Richard Corben is a fantasy comics master

The legendary Richard Corben’s ‘Den’ returns to our libraries in a stunning edition.

Richard Corben, a comics legend, died almost four years ago. His graphic style and stories full of violence, fantasy, and pure adventure made him one of the most famous artists. He was unique, and no one has dared to claim his throne. Luckily, his work survives, and we can now reclaim one of his classics.

ECC is republishing ‘Den’ in hardback with Corben’s art restored. We can only enjoy ‘Nuncanada‘, but ‘Muvovum’ will hit bookstores in December. It is a recovery work that adds to ECC’s other Corben volumes, such as ‘Mundo turbio‘, ‘Mundo mutua’, and its sequel, or a Vertigo compilation.

‘Den’ is a classic isekai story about a stranger in a strange land. A weak young human is dragged into the strange fantasy world of Nevernite and transformed into a muscular (and naked) adventurer who explores ancient ruins and meets a local resident who was once human.

He’ll risk everything for her. An evil queen and an ambitious sorcerer will be his first enemies in this world where mistakes can kill. It appeared in one of ‘Heavy Metal”s inferior animated episodes.Den’s recycling is its best feature.

stories that have been read a thousand times and worn-out heroic fantasy conventions, creating a completely new world. The expressiveness of the faces, the grotesque anatomies, the colors that seem to have fallen from space because they are often chromatic galleries that have rarely been seen in print… all of this is Corben’s hallmark, and his juggling of borrowed ideas is part of Den’s charm because it gets our imagination to play with the story’s many gaps.

A master class, especially in the visual section, thanks to José Villarrubia’s artistic direction and restoration, who met the artist before his death and understood his reproduction goals. His eighties editions were blurry chaos, which the oldest in the room will remember with shivers.

Corben’s perfectionism and the difficulty of matching his extremely complex coloring techniques—hand-coloring photolithographs with unique results—have kept his work unreprinted for so long. In an illustrated text, Villarrubia describes how Corben supervised previous restorations of his pages for ‘Creepy’ and how he restored ‘Den’ from scans of the original pages with the artist’s widow.

In complementary books, Fritz Leiber and Bruce Jones examine Corben’s legacy, which captivates readers with its wild imagination. If you have ever been terrified by how Corben achieved such hyperrealism in shadows and textures without computers, revisit that well. If this is your first time seeing Corben, be prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime sensory experience.

Richard Corben is a fantasy comics master

By nr39r

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