Death of Steve Whitaker

[GuyLawley]

With great sadness I must announce the death of one of my oldest friends, the artist and comics historian Steve Whitaker.

Steve drew the first two issues of the Man-Elf comic, and though he had been replaced by the third issue, when Jerry Cornelius entered the story, Steve had enjoyed creating his version of Jerry for promotional material. I really liked his Jerry! Steve’s cover of Trident Comics’ promo booklet can be seen here:

http://www.multiverse.org/imagehive/v/bookcovers/comiccovers/Heroes/album36/album114/

The guitar Jerry is holding is an example of Steve’s obsessional sense of detail. He reasoned that Jerry might have one of Hendrix’s left hand guitars, but as a right-handed player, play it upside down. Touches like that enriched everything he did. (I’ll take credit for the vibragun that looks like a tin toy ray gun, beautifully rendered by Steve!)

The Jerry you see here looks very much like a “Swinging London” image; I hope those who know the comic will recall that we did our best to undercut that kind of cliché in our depiction of Jerry. (It made a fun promotional image though!) Steve understood completely why I wanted to use that kind of image and then screw with it. (So did Richard Weston; hence the dirty, tattered flag on the cover of issue 3!)

Steve was a very talented colourist; his major contribution to the mainstream was in the DC comics colour version of V for Vendetta. He was one of two assistants taken on by David Lloyd. David knew that Steve was one of the few people who could grasp and apply the limited palate he wanted.

He also loved mazes and labyrinths. An underground maze would have been an important part of Man-Elf book 2, if we had got that far. Miss Brunner would have been driven entertainingly insane in it. It was entirely inspired by Steve. He had a far richer cultural life as a lover of fine and popular art, music and film than I will ever have.

Steve was the kind of fellow who inspired tributes like “gentle giant”, and he was a kind and generous man. In the field of comics history he had few peers. The conversations we used to have about comics had a depth and breadth which will be irreplaceable, and it was approximately 98% his knowledge that we were sharing. On those few occasions that I was able to inform him of something he didn’t know, I felt I was adding to a great archive. How much of that survives his death we don’t yet know.

Steve died suddenly on Friday February 22 2008, almost certainly from a stroke. He will be hugely missed.

Guy Lawley
London
Feb 24th 2008