The Comics Journal posts an interview that publsiher Gary Groth did with artist Dave Stevens way back in 1987:
You said that your three main influences were Steranko, Eisner and Foster, but I see a lot of Frazetta…
Well, that came later. The initial stuff was Foster. I used to clip the Sunday pages when I was a kid. That was the first real comics that I got a good dose of, and it was all classical style illustration. I think right after that the first real feeding from superhero type comics was the mid-’60s Marvel stuff, and of course Steranko was the grabber out of that bunch. He and [John] Buscema were the two hotshots as far as doing really nice illustration. And Steranko’s was pretty way-out anatomically, but it had real exciting layouts. It was visually very dazzling, whereas Buscema was very solid construction, basic meat-and-potatoes drawing. You couldn’t fault it at all. And between those two that was it. I think when I was about 14 or 15 somebody showed me a copy of Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, and it had an Eisner Spirit story in it. It was the first time I had ever seen Eisner’s work or heard of him and I thought…. This must be Steranko’s dad, because it was that close to what he had been doing in the latter issues of S.H.I.E.L.D. From that moment I went about trying to find anything I could on The Spirit, which at that time was almost impossible for someone with no money — I didn’t have two coins to rub together — so I couldn’t afford the old comics and I had to go look at them at somebody’s house. It was a real limbo period when nobody seemed very aware of Eisner.
March 17th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Man, I loved Airboy. I didn’t realise that was Dave Stevens.