19 Facts About Dave Cockrum

David Emmett Cockrum was an American comics artist known for his co-creation of the new X-Men characters Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Mystique, as well as the antiheroine Black Cat.

Dave Cockrum was a prolific and inventive costume designer who updated the uniforms of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Dave Cockrum did the same for the new X-Men and many of their antagonists in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Dave Cockrum was born on November 11,1943, in Pendleton, Oregon.

Dave Cockrum's father was a lieutenant colonel of the United States Air Force, resulting in the Cockrums frequently transporting their household from one city to another for years.

Dave Cockrum discovered comic books at a young age; an early favorite was Fawcett's Captain Marvel, especially Mac Raboy's Captain Marvel Jr.

Dave Cockrum was then hired as an assistant inker to Murphy Anderson, who was inking various titles featuring Superman and Superboy for DC Comics.

Dave Cockrum eventually left DC and the Legion in a dispute involving the return of his original artwork from that issue.

Storm and Nightcrawler were directly based on characters which Dave Cockrum had intended to introduce into the Legion of Super-Heroes storyline had he remained on the title.

Dave Cockrum's penciled interiors on those first few issues of the "new" X-Men were dark and appealingly dramatic.

Dave Cockrum gave those first few issues of X-Men a sumptuous, late-'70s cinema style that separated the book from the rest of Marvel's line, and superhero comics in general.

Uncanny X-Men really felt new and different, almost right away, and Dave Cockrum's art was a tremendous part of that.

In 1979, Dave Cockrum designed Black Cat for writer Marv Wolfman.

Two unpublished fill-in issues that Dave Cockrum pencilled in the early 1990s for X-Men and New Mutants respectively were released together posthumously as the one-shot X-Men: Odd Men Out in 2008.

In 1983, Dave Cockrum produced The Futurians, first as a graphic novel, and then as an ongoing series published by Lodestone Comics.

Dave and Paty Cockrum were married on April 28,1978.

Marvel eventually provided an undisclosed amount of financial support in exchange for Dave Cockrum agreeing to terms protected by a nondisclosure agreement.

Dave Cockrum died at his home in Belton, South Carolina, on the morning of November 26,2006, due to complications from diabetes.

Dave Cockrum was survived by his wife of many years, Paty Cockrum, a longtime member of Marvel's 1970s production staff, and by his son and two stepchildren.