Comic book penciller Marshall Rogers died last weekend, as Newsarama and other sites have reported. Rogers was widely regarded as being the artist who co-envisioned the definitive caped crusader for DC Comics in the late 1970s; as the writer of those stories, Steve Englehart, said in a LA Times obituary, “He drew a total fantasy world, but he wanted it to be a very real fantasy world. It was very striking, it jumped off the page…another artist could have worked on pages every month for 30 years and not made the impact Marshall did.” (The pair would revive the Silver Surfer for Marvel in the late 1980s, and eventually reteamed with the inker on the Batman stories, Terry Austin, two years ago for a mini-series called Dark Detective, to the delight of fans.)
The blog Photon Torpedoes has an overview of Rogers’ comics work, while Chris Sims reflected on the sources of his appeal: “He’s not just a good draftsman or a great penciller; he was a great comics artist and a true master of the sequential format of the page… Reading through these issues when I was a teenager blew my mind, and made me realize how much you could actually cram onto the page.”