- CORBEN, Richard
- (1940-)US illustrator and film animator. He attended the Kansas City Art Institute, and worked for almost a decade with a Kansas City animation company, doing sf illustration (a cover for FSF in 1967 was his first sale) and underground COMICS on the side. He became a full-time freelance illustrator in 1972. Better known as a comic-book artist than as an sf illustrator, RC in fact combines the fields in his work: his sf art can look cartoonish, while his comics art has the solid feel of sf illustration. While his men tend to look like "sacks filled with potatoes" and his women are ridiculously huge-breasted, he has a genius for surface texture and for three-dimensional solidity achieved with shading. Much of his best work in sf has been for the SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB and DOUBLEDAY, and, in comics, for METAL HURLANT, especially his two series Den and Rowlff. He contributed a sequence to the animated film Heavy Metal (1981), published the GRAPHIC NOVEL Bloodstar (1976) and, with Jan Strnad, produced New Tales of the Arabian Nights (1979). A somewhat fannish study, with 80 pages of colour illustration and many more in b/w, is Richard Corben: Flights into Fantasy (1982) by Fershid Bharuch. Richard Corben's Art Book (graph coll 1990) is useful. Richard Corben's Art Book (graph coll 1990) is useful.PN/JGOther works: Vic and Blood (graph coll 1989) with Harlan ELLISON.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.