Comics’ Superman title. He soon progressed to penciling a memorable run on Legion of Superheroes.
A couple of years later he moved to Marvel, once again starting out with an inking job, this time on The Avengers. But bigger things were just around the corner…
When Cockrum and Len Wein created the new X-Men in 1975 the team was hardly the top seller it is today. In fact it had been on hiatus for several months and for months prior to that had been surviving on reprints.
Giant Size X-Men 1 changed all that. Building on the mutant team created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963 they added new heroes who would become staples of the title for years to come. Several would even make the leap to celluloid in the three hugely successful X-Men movies.
Colossus, Storm, Mystique, and Phoenix are just a few who owe their look to Dave Cockrum. But his greatest creation must surely be Nighcrawler, a character he’d created years before and even offered to DC for their Legion of Superheroes.
