Rich Corben and Den
August 2025
Thinking about J.M.W.Turner and Corben's Den series – The Comics Journal
I never had much patience for Corben's Den series. His pages were easy to spot because the typical American newsstand of the 1970s carried Heavy Metal magazine almost everywhere. His exposure to the mass audience was likely at its peak during this time, and not just due to sales, but because Americans were inveterate magazine page-flippers in that era. People would browse through periodicals, one after another, deciding which ones to actually buy and take home, or would simply peruse various issues for ten minutes at the news racks, which were packed with an endless array of titles, all competing for attention (and, of course, sales). Den was meant to help Heavy Metal move copies, and it it was full of the nudity, violence and, importantly, as pointed out in the Comics Journal article, the sheer magazine-quality color that Corben employed through a combination of drawing and especially air brush skills, something wildly more sophisticated than the simple Gravure-printed color halftone screens over black ink drawings in DC and Marvel comics.
Corben's story writing was an acquired taste, though, to put it mildly.
On the other hand, I later recognized that Rich Corben could be a dynamic interpreter of someone else’s writing. A strong example is his adaptation (with Simon Revelstroke) of House on the Borderland, as well as his short The Spectre tale that appeared in Solo #11 (Feb. 2006), the all-Corben issue from DC Comics, with John Arcudi providing the script. In that story, Corben presents the Jim Corrigan version of The Spectre — somewhat in the spirit of how Jerry Siegel originally conceived him — in a short adventure that is both darkly humorous and brutally harsh, doubling as a meditation on death. Corben also had a long association with adapting (or, depending on your perspective, massacring) the works of Edgar Allan Poe. And then there’s a historically significant moment: in 1975, Corben illustrated and contributed to the narrative adaptation of Robert Howard's Bloodstar (originally titled by REH as The Valley of the Worm) as a single, cohesive 94-page tale. This predates Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), giving Bloodstar and Richard Corben a legitimate leg up in the sweepstakes for first "graphic novel."*
But perhaps most importantly in identifying Rich Corben among the vast pool of comic-book artists was his classical approach to the human figure. By this I do not mean anatomy, which in Corben's case was developed and more intricate than the norm, but the way he rounded and shadowed forms beyond usual comic-book styling. It was the result of actual study. He also exploited symbolism, and he had a predilection for making his male protagonists look like idealized versions of himself (in this regard he is in the same boat as Frank Frazetta). That tendency is not particularly unusual in the arts generally, but with Corben it suggests that, on some level apart from the commercial aspects of a work, he was communicating back to himself. Likewise, his repetition of a certain modeled female form in his stories and one-off pieces seems to indicate a single, specific woman; together with his male avatar, they became the two central figures populating his work, to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
Bloodstar 1975 - Rich Corben "The First Graphic Novel"
House on the Borderland 2000 - by Richard Corben
Edgar Allen Poe and Richard Corben
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Bloodstar - 1975 - Richard Corben
