Decoding Steranko
“In the thick of the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, Jim Steranko’s work hit comics like a smart bomb. In Nick Fury, Agent of SHEILD, there was something new on every page. As a little kid I thought my head would explode looking at the special effects that he layered into his furiously experimental designs. Stories of his uncompromising nature made him even more impressive in my eyes. Steranko’s autonomic rejection of assembly-line comics production and his standing his ground for his artistic integrity made me and others like me all think of self-publishing as an option. Although he had to fight to experiment, his work in the 4-color process set technical and content standards that the companies have profited from ever since.
The series of unprecedented narrative devices and techniques created by Steranko has never been compiled, investigated, and analyzed in terms of their importance to the evolution of the comic book medium by either fans or experts. Some artists have incorporated his iconic figurative concepts in their work, and some have even scratched the surface of his timing innovations in panel breakdowns and editing patterns, yet few have mined the subtler areas of his innovations. Many of these were decades ahead of their time, and have not yet been adapted, or even understood.
I didn’t understand the full scope of Steranko’s ideas until I conducted the interviews that led to the INNOVATIONS list. In these we systematically examined his work, beginning with the earliest material and analyzing the content, motion, temporal direction, pacing, and tempo of each panel and annotating the conceptual content.”
