Dave Cockrum, co-creator of the new X-Men, died this morning from the effects of diabetes. (Here is the posting from his friend Clifford Meth.) Cockrum, with writer Len Wein, created the characters of Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler, relaunching the moribund X-Men and building a new dynasty for Marvel Comics.
I knew Dave Cockrum. As a boy I would see him at comic conventions and interview him for fanzines. I remember during his stint on X-Men, which was initially bi-monthly, that he once told me that Marvel would like to make the book monthly but that he didn’t think he could make the deadlines. I remember thinking, “Uh oh” — and soon thereafter Marvel replaced Cockrum with John Byrne.
Cockrum also told me that Storm was his fantasy woman and that Nightcrawler was he himself. At the time, being raised in the household I was being raised in, it seemed incredible to me that this white man was fantasizing about this black woman. Fantasizing about being a teleporting obsidian elf with a tail and cloven feet didn’t faze me.
Several years later when I was in my late teens, I put on my own comic-book convention. Here was my thinking: my business partner and I were selling comic books every weekend at comics shows and making money doing that — how much harder could it be to run the convention, too, and make money not just at our table but from admission and renting tables to other dealers? Not hard at all, it turned out.
To guarantee attendance at the con, we needed a comics celebrity. I called Marvel Comics and asked for Dave Cockrum. He was no longer drawing X-Men — in fact, I can’t remember what he was drawing — but he agreed to do the show, and here’s what I agreed to pay him: the cost of a round-trip train from Manhattan to New Jersey (around ten bucks), and lunch. I promptly slapped Dave Cockrum’s names all over our flyers and ads, sold all the dealers’ tables in advance and for the first time in my life, I made money before walking out the door (with the admission fees still to come in). It was a great feeling.
About 150 fans showed up for the show, which we named Escape (bouncing off the name of the Creation Con, a name that made no sense whatsoever to me — weren’t comic books about escapism?). All day long, Dave sat at his table and patiently answered fans’ questions and sold original artwork and pencilled sketches. He was incredibly gracious. I sent out a hireling even younger than myself to buy Dave his preferred lunch: Burger King. Total investment in his attendance: $13.
At the end of the day, Dave had made about $3000. I was astonished. Even now I’m astonished. That’s $3000 in circa 1980 dollars. At the time it seemed like enough money to retire on. He asked me if we were going to do another Escape Con and told me he’d be glad to come back. I wanted to, but my partner told me in a very snippy tone, “You can do that if you want to, but I’m not.” Maybe I should have kept it going, but other things began to intrude, like college, and theatre, and an even greater focus on writing, so that by the mid-80’s when I was no longer selling comics and had stopped writing about them for The Comics Journal, comic books were becoming less important to me.
It’s difficult to explain just how much of a star Dave Cockrum and artists and writers like him were to me, or how important the relaunch of X-Men was. It’s sad to read of his death, and sadder still to read that he was stuck in a VA hospital for so long and with such financial problems until Marvel finally agreed to help out the artist who, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for the remarkable resurgence of their comics, both on the page and on the screen. Although for a long time they figured they didn’t owe him anything, they finally realized they owed him a lot. Just as I do.
