Both Dave Stevens and Mario DeMarco loved the romance and wonder of entertainment from days gone by – loved it so much that they filtered it through their own souls, reshaping it and recasting it, shining it up and sending it out.
Dave, of course, was the artist and writer best known for creating the great comic-book character the Rocketeer, a character rooted in the gosh-wow science-fiction movies and pulps of the ’30s and ’40s. His stunning work on the Rocketeer stories quickly made him one of the first and brightest stars of the independent-comics movement of the ’80s.
Mario, on the other hand, was less well known, his audience comprised mostly of fans of B-western movies, for whom he created pen-and-ink portraits and self-published paeans to the cowboy-movie stars of yesteryear. (His obituary in the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette indicates that he also had a 50-year-career as a cartoonist with the Navy Times.)
They both created a lot of their oeuvre in the ’80s, although I have no idea of whether they were aware of each other’s work or not. They both died in early March, within a week or so of one another. And I knew them both, at least a little bit.
I met Dave Stevens in San Diego in 1974, where I was fulfilling my obligations as a Navy Reservist – following two years on a helicopter carrier – by spending a couple of weeks as part of the crew of a fleet tug. My previous Navy service had included some time in that city, where I’d had the good fortune to meet Shel Dorf and Richard Butner, both of whom were heavily involved with the San Diego Comic Convention (which had then been going only a few years). I believe it was Richard who introduced me to Dave one weekend, when I was able to get off the tug and into town. I was impressed when I found out this young guy was inking backgrounds for one of my comic-book heroes, Russ Manning, on the Tarzan comic strip.
I recall Dave as being pretty shy and reserved that day, but we nonetheless hit it off. Both of us not only dug comics and pulps, but old movies and serials and – perhaps most important – the leading ladies of low-budget horror and science-fiction movies.
As the years went by, we’d exchange the occasional letter or phone call, in addition to seeing each other at conventions, where we’d make the time to do some catching up. After he’d begun dating the ’50s B-movie actress Yvette Vickers, I went to my mailbox one day to find an envelope with an 8X10 glossy, taken on the set of Attack of the Giant Leeches, she’d signed for me. For my part, I sent him a cassette tape of Dreamsville, one of my all-time favorite LPs, featuring Henry Mancini’s ultracool jazz orchestra behind vocalist Lola Albright, who played Edie Hart on the Peter Gunn TV series. In 1991, when Disney put out the Rocketeer movie, I was able to interview Dave for the Tulsa World, where I was working as an entertainment writer. Later, he told me that the picture had been the No. 10 moneymaker for that summer – which, unfortunately, wasn’t quite big enough to trigger the planned sequels and other spinoffs.
After the Rocketeer comic-book stories hit, and especially after the movie, Dave Stevens became a huge star on the convention circuit. His Betty character, a tribute to ’50s pin-up queen Bettie Page, led to Ms. Page’s rediscovery, and Dave ended up becoming the most famous pin-up artist since Alberto Vargas.
As fame increases, so do the demands on a person’s time and energies, and the last few times I saw Dave we talked through a stream of interruptions and distractions, which seemed to bemuse him a bit. It was clear that day that he did what he did from love, not a lust for fame or money. It may be clichâd to say that, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Dave Stevens, to the end, remained one of those people you always look forward to seeing again. To know that you won’t be able to do that in this particular sphere of existence has saddened a great number of people, myself included.
While Dave died early – at 52, from leukemia – Mario DeMarco was 86 when he passed, having actually lived through the movie heyday of the B-western stars in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s.
Mario and I never met, but we wrote one another, and I have several of his handcrafted B-western books in my library. I first became aware of him in 1979, after I’d left my college-teaching job to move back to my home turf and try to make it as a writer. The very first gig I got was at a tabloid-sized newsprint publication called The Big Reel, published out of North Carolina by a man who was, I believe, had a day job as a carpet cleaner. His name was Don Key, and his publication, slanted toward the old westerns, was for folks who – in those pre home-video days – collected, sold, and traded stills, movie-related publications, and 16mm films. Just after we’d moved, I saw a notice that he was looking for a book reviewer for The Big Reel. The pay was a penny a word, and you got to keep the books and magazines sent to you for review, as well as receiving a gratis subscription to the publication itself.
I’ve never been much of a reviewer, but it was a paying gig, so I applied. For the next couple of years or so – before the mag was inundated with amateur critics who’d do the job for free – I got a check every three months right on the dot, and that $45 paid for a lot of groceries in those days.
Mario DeMarco was doing line drawings, coupled with biographical nuggets, for The Big Reel, and he crafted a little logo for my column. Right after I started working for the magazine, he sent me his self-published Yours Truly, Tom Mix, a “photostory” of the great western star, along with a letter talking about how the book “wasn’t meant to be a ‘classic’ – it was printed at my expense (and extremely expensive) for the fans who really loved Tom – and for the collectors too – for in it went a lot of love and care.”
There was a lot of love and care in everything Mario did to help keep the B-westerns alive, and perhaps to help telegraph their joys to a generation that didn’t grow up with Saturday afternoon shoot-’em-ups. And a lot of love and care went into Dave Stevens’ wondrous work as well. They were working very different sides of Nostalgia Alley, certainly, but Dave Stevens and Mario DeMarco covered their respective turfs with joy and wonder, working with the benign ghosts that haunted them to create new images for our dreams and daydreams.
For my money, those were two lives well lived.
(The Internet is full of obituaries and tributes to Dave Stevens. My friend Jim Vance has a very nice one at http://www.james-vance.com/jvblog/?p=80)